Twitter ends up banning Alex Jones – an advertising stunt



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Troll of the professional tragedy, Alex Jones, went to Washington on Wednesday to recover the lost attention since Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Spotify and other tech giants pulled him out of their service the month latest. He tracked down behind Facebook's director of operations, Sheryl Sandberg, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, during their testimony in the Senate, addressed Senator Marco Rubio during a post-hearing interview. and spread all on Twitter. the last platform that would have it.

And that's gone against it.

On Thursday, just one day after Jones brought his circus to Capitol Hill, Twitter announced it would finally ban Jones and his InfoWars conspiracy site, citing "new reports of Tweets and videos released yesterday that violate our behavioral policy. abusive". This policy prohibits "overly aggressive insults directed at an individual, including content containing insults or similar language". Dorsey had previously defended Twitter's decision to allow Jones to continue operating on the platform, claiming Jones had not violated Twitter's policies.

But in early August, CNN reporter Oliver Darcy publicly pointed to a number of cases where Jones had violated these policies, leading Jones – or a member of his team – to remove the tweets in question. . A few days later, Twitter forced Jones to remove another offensive tweet and put his account on read-only for a week. The waiting period has increased and Jones' account has continued to live.

Ironically, it was CNN's initial story – or rather Jones's unbalanced response – that proved its ultimate loss. On Wednesday, just before Dorsey was called to testify at his second congressional hearing of the day, Jones approached Darcy as he looked forward to his media colleagues entering the courtroom. Accompanied by his entourage, Jones surrounded Darcy, stole a phone and harassed the reporter for more than 10 minutes about his job, his employer and his appearance, saying that he had the "eyes of" 39, a rat ". The entire test was broadcast on Periscope, which belongs to Twitter.

That particular edge is the last straw for Twitter seems curious. Yes, Twitter had a lot of reasons to suspend Jones on Thursday. But there are as many reasons as there was a week and the week before, and in early August, when all his contemporaries jumped. Compared to Jones' long series of misdeeds on Twitter – claiming that no one was killed in Sandy Hook's shooting, and comparing the Parkland shootings survivors to the Nazis, to name just a few. A – Certainly, a CNN reporter who covers Jones for a living is better equipped to handle his delusions than a victim of large-scale shooting, and insulting the appearance of a person barely of claim that the dead child of a parent never really existed.

But finally, the tirade against Darcy was too public for Twitter to ignore. Standing in the corridors of Congress, in front of the room where Twitter's CEO was standing, and in front of almost every reporters in the industry, Jones tested the limits of what he could do until he can not escape. more

Jones will surely try to take advantage of his ouster from Twitter, just as he was trying to use his banishment from the rest of the tech giants as a rallying cry. But if the story is an indication, it will not work. A recent report from The New York Times suggests that traffic to Jones' InfoWars webpage has been cut in half since the start of the big deconstruction.

As for Twitter, this action was probably only a matter of time. Since the company broke with peers to stand by Jones, all eyes went to the @realalexjones account, waiting for the slightest infraction. And it was a relatively light infringement, at least for Jones, who did it.

Yet for Dorsey in particular, the timing was right, if not too late. On Wednesday, the CEO spent the day making Twitter a "healthy" place for its users, even if it comes at a price. "We are ready to take the difficult road," he told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This path begins only by saying goodbye to Jones.


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