X restores Alex Jones

On Sunday, Elon Musk restored the notorious right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to X. The move followed a poll he posted for his followers, in which a large majority of respondents appeared to vote in favor of bringing Jones back.

Like many of Musk’s decisions, this one appeared to have arrived on a whim, after someone tagged him in a post asking him to consider the idea. If the move was shocking, it was largely because Musk had previously ruled out the idea in the name of his firstborn child, who died tragically.

By now there’s no sense working up much outrage over which right-wing extremists Musk welcomes back onto X. It has now been more than a year since X’s CEO declared a “general amnesty” for accounts that had previously been banned, resulting in the restoration of various white nationalists, QAnon affiliates, and others who had been booted from Twitter for good reason under the previous regime. At this point he could announce the returns of Cobra Commander, Skeletor, and Voldemort, and few of us would blink an eye.

But Jones’ original deplatforming five years ago stands as one of the most consequential cases of collective action among tech platforms in modern history. It’s now been long enough that some readers have asked me, in good faith, whether Jones’ case should come up for appeal. 

“What’s the case for indefinite bans on social media?” one reader asked me over on Threads. “In a world where big platforms are winner-take-all markets, handing out perma bans should be the absolute last resort and only be applied with very clear guidelines.”

It’s a good question. To answer it in the Jones case, let’s refresh our memory about the events leading up to his removal from Twitter and other platforms in the late summer of 2018.

That year, the national media was nearing the peak of its interest in the platforms’ role in spreading misinformation. Jones, who advanced all manner of outlandish theories across his Infowars media empire, had effectively harnessed platform recommendation algorithms to grow his audience and revenue.

Some of those theories were harmlessly nutty, such as his famous rant warning that chemicals were being put in the water to “turn frogs gay.” But he also promoted much more dangerous theories, in particular the idea that mass shootings were staged as a pretext