It was a day that will go down in tech history books, as much for its potential significance as for its utter bizarreness.
For a brief moment on Wednesday, the worlds of Silicon Valley business, partisan politics, conspiracy theorists and the theater of the absurd all collided into one magnificent spectacle, as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey visited Washington DC for back-to-back Congressional hearings.
Amazingly, a photographer was able to get a picture that captures all this, and more.
Dorsey and his weird beard-shirt combo, Alex Jones, a congressional staffer wearing Google Glass, and a journalist wearing an 1980s Casio watch.
This has to be the most hilariously dystopian picture of the year. pic.twitter.com/d9DPnExbLX
— Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (@lorenzofb) September 5, 2018
This photo was taken by Politico’s M. Scott Mahaskey during a break in the hearings and posted to Twitter. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]Twitter banned Infowars and its founder Alex Jones, following months of public pressure to do so.
In a series of tweets on Thursday, the company said it had “permanently suspended” accounts associated with Jones and Infowars after numerous complaints that they violated its terms of service prohibiting repeated abusive behavior. A Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Beast specifically that an Infowars video posted on Twitter of Alex Jones berating CNN reporter Oliver Darcy on Wednesday was the final violation of the company’s terms.
“Those are the eyes of a rat,” Jones told Darcy to his face in a live video, where he accused Darcy and CNN of trying police internet content.
“Today, we permanently suspended @realalexjones and @infowars from Twitter and Periscope,” Twitter said in the first of a series of Thursday tweets. “We took this action based on new reports of Tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy, in addition to the accounts’ previous violations,” the company tweeted, linking to its policies on abusive behavior.”“As we continue to increase transparency around our Rules and enforcement actions, we wanted to be open about this action given the broad interest in this case. We do not typically comment on enforcement actions we take against individual accounts, for their privacy,” Twitter continued.
Twitter said it will “take action” if Jones or Infowars seeks to circumvent their ban.
The ban deprives Jones and Infowars from its 1.5 million followers, combined, and comes on top of bans that cut them off from millions of others. READ MORE;