Alex Jones, Infowars permanently banned from Twitter

(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

published 7 September 2018

Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory peddler behind Infowars who has claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was fake, was permanently suspended from Twitter on Thursday.

The company said both @realalexjones and @infowars were banned from Twitter and Periscope "based on new reports of tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy, in addition to the accounts' past violations." Twitter's policy prohibits users from making "excessively aggressive insults that target an individual, including content that contains slurs or similar language."

Jones, who had about 896,000 followers before getting booted from Twitter, spent his Wednesday in Washington, where he attended a Senate hearing featuring Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, then got into an argument with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). He also confronted CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, telling him he has "the eyes of a rat," streaming the encounter on Periscope. Jones was booted from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple last month.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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