Five years after being permanently suspended from Twitter, conspiracy theorist and Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones’ hateful content remains available on the platform.
Since his initial ban, Jones has continually begged his collaborators, including antisemitic commentator Paul Joseph Watson, to promote his content on Twitter. Jones made at least 268 of these requests in 2019 and 2020 alone.
For the most part, Jones cannot use Twitter and his reach has dramatically reduced. Yet despite being banned, Jones’ hate-filled and violent content remains available on the platform thanks to a network of verified accounts which repost Infowars shows. Jones himself even issues direct statements to his audience through the use of his wife’s account.
Jones’ history with Twitter
Jones and his conspiracy website Infowars’ accounts were permanently suspended in September 2018 for repeated violations of the platform’s abusive behavior policy – the final straw being his harassment of CNN reporter Oliver Darcy (who he compared to a “rat” and “the Hitler Youth”) outside of a Congressional hearing at which former CEO Jack Dorsey was testifying. Jones’ account had already been temporarily restricted just a month prior, when he told Infowars listeners to “have their battle rifles and everything ready at their bedsides” for action against the media and Antifa.
Following his purchase of the platform in October 2022, Elon Musk has seemingly worked to impair Twitter’s content moderation capabilities, enabling the platform to act as a vector for hate and misinformation. Under Musk, dozens of right-wing accounts have been reinstated, including those belonging to anti-vaccine figures, white nationalists, and QAnon conspiracists. He even briefly unbanned noted neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin. Despite this wave of account reinstatements, Musk made an exception for Jones’ account because of the lies the Infowars host pushed about the Sandy Hook massacre, saying he has “no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”
Jones regularly encourages his listeners to post his videos on platforms where he is banned, and his network has actively evaded those bans – including on Twitter – by utilizing alternate accounts owned by others employed by or affiliated with Infowars to share clips of his broadcast. Following Jones’ ban from YouTube in 2018, multiple accounts bearing names like “Infowars Re-Uploaded” and “Tyranny Crusher” emerged with a sole devotion to posting Infowars content.
Infowars content is being widely shared on the platform
A number of Twitter accounts are reposting clips and near-entire episodes of The Alex Jones Show and other Infowars productions. Many of these users utilize Twitter Blue, increasing their reach and leading to some clips featuring the banned conspiracist earning hundreds of thousands of views.
Twitter Blue users can also upload videos up to two hours in length, allowing a number of these accounts to post near-entire episodes of The Alex Jones Show. These videos often include advertisements for the Infowars store – through which Jones has made over one hundred million in revenue since 2016 by hawking overpriced (and potentially dangerous) supplements and survival gear.
Some users appear to source their videos directly from Infowars’ streaming website. One user has repeatedly run a concurrent livestream of Infowars on Twitter. Occasionally, an Infowars staff member will retweet the Twitter live feed during the broadcast.
Jones continues to post directly on Twitter
Jones utilizes the account of his wife, Erika Wulff Jones, to issue personal statements to his audience, allowing him to advertise Infowars and to directly propagandize on Twitter. Though Wulff Jones appears to film the videos, Jones uses them to repeat the same rhetoric from his show, claiming that Bill Gates is pushing microchips on the population and mocking attempts by the Department of Justice to retrieve the money he is hiding from the families of the Sandy Hook victims. In one such video, Jones even directly responded to Musk’s refusal to reinstate his account, saying he was “not mad” and believed Musk’s transformation of Twitter would make him “one of the most important people in human history.”
In December 2022, Jones, right-wing provocateur Ali Alexander, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes all used the account of rapper Ye to send a series of Tweets while their own accounts were banned. No action was taken against any of the involved parties — Alexander and Fuentes, who had both been banned from the platform since 2020, were reinstated a month after the incident, only to be quickly permanently suspended again.
