Twitter on Thursday permanently banned Alex Jones and his company Infowars for violating its policy prohibiting “abusive behavior.”
The ban comes one day after Jones posted a video to Twitter in which he lambasted CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy as “the equivalent of like the Hitler Youth” and suggested that Darcy was “smiling like a possum that crawled out of the rear end of a dead cow.”
Twitter confirmed in a Thursday afternoon statement that the nine-minute video Jones posted on Wednesday, along with previous policy violations, prompted the permanent ban.
“Today, we permanently suspended @realalexjones and @infowars from Twitter and Periscope. We took this action based on new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy, in addition to the accounts’ previous violations,” the statement read. “As we continue to increase transparency around our Rules and enforcement actions, we wanted to be open about this action given the broad interest in this case. We do not typically comment on enforcement actions we take against individual accounts, for their privacy.”
Jones, a famed Internet conspiracy-monger, was temporarily suspended from Twitter late last month for violating the platform’s prohibition on targeted harassment. That suspension came after YouTube and Facebook permanently removed all of Jones’s content from their platforms — a decision Jones has cited as evidence of the tech giants’ anti-conservative bias.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who routinely defends his company’s reluctance to permanently ban controversial figures, testified on Capitol Hill this week, answering lawmakers’ accusations that the platform is riddled with anti-conservative bias and fails to prevent the dissemination of political misinformation.
During the hearing on Wednesday, Jones walked the halls of Congress, confronting various media figures and politicians, including Darcy and Senator Marco Rubio, who angrily threatened to “take care of” Jones after he patted the Florida lawmaker’s back.
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