【Web Series Archives】

Twitter’s decision to provide Alex Jones with a platform came down from the very top.

A recent report from the Wall Street Journaldetails the internal decisions at Twitter that have Web Series Archiveskept Alex Jones on the app — even as other tech companies, like Apple, Facebook, and YouTube, decided Jones was no longer welcome.

Apparently, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself stepped in and overruled staff recommendations to remove Alex Jones from the service.

SEE ALSO: Jack Dorsey says Twitter's 'left-leaning' bias doesn't affect content decisions

Per the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Dorsey told one person that he had overruled a decision by his staff to kick Mr. Jones off, according to a person familiar with the discussion.”

Twitter has maintained that Dorsey doesn’t personally get involved with these decisions. The company issued the following statement to the paper:

“Any suggestion that Jack made or overruled any of these decisions is completely and totally false,” Twitter’s chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, said in a statement. “Our service can only operate fairly if it’s run through consistent application of our rules, rather than the personal views of any executive, including our CEO.”

When Jones was banned from pretty much every Silicon Valley tech platform except Twitter, the company’s defense was to say that the violent vitriol, Islamophobic hate speech, and targeted harassment happening on Jones' YouTube and Facebook accounts wasn’t being posted on his Twitter account. (Twitter’s own rules also state that a user’s behavior off the platform needs to follow its terms of service, so there's that.) Anyway, the same exact problematic material was later indeed found on Jones’ Twitter. The company admitted that these tweets did violate its rules, but still chose not to ban Jones.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s alleged interjection into specific user issues doesn’t end with Alex Jones. Dorsey himself stepped in to lift the ban on Richard Spencer — open white nationalist, founder of the white supremacist think tank National Policy Institute, and the guy who coined the term “alt-right” — after the trust and safety team removed him from the platform. According to the same Wall Street Journal report:

A similar chain of events unfolded in November 2016, when the firm’s trust and safety team kicked alt-right provocateur Richard Spencer off the platform, saying he was operating too many accounts. Mr. Dorsey, who wasn’t involved in the initial discussions, told his team that Mr. Spencer should be allowed to keep one account and stay on the site, according to a person directly involved in the discussions.

Check any tweet from Dorsey’s account, @Jack, and you’re likely to find a slew of requests asking the Twitter CEO to deal with the site’s well-known Nazi issue. But Silicon Valley tech companies have by and large been been kowtowing to the latest right-wing grift, and conservative talkers and other right wing personalities have found great PR success in breaking tech platform rules and claiming that the apolitical punishment doled out is specifically targeted to curtail voices and the rights of those on the right.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey takes this concern about *appearing* to have an anti-conservative bias a step further. Along with recent decisions not to ban some of the right’s worst actors, Dorsey has gone out of his way to bring his case to conservative outlets. His very first media appearance, where he sought to set the record straight on the Alex Jones situation, was Sean Hannity’s show. Dorsey has publicly apologized to far-right personality Candace Owens for Twitter (correctly) labeling her a “far-right” personality. This is something he's rarely, if ever, extended to the many Twitter users who have been harassed on the platform. He also follows many conservative and far-right personalities on his personal Twitter account, like Mike Cernovich, a serial harasser, PizzaGate promoter, and date-rape denying misogynist who labels anyone he doesn’t like as a pedophile.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Then there's the case of Milo. In July of 2016, months before the election of Donald Trump, which led to the public rise of voices like Alex Jones and Richard Spencer, prominent far-right personality Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently booted from the platform for leading a racist, targeted harassment campaign against Saturday Night Live’s Leslie Jones.

The argument for banning vitriolic people like Milo, Alex Jones, and Spencer is that they lose their platform and their voices fade away from the public square. As my colleague Rachel Kraus recently pointed out, de-platforming works. Consider Milo’s recent rant about how his profile and finances have been hurt by the avalanche of cancelled speeches and lost business deals stemming from his behavior.

But as Twitter bucks its own publicly stated rules, seemingly at the behest of its founder and CEO, one question continues to bug me. If Alex Jones and Richard Spencer make the cut, why was Milo banned? What’s the difference between Milo enabling his followers to harass a comedian off of Twitter and Alex Jones inciting his audience to harass Sandy Hook parents to the point where they have to move from their homes? Was Milo banned solely because his target was a well-known TV personality who prominently used the platform, and Sandy Hook parents are, well, just grieving parents whose children were murdered in a horrific school shooting? Or is it because the current political climate has pushed a trope of an anti-conservative bias in tech, thus making it important for Twitter’s CEO to try to prove them wrong?

These are questions that unfortunately cannot be answered by Twitter’s terms of service or by a spokesperson, because the answers change based on one man’s interpretation of the rules he’s laid out at any given time.

While questions continue to arise concerning Alex Jones and Twitter, we know one thing: the location of Alex Jones’ new home for his daily show. InfoWars — where Jones continues to urge his viewers to take up arms and where he welcomes guests like the Twitter-banned Milo Yiannopoulos — can be found daily thanks to the video streaming platform Periscope, wholly owned by Twitter.

---

Featured Video For You

---

Watch Zuckerberg’s face freeze after a far-right politician credited Facebook for Trump's win and Brexit

---

Topics Social Media X/Twitter Politics