Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has had his account on X - formerly Twitter - reinstated by Elon Musk.

Musk asked users to vote in a poll whether or not to lift a Jones ban pre-dating his ownership of the platform, signalling he would honour the result.

Around 70% of roughly two million respondents voted to lift the ban.

Jones is most notorious for falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, in which 20 children and six adults died, was “staged”.

He was ordered to pay $1.5bn (£1.32bn) in damages to family members of the victims, after courts found he had caused them to be subjected to harassment and death threats with his false claims.

    • loki_d20@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      What a ridiculous idea. People rely on Twitter for their job and aren’t interacting with the politics of social media. They’re sympathizers for daring to have a job that involves being seen on social media. Regardless of your view of Twitter, people aren’t leaving Twitter and that means their customers are still reliant on it for a source of info on many content providers.

            • noahm@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              They don’t want this! Control comes with responsibility and is expensive. Twitter is already there, has been there for a long time, and still has the users and the mindshare. It’s still the logical choice for organizations wanting to reach the widest audience.

              Fortunately that last bit does seem to be changing. It’s not happening as fast as many of us think it should, some prominent organizations have left X. Hopefully more will continue to do that, but calling the stragglers fascists, as was done earlier in this thread, is not a productive way to engage.

              • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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                11 months ago

                Lemmy.world, one of the largest instances said it costs around $1500 per month and about $200 to set up, I don’t think it’s expensive. If all of one state’s government puts it on Mastodon, then everyone under that can post as well under that umbrella. This isn’t a huge deal or groundbreaking.

              • takeda@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                The responsibility only matters if their server is open, they could have one just for their employees like it is done with email.

                But there is another option and it only requires web server which they already have. It is called RSS feed.

            • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
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              11 months ago

              Yeah good luck getting the average transit user to figure out and use mastodon

              • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
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                11 months ago

                You don’t have to sign up, just have a link from your website like they do twitter. Not sure why you guys are trying to find the negative. This one is a no-brainer.

        • loki_d20@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Any job where you have to sell your image or show your work to get sales. Such as artists, news sites not part of MSM, and content creators. While there are various sites, none of them work as well as Twitter at sharing info and getting your info in front of new users.

        • cokeslutgarbage@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I dont have Twitter or children, but I know some school districts exclusively use Twitter to announce school closings or delays from weather. To play devil’s advocate towards myself, parents could just listen to the radio or watch their local news, both of which usually/used to have school closings listed.

          I don’t have an opinion abt this, I just have friends that are still on Twitter because they follow their kid’s schools.

      • TBi@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        If you are still on by choice then I’d agree with the OP. If you need it for work then that’s different, but you should be trying to move off it.

    • squiblet@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      Some people are just oblivious. Take my dad, for instance. He told me last week “so Twitter is now called ‘X’!” Uh, yeah, thanks.

        • squiblet@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          He is, he uses it every day. For some reason he assumed I hadn’t heard of it which I guess makes sense as I deleted my acct and don’t use it at all, but I mean, it was all over tech news for a couple months.

      • Corgana@startrek.website
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        11 months ago

        Ehhh Twitter has been pretty friendly to anti-democracy types for years now. January 6th was literally organized on the app and that was way before Musk. At this point I have an extremely hard time believing any regular Tweeter who claims ignorance.

    • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      Personally I only have an account still because it’s the way I log into Disqus and I don’t remember my actual Disqus password. I don’t actually go on X/Twitter unless linked to by a post or something, and even then I’m usually not logged in because I don’t have the app on my phone, and I do lemmy browsing on phone.