Last week, Twitter announced that it would ban Alex Jones and Infowars from their social media platform, as well as Periscope, a live stream service owned by Twitter. This comes about a month after other prominent social media platforms (Apple, Google, and Facebook) removed Alex Jones and Infowars from their sites.

One of Alex Jones’ most well-known conspiracy theories revolves around the Sandy Hook Massacre. He claims that the shooting was a hoax and that all the victims were simply “child actors”. Families of the victims have levelled legal suits against Jones for emotional and mental distress due to his false claims.

Social media websites received backlash for the hateful speeches that Jones would give, as well as for assisting the spread of fake news.

Twitter’s ban occurred after Jones used Periscope to live stream a verbal altercation between himself and Oliver Darcy, a reporter for CNN.  Darcy made reports and investigated social media rules and policies across a number of companies, which led to him calling out Twitter for not banning users like Jones (and in association, his company). Twitter had originally claimed that Jones had not violated any rules, but further investigation by Darcy had Twitter admitting that at least several of Jones’s tweets did, in fact, violate rules and policies.