After weeks of deplatforming efforts by social media companies, Infowars founders Alex Jones has lost his last refuge: Twitter.
Twitter confirmed the move via the @twittersafety account, citing abusive behaviour:
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’ past violations. https://t.co/gckzUAV8GL
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) September 6, 2018
According to a Twitter spokesperson speaking with The Daily Beast, the impetus for the suspension stems from an altercation between Jones and CNN reporter Oliver Darcy during yesterday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
Before being banned, Jones’s Twitter page had accumulated nearly 900,000 followers, while the Infowars page had accrued around 430,000.
Jones was banned from a litany of services over the past month, including Spotify, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn and Facebook. Thus far, efforts to hold Jones accountable to the community guidelines of sites he leveraged have resulted in a nearly 50 per cent loss of viewership to Infowars.
Like YouTube, the accounts of some of Infowars’s other major players — including editor-at-large Paul Joseph Watson — remain active, though Twitter Safety states that the company will “continue to evaluate reports we receive regarding other accounts potentially associated with @realalexjones or @infowars and will take action if content that violates our rules”.
We reached out to Twitter for comment but had not heard back at time of writing.