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The bell finally tolled for Alex Jones, with most platforms — including Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube — finally ousting him so he can go shirtlessly caterwaul his Sandy Hook denial conspiracies someplace else. But Twitter opted not to ban Jones or InfoWars, with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (pictured above) defending their decision on the same day it was revealed Jones’ lawyer is seeking to make the home addresses of Sandy Hook parents public. So that is some amazing timing, or perhaps, as Seth Rogen has said, “the dude simply does not seem to give a f*ck.”
To put this in further perspective, Neil Heslin, the father of a 6 year old killed at Sandy Hook, has said, “I lost my son. I buried my son. I held my son with a bullet hole through his head.” If you’re the CEO of a company — watching Jones use a national platform to label the shooting a hoax and calling Neil Heslin and the other grieving parents “crisis actors” — and you don’t consider that a violation of the rules (while other people are banned for incredibly minor things like obvious parody accounts or saying they would throw a chess board at Nancy Pelosi if she breaks into their house), you may have lost the plot. Many people on Twitter pointed out the arbitrary reasons they’ve been disciplined by Twitter while Dorsey makes excuses for Jones and his ilk:
You suspended me twice for repeating reported facts about prominent white supremacists https://t.co/wL4nBX7PXu
— David Klion
(@DavidKlion) August 8, 2018
Others joked about invoking “slippery slope” arguments, citing Niemöller poetry, saying “both sides” are the same, or believing that doing nothing isn’t in itself a political stance.
Things heated up when the official Twitter Safety account dropped a couple of questionably-worded updates:
People were definitely angry.
Here's the thing, @jack. If someone's posts break the rules of YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Pinterest and Spotify, but the same posts do not break @Twitter's rules, the problem is your rules. https://t.co/PdMTA80bk0
—
Sha Naqba Īmuru
(@JShahryar) August 8, 2018
One part of Dorsey’s stance that people found especially egregious was him saying it was up to journalists to refute the endless flow of “unsubstantiated rumors” from accounts Twitter could easily ban.
This led to people spreading some unsubstantiated rumors of their own:
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