Elon Musk announced that X, formerly Twitter, will reinstate the account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones five years after being thrown off the platform. Musk posted his decision after polling X users; over 70% of the poll’s nearly 2 million votes were in favor of reinstating.
“The people have spoken, and so it shall be,” Musk wrote in response to the poll.
The move comes amid a growing advertiser boycott of the platform, following a Media Matters report in mid-November that revealed that white supremacist content consistently appeared alongside major brand advertisements on the platform. The report was quickly followed by a post from Musk effectively endorsing the Great Replacement Theory, earning him a rebuke from the White House.
The volatile media mogul told advertisers to “go fuck” themselves late last month at the New York Times Dealbook conference in late November. “If the people vote him back on, this will be bad for 𝕏 financially, but principles matter more than money,” Musk wrote Saturday.
Jones was permanently banned from Twitter in 2018, with the platform citing a pattern of behavior violating its harassment policies. At the time, Jones had already been sued by the parents of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting for spreading lies about the massacre and harassing survivors. Jones had about 900,000 followers when he was booted off the platform.
When Musk acquired the media company in 2022, he initially resisted pressure to reinstate the Infowars conspiracist, even as at various points he reinstated the accounts of former president Donald Trump, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and infamous neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin as part of an “amnesty” policy. Pointing to the death of his first child to justify his decision to keep Jones off the platform, Musk wrote in November of that year that he had “no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”
“I vehemently disagree with what he said about Sandy Hook, but are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech, or are we not?” Musk wrote on Saturday. “That is what it comes down to in the end.”
Responding to a post expressing worries about Jones using his reinstatement to spread misinformation, Musk wrote Sunday that it was a “safe bet that Community Notes”—the platform’s crowd-sourced fact-checking function—“will respond rapidly to any AJ post that needs correction.”
Jones’s account appeared to be active on Sunday morning. His first action was a retweet of a post from Andrew Tate—a media personality and conspiracist also unbanned by Musk—which hailed the reinstatement of Jones’ account. “To show respect to Alex Jones for his triumphant return and to show respect to Elon being a hero,” Tate wrote, “tell a globalist to get fucked today.”