Elon Musk has reinstated conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' mentioned.
It brings new uncertainty for advertisers, who have fled X over concerns about hate speech appearing next to their ads.
Musk posted a poll on Saturday asking whether Jones should return to power. The results showed that 70% of respondents responded positively. Early Sunday, Musk tweeted: “The people have spoken and so it shall be.”
A few hours later, Jones' posts were visible again — the last from 2018, when the company permanently banned him and his Infowars show for offensive behavior.
Musk, who has described himself as an absolutist of free speech, said the move was about protecting those rights. In response to a user who posted that “permanent account bans are against free speech,” Musk wrote, “I find it hard to disagree with this point.”
The billionaire Tesla CEO also tweeted that it's likely that Community Notes — X's crowdsourced fact-checking service — “will respond quickly to any post from AJ that needs correction.”
Jones has repeatedly said on his show that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six teachers, never happened and was staged in an effort to tighten gun laws.
Relatives of many of the victims sued Jones in Connecticut and Texas, winning nearly $1.5 billion in judgments against him. In October, a judge ruled that Jones could not use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying more than $1.1 billion of that debt.
Relatives of the school shooting victims testified at the trials that they were harassed and threatened by Jones' believers, who sent threatening messages and even confronted the grieving families in person, accusing them of being “crisis actors” whose children never existed.
Jones is appealing the sentences, saying he did not receive fair trials and that his speech was protected by the First Amendment.
The reinstatement of Jones' account comes after Musk noted that a slew of major brands, including Disney and IBM, have stopped advertising on nationalistic messages appeared.
They were also chased away after Musk himself endorsed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in response to a post on .
But he also said advertisers were engaging in “blackmail” and, using profanity, essentially telling them to go away.
“Don't advertise,” Musk said in an onstage interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit late last month.