San Francisco, Twitter said the accounts belonging to US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his media organisation InfoWars will remain online for now, one day after an investigation found that his accounts appeared to have repeatedly violated the company’s rules.
A Twitter spokesperson said the company concluded that of the more than a dozen tweets included in CNN’s Thursday report, seven were found to have violated Twitter’s rules, CNNMoney reported on Friday.
CNN’s investigation found that InfoWars’ and Jones’ Twitter accounts had published content that degraded groups of people on the basis of their religion and gender identity, engaged in the harassment of individuals, glorified violence, and promoted conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings.
Twitter would have required those tweets to be deleted, if they were to have remained up, the report said.
But after CNN’s investigation was published, the tweets cited in it were almost immediately deleted from the social media website.
Jones said on his programme that he had instructed his staff to do so and “take the super high road”, though he contested whether the tweets violated any Twitter rules.
Among the seven tweets found to have violated Twitter’s rules, two of it occurred recently enough that Twitter could cite them in the future to take additional punitive action against Jones’ accounts, the spokesperson said.
The other five tweets occurred before a set of bolstered Twitter rules were put into place in December 2017. While Twitter required those tweets be deleted, the company cannot use them as grounds to take further action against the accounts, the spokesperson said.
The Twitter spokesperson was not immediately able to provide CNN with the specific tweets the company had determined to have violated its rules.
“We will continue to review any content that is flagged to us and take action as appropriate,” the spokesperson said.
