Alex Jones is banned from Twitter for a week

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It’s been a long time coming, but Twitter has finally suspended Alex Jones. Well, at least for a week.

The reasoning behind the suspension is pretty straightforward. On August 13th, Jones uploaded a video to Periscope, which Twitter also owns, where he calls on his supporters to get their “battle rifles” and prepare to “act on the enemy.” He then tweeted the link to his followers, which is a clear violation of Twitter’s policy against inciting violence.

Because of his actions, Twitter will be temporarily suspending his account for seven days, the New York Times reports. However, his suspension is somewhat on the light side. Jones’ account will be placed in “read-only” mode. Which means he can still access the account, but he’ll be unable to tweet, retweet, or like others’ posts. Thankfully for Jones and company, accounts run by Jones and his team for the highly visited conspiracy site InfoWars will be unaffected by the suspension.

Obviously, this isn’t the first time Alex Jones has seen the ban hammer. Just last week, YouTube pulled the plug on his YouTube channel, as well as having his podcasts removed from iTunes. Before that, Spotify pulled several episodes of Alex Jones’ podcast for, you guessed it, hate speech. However, the list keeps on growing to include Facebook and Vimeo.

Out of all these platforms that gave Jones the boot, Twitter has been the only one to state that Jones’ content did not violate any of the company’s policies.

Last week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, wrote in a series of tweets defending the platform’s decision to allow Jones to continue posting.

“We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday,” said Dorsey. “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.”

Well, it’s finally obvious, to Twitter at least, that Jones is in clear violation of the rules, and now, Jones has to face his consequences. But keep in mind, he can just switch over to his InfoWars account if he wants to continue spewing his “hate speech.”

“This is a very positive thing that’s happening,” said Jones. “We’re going to win.”

Update: Annnnnnnd and now the InfoWars Twitter account has just been suspended for seven days:

https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1029794873996537857

We reached out to Alex Jones and InfoWars, but they did not immediately respond to our request for comment. We’ll update the post if we hear anything back.

How do you feel about this suspension? Do you think it’s warranted? Let us know your thoughts down below in the comments! 

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Kevin Raposo

Kevin is KnowTechie's founder and executive editor. With over 15 years of blogging experience in the tech industry, Kevin has transformed what was once a passion project into a full-blown tech news publication. Shoot him an email at kevin@knowtechie.com.