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.
There we go. Now it’s officially Truth Social as run by Elon Musk. He could have just bought the actual Truth Social for way less.
But he got a huge huge audience, which is what the other platforms lack. It was a realy good move if your goals are to try to move social media massively to the right, shut down conversations you don’t like, etc.
It may have been expensive, but way cheaper than buying or starting a new platform and trying to get that size of an audience and apparent lock-in/addiction.
I’m convinced he did it for the '24 election. He lost a lot on Twitter, but he stands to gain a lot more if trump wins.
Remember that last election, all major social media sites released a “fact check” on content at the last minute, completely hijacking Trumps strategy of lying about everything.