Twitter’s Jack Dorsey defends decision to keep Alex Jones

By Mark Sullivan

While major social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube and tech giants like Apple shun conspiracy theorist and hate monger Alex Jones, Twitter has stood out in the tech sector by keeping him. Tonight, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended his company’s decision to leave Jones’s Twitter accounts alone.

Dorsey continues:

“Truth is we’ve been terrible at explaining our decisions in the past. We’re fixing that. We’re going to hold Jones to the same standard we hold to every account, not taking one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories. If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.”

The entire thread below Dorsey’s tweet is worth a read. Both sides of this complex argument are compellingly argued.

Other platforms have suspended Alex Jones and InfoWars accounts because they traffic in hate speech, not due to their sharing of disinformation and fake news. Amazon, which rarely responds to pressure to remove content, even quietly stopped recommending products promoted by Jones.

Over the past few years, as pressure has mounted, Twitter has changed its Twitter Rules to prohibit more forms of hateful behavior. Tonight, Dorsey linked to a post by Twitter VP of trust and safety, Del Harvey, in which she writes:

“Last year we expanded hateful conduct and media policies to include abusive usernames and hateful imagery. We also updated rules around violence and physical harm to include the glorification of violence and violent extremist groups.”
And here are the rest of the types of content that constitute hate speech on Twitter:
  • violent threats
  • wishing for the physical harm or death of individuals or groups
  • references to mass murder, violent events, or specific acts of violence in which such groups have been the primary targets or victims
  • behavior that incites fear about a protected group
  • repeated and/or nonconsensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone

These are the standards by which Twitter is weighing the content shared by Alex Jones and InfoWars. Apparently, Jones’s pages, podcasts, and videos have crossed the “hate speech” line for Dorsey’s competitors but not for Twitter.

 
 
 

 

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