When the Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made his first appearance on the JRE (Joe Rogan Experience) podcast, many listeners were unhappy that Rogan failed to properly press Dorsey on why Infowars founder Alex Jones was banned from Twitter. The backlash was so great that Rogan promised to do a a second podcast with Dorsey which would focus on specific cases of users being banned from Twitter. That second highly anticipated podcast landed yesterday with Dorsey, independent journalist Tim Pool, and Twitter’s Lead of Trust and Safety, Legal, and Public Policy Vijaya Gadde all appearing on the JRE podcast.
On the first podcast, Dorsey said he didn’t know why Jones was banned and Rogan didn’t press him for an answer. This time, Pool took the lead and got a much more satisfying answer from Dorsey and Gadde.
Pool introduced the Jones ban by highlighting that the CNN journalist Oliver Darcy had claimed that the social networks banned Jones in response to media pressure.
Dorsey and Gadde initially denied this claim but then surprisingly went ahead and admitted that one of the reasons Jones was banned from Twitter was because people, who included employees of CNN, were reporting his content. Here’s the exact quote from Dorsey:
Then we got into a situation where suddenly a bunch of people were reporting content on our platform, including CNN, who wrote an article about all things that might violate our rules that we looked into and we gave him [Alex Jones] one of the warnings.
Gadde also said that one of the main incidents that led to Jones being banned was a video that showed him confronting and insulting Darcy (the CNN journalist).
At the time this video was uploaded, Darcy had already successfully lobbied many of the big tech giants to deplatform Jones and Infowars. Jones was confronting Darcy to call him out for this behavior.
Rogan found the idea that Jones was banned for confronting Darcy humorous and laughed as Gadde described the video while saying:
That’s enough [to get banned]? Really? That’s hilarious.
While it is indeed laughable that Jones was banned for saying mean things to a CNN journalist, we all knew this was the reason he was banned from Twitter. It’s just surprising to see Dorsey and Gadde finally admit that CNN and Darcey were behind the banning of Jones.
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