CNN on Wednesday took a close look at the videos in the Alex Jones/InfoWars Twitter accounts and found some of the same hateful videos that got the conspiracy theorist banned on Facebook and YouTube. Within an hour, the content had been deleted–but not by Twitter, according to the company.
“Twitter spox tells me that Twitter has not deleted these tweets/content,” CNN reporter Oliver Darcy tweeted at around 6 p.m. ET. “Someone with access to the accounts has deleted them. Twitter is still reviewing the content.” It’s also possible that InfoWars itself is removing the videos as a way of avoiding a full Twitter suspension.
On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took to his platform and spoke to Fox News’ Sean Hannity to explain why Twitter is keeping Jones and InfoWars around when fellow tech giants are banning the content. “We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday,” he tweeted. “We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.”
Twitter’s VP of trust and safety, Del Harvey, had said in an email to employees earlier on Wednesday that had InfoWars published the offending content to Twitter, it would constitute a violation of Twitter’s rules, and would have forced the company to “take action.”
Twitter said it would have taken action against Alex Jones/InfoWars had the content that got them in trouble w/Facebook & YouTube been posted on Twitter.
But all of the content that initially led to YouTube/FB taking action is, in fact, posted to Twitterhttps://t.co/WpEZsLjr0i
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 9, 2018
But as CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported,
“Content that appears to violate Twitter’s rules appears over and over again in the hundreds of hours of video available on the accounts that Jones and InfoWars maintain on Twitter and Periscope, a live-streaming video service that Twitter owns.”
Within an hour of the CNN story going live, more than a dozen videos and tweets from Jones’s account began disappearing from the platform.
Update: All 20 of the tweets/videos in our story about how InfoWars / Alex Jones have violated Twitter standards have been deleted https://t.co/WpEZsLjr0i pic.twitter.com/skAmob4TfL
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 9, 2018
Among the messages it reviewed, CNN found video in which Muslims were degraded, people were attacked based on their gender identity, and individuals were harassed. Jones reportedly said Parkland, Fla., shooting survivors interviewed by the news media were actors and compared student David Hogg to members of the Nazi Party. In another video (now removed), Jones called CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter the “literal demon spawn of the pit of hell,” a “smiling, leering devil,” and a “degenerate sack of anti-human trash.” Stelter, the InfoWars founder said, was the “enemy . . . drunk on children’s blood.” He cackled: “You will pay! You will fall!”
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