Enough is enough. At least Twitter seems to think so.
Full-time conspiracy theorist, Info Wars host and at least part-time trans porn enthusiast Alex Jones was permanently banned from the social media platform on Thursday.
The official accounts for Info Wars and Jones himself were also removed from Twitter-owned Periscope. In a series of tweets from the Twitter Safety account, the company cited Jones’s violations of Twitter’s abusive behavior policies and past violations as grounds for the ban.
On Wednesday, Jones made a spectacle of himself in D.C., yelling at a CNN reporter and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, altercations he streamed live on Periscope.
You see, Jones is on Capitol Hill because he thinks he should have been invited to testify at this week’s tech hearings in the Senate, along with execs from Google, Facebook and Twitter. Jones’s bread-and-butter is getting people to believe that he’s a truth-teller and that’s why the government wants to silence him.
Jones made bizarre headlines on Wednesday when he got into a physical altercation with Marco Rubio in the halls of Congress. He patted the shoulder of the Florida Republican, trying to get a rise out of him. Rubio’s response: “Get your hand off me. Don’t touch me again, man."
Let’s be real, Twitter: it took you way too long to pull the plug on this fear-monger. He was banned on iTunes, Spotify, Facebook and YouTube already. This doesn’t exactly make you look good by comparison, but at least it’s done.
As we’ve reported in the past, Alex Jones is the man New York magazine christened “America’s leading conspiracy theorist.” He’s aggressively opposed to even minimal gun control, he has loudly proclaimed that the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, which left 28 people including 20 young children dead, was fake and never actually happened. For this and other offenses, he’s currently entangled in numerous defamation lawsuits.
He also claims that the U.S. government was behind the Oklahoma City bombing, and the September terror attacks. And of course he says the 1969 Moon landing was staged.
Following the ban, Jones posted a video on InfoWars' website, saying:
"I was taken down, not because we lied but because we tell the truth and because we were popular. And because we dared go to that committee hearing and stand up to Rubio and stand up to the lies of mainstream media and speak the truth. …This is the deep state striking back and really pressuring these tech firms to censor."
Are you enjoying watching his drawn-out downfall, or do you just wish he would disappear forever? Like, evaporate? Let us know in the comments.
h/t: NPR
h/t: CNBC