Jack Dorsey to Joe Rogan: ‘Not Sure’ Why Alex Jones Was Blacklisted on Twitter

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey claimed during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience that he didn’t know what exactly led to Infowars’ Alex Jones permanent blacklisting from the platform.

“You were the last guys to keep Alex Jones on the platform. You were the last ones. And I believe you hung in there until he started harassing you personally, right?” asked Rogan.

“No, no, no… He did very different things on our platform versus the others. So we saw this domino effect over a weekend of one platform banning him, and then another, and another, in very quick succession, and you know, people would’ve assumed we just would have followed suit, but he didn’t violate our terms of service,” replied Dorsey. “And afterwards, he did. And we have a policy, and if, you know, there’s a violation, we take enforcement actions. One might be asking the account-holder to delete the tweet, another might be a temporary suspension, another might be a permanent suspension.”

Rogan then questioned, “So him saying Sandy Hook was fake. He didn’t say that on the platform. He did not say that on Twitter. He only said it on his show… So what did he do on your platform, that you were all in agreement that this is enough?”

“I’m not sure what the actual violations were, but we have a set number of actions, and if an account keeps violating a terms of service, ultimately it leads to permanent suspension, and when all the other platforms were taking him off, we didn’t find those,” Dorsey claimed. “We didn’t find those violations and they weren’t reported… People weren’t reporting a lot of the tweets that may have been a violation on our service, and we didn’t act on them.”

Jones and his company Infowars were permanently suspended from Twitter in August following a pressure campaign from CNN, BuzzFeed, and left-wing activists.

CNN reporter Oliver Darcy personally lobbied for Jones’ suspension after Jones used the Twitter-owned video streaming service Periscope to film himself mocking Darcy outside Dorsey’s hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Following Jones’ permanent suspension, a Twitter spokesperson admitted to the Daily Beast that Jones’ exchange with Darcy, where he referred to the CNN reporter as a “rat,” “possum,” “evil-looking,” and a “virus,” had violated the platform’s rules.

Rogan’s episode with Dorsey was heavily criticized by fans as a softball interview, and both the full episode and the clip of Dorsey discussing Alex Jones received more dislikes than likes.

“He was banned for telling off CNN’s Oliver Darcy (who had been lobbying social media companies to ban him) at the Jack Dorsey congressional hearing and so then Twitter banned him for ‘harassing’ a ‘journalist’ (who was working in the capacity of a journalist at the time, on public property, while he was covering an event about social media) thus confirming everything Alex Jones was saying about social media censorship,” commented conservative YouTuber Mark Dice.

“This interview was soft AF. Shameful,” expressed one user in a comment, while another added, “Joe should’ve just went under the table n blew this dude for 3 hours.”

In response to the complaints, Rogan announced that Dorsey had offered to come on his show again.

“Good news for everyone that was annoyed that we didn’t cover censorship and deplatforming enough on the podcast with Jack Dorsey because he’s offered to come back on again,” proclaimed Rogan. “I’m going to take the criticism to heart and research all the high profile cases on the right and on the left and any instances that might be viewed as double standards. Anything in particular you think is important please leave a mention in the comments and I’ll have someone make a list.”

“One thing I really liked that Jack said was that he felt that the ability to communicate online was a right that we all should have,” he continued. “Maybe there can be a road to redemption for people that have been banned? I’ll keep you folks posted as to when we work out the details and the date.”