Musk raises the prospect of a comeback for conspiracy ideologues
Should Alex Jones return to X? Elon Musk is currently asking the users of his platform. The piquant thing is that Jones has been blocked because he has been spreading conspiracy stories via his website for a long time.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk is letting users of his online service X vote in a poll on whether the account of US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones should be reinstated. Musk launched the twelve-hour poll in a tweet. "Vox populi, vox dei" (the people's voice (is) God's voice), he wrote.
Jones has been banned from the platform since 2018. The founder of the right-wing website Infowars had violated the guidelines and had previously also been banned from other platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. Most recently, Jones was sentenced to pay billions in damages in several proceedings due to his false claims about a massacre at Sandy Hook Primary School.
Jones had claimed for years that the rampage in December 2012 had been staged by actors. A 20-year-old had shot dead 20 schoolchildren and six teachers in Newtown in the US state of Connecticut on the east coast. This is not Musk's first survey of this kind. In November last year, he put it to a vote on whether former US President Donald Trump should be allowed to use the short messaging service again.
Trump's account, which had been blocked after his supporters rioted in January 2021 during the storming of the Capitol, was reactivated by Musk after a narrowly successful poll. However, Trump has not used the account again - with one exception - but posts on his own "Truth Social" platform instead.
Read also:
- Snow chaos further restricts Bavaria
- Unanimous decision: faster wolf culls possible
- The year of climate records: extreme is the new normal
- Snow and ice paralyze southern Germany
Elon Musk's poll on reinstating Alex Jones' account on X (formerly Twitter) has gained attention due to Jones' ban for spreading conspiracy theories. Jones, who was previously banned from platforms like Facebook and YouTube, has been a controversial figure for his claims about the Sandy Hook massacre.
Source: www.ntv.de
