Twitter Takes it Easy on Alex Jones; Plus: Viva La Crazy!!!!

Aaaaaand it’s another article!

Chemically subservient men and women, it’s time to talk Alex Jones.

Alex is a mixed bag: on one hand, he has a really, really cool first name; on the other, if you were making a top ten list of two-word combos to describe the controversial figure, “unhinged maniac” might not be positioned below #6.

Then again, if you listen to Joe Rogan, Jones seems like he might be a fun guy to hang out with.

I’ve been known to have dinner with maniacs from time to time; perhaps you have as well.

Although, I prefer my maniacs to be hinged. No “un.”

But hinged or no, as Spotify, Apple, and Facebook are keen on diminishing Alex’s conspiracy-centric voice — made clear on Monday — Twitter is still letting the hairy-chested, bark-spitting whistleblower tweet like Gilbert Gottfried’s Aladdin parrot.

On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey released a statement explaining why the company hasn’t banned Jones.

Wow — you know you’re in trouble when a company feels it has to explain why they HAVEN’T 86’d you.

Also, keep in mind that this is Jack Dorsey, the man who issued an apology for buying a Chick-fil-A sandwich during June. And why? Because someone, somewhere, at some point, decided to designate that month gay Pride Month.

By the way, what does that even mean? I like Pac-Man; how ’bout I deem August “Liking Pac-Man Pride Month.” Is the net result that you can only play Space Invaders from September through May? I mean, if supporting homosexuality means you can’t buy the most delicious chicken sandwich on the market (and I don’t believe it does), then wouldn’t that go for every month of the year?

Regardless, the point is that Dorsey isn’t particularly not-liberal. But he’s letting everyone know why Alex is still trick-or-tweeting:

“We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.”

We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified.

— jack (@jack) August 8, 2018

That’s nice of him.

Incidentally, here are the rules:

Hateful conduct policy

Freedom of expression means little if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up. We do not tolerate behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice. If you see something on Twitter that violates these rules, please report it to us.

How our policy works

As explained in the Twitter Rules,

Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.

Examples of what we do not tolerate includes, but is not limited to behavior that harasses individuals or groups of people with:

violent threats;

wishes for the physical harm, death, or disease of individuals or groups;

references to mass murder, violent events, or specific means of violence in which/with which such groups have been the primary targets or victims;

behavior that incites fear about a protected group;

repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone.

Personally, I’m a fan of Dorsey; I wanna be more like him — he has lots of Twitter followers, whereas I have 4,368 fewer than the MPR raccoon.

AJ has 856,000. Nicely done.

Foley says he knows the fact that Twitter hasn’t suspended Alex is “hard for many.” But why is it hard?

I don’t understand the contemporary weeping and gnashing of teeth over people’s wackiness or error. If I was at dinner, and someone walked into the middle of the restaurant, stripped naked and peed in the floor, I’d mostly just go, “Well…that was unexpected.” (Oh, and maybe, “Check, please.”)

I wouldn’t spend the next month raving over it. But in our current climate, people seem to lose their minds over anything spoken with which they disagree.

And someone saying a whole lot to disagree with is Alex Jones. From the government poisoning the water to turn us into zombies, to frogs being made Friends of Dorothy, to Sandy Hook having been a fake…he makes a lot of bizarre (and, sometimes, incendiary) accusations. But that’s the nature of an open forum, which I prefer to a heavily-regulated platform.

The chief of InfoWars may be a bit nuts; but don’t nuts make the world interesting? Not to Apple. The mega-corporation removed his podcasts, explaining it this way:

“Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users. … We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.”

Facebook took down four of Alex’s pages, for “glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies.”

Is this fair? These are private companies, which can choose to do what they want in terms of content, if the rules are evenly applied. Take one look at Louis Farrakhan and his treatment on social media, however, and it’s clear that something unequal is afoot.

Speaking of a foot, Jones could be the first banana peel on a slippery slope, and we could all be next. There’s a conspiracy theory for ya right there, and one that may well prove to be right.

In the meantime, here’s to that zany character known as Alex Jones. He may come across as crazy, but if you’re not too traumatized by a mid-restaurant naked pee session, you might just find him to be some crazy good television. Enjoy the videos.

And in the Comments section, please tell us your favorite AJ moments or conspiracies.

For something completely different, check out my articles on the fact that you’re Russian, Melania’s bad-choice jacket, and CrossFit fascism.

Find all my RedState work here.

And as always, follow Alex Parker on Twitter and Facebook.

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