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Twitter Caves, Bans Alex Jones. For a Week. Sort Of.

Controversial Infowars founder and host Alex Jones has been hit with a lite ban from Twitter.

The social media platform took action Tuesday to restrict the conspiracy theorist’s account for seven days. That means he can’t tweet, retweet, like, or follow. He still has access to his account and can see the tweets other users post.

Twitter’s move against Jones comes the week after it was criticized for not banning him. Other major internet platforms—including Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Apple—had completely unpublished and/or removed his professional pages and podcasts. As Reason‘s Zuri Davis noted at the time, all four companies stated that Jones’ inflammatory statements about Muslims, immigrants, members of the LGBT community, and other groups violated their terms of service.

Twitter, though, decided to keep letting Jones use its platform, with CEO Jack Dorsey explaining that “he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does.”

So why did Twitter finally decide to move against Jones? According to BuzzFeed‘s Ryan Mac, Jones had tweeted a video from Periscope (which is owned by Twitter) in which he called on his followers to have their “battle rifles” ready to defend against the mainstream media, antifa, and others. That likely violated Twitter’s policies prohibiting users from inciting violence.

Jones responded Wednesday morning in a video posted to Infowars‘ official account, which was not restricted.

“We have been so careful even to follow [Twitter’s] anti-free speech, kind of university SJW rules, and so a video about Donald Trump needing to take action against web censorship, that is flagged and then gets us suspended for seven days,” he says. “I guess Dorsey is toying with us, or his people are.”

Dorsey et al. may indeed be toying with Jones, but their most recent action against the right-wing host likely won’t placate those who thought Twitter should have banned him in the first place. Of course, as a private company, Twitter is under no obligation to listen.

Partisans on both sides of the aisle want digital speech they don’t agree with be restricted and/or banned. But it’s impossible to please everyone. And by picking and choosing who they censor, Twitter and other internet platforms are likely to make the problems of polarization and information bubbles even worse.

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Emerging Market Massacre Returns: Rand Routed But Yuan’s Collapsing

While the Turkish Lira continues to rebound squeeze higher, the rest of the emerging market complex has caught its cold with the Rand, Ruble, and all the ‘pesos’ getting pounded in early trading. However, it is the ongoing collapse of the Yuan that is most notable…

Turkey is fixed…

So why isn’t everyone celebrating? Because the looming dollar shortage isn’t stopped by a bounce in what everyone claimed was an idiosyncratic issue with Erdogan…

The South African Rand is getting routed (slumping back towards its flash-crash lows)…

The Russia Ruble is slumping…

 

The Brazilian Real and all the pesos (Argentina, Mexico, Colombia) are sliding…

 

But while the numbers are bigger for all of the above, it’s the collapse of the yuan that has most people’s attention…

It’s all getting very real as Offshore Yuan nears its record low… (down 11% from its march highs)

Which pushes the Renminbi near 10-year lows…

 

Just one more wafer-thin USD-denominated debt issue?

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“The Enemy Of My Enemy”: Snubbed By Trump, Erdogan Turns To Merkel

Before Turkey’s president got caught into a growing feud with Donald Trump, Erdogan’s arch-nemesis was Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel following a spat of the treatment of Europe-headed migrants which culminated with Germany pulling its troops from NATO bases in Turkey, while Erdogan urged Germans not to vote for Merkel.

Well, may not anymore, because in a clear example of why the “enemy of my enemy is my friend”, Bloomberg reports that the two leaders broke the diplomatic ice and during a phone call today, Merkel said that the “Turkish economy’s strength is important for Germany.” They also discussed the current situation and agreed on a meeting between Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak and the German ministers of economy and finance.

The leaders asserted their commitment to strengthen Turkish-German cooperation with more high-level talks and visits, and also discussed bilateral relations and the situation in Syria, Daily Sabah reported. Erdoğan will travel to Germany on Sept. 28 for a two-day state visit, where he is expected to hold talks with Merkel.

And it’s not just Merkel: tomorrow, Erdogan is set to speak with France’s President, Emmanuel Macron.

So will Germany come in and rescue the struggling Turkish economy, even as Trump does everything in his power to torpedo it? While many hurdles remain, the Turkish Lira is clearly buying it, with the USDTRY trading near session lows, just below 6.10, far below the 7.23 level it hit late on Sunday.

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The world’s greatest investor is running out of things to buy

It was late October, 1989.

East Germany was disintegrating, and the Berlin Wall was days away from coming down.

The Soviet Union was just starting to fall apart.

George H. W. Bush (the elder) was President of the United States.

And the #1 movie in the world was John Travolta’s Look Who’s Talking.

It was during that month that the US stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 index, began a decline that would last for roughly 12 months.

The stock market finally reached its lowest point the following year, on October 11, 1990, when the S&P closed at 295.46.

It would never see a level that low ever again.

Starting the following day, the S&P 500 began a historic rise that would persist for nearly a decade– a total of 3,452 days.

In financial parlance this is known as a bull market, when stocks and other asset prices generally rise for years at a time.

Prior to 1989, the average US bull market only lasted about 46 months– 1402 days.

And the longest on record was the bull market of the late 1970s that lasted 2,274 days, about 6.25 years.

So the 1990s bull market (which ended on March 24, 2000) completely shattered the previous record by more than 50%.

Now, you may recall the 1990s– there were a lot of game-changing events that drove stock prices ever higher.

The fall of the Soviet Union was tremendously important in creating greater stability in the world and vastly expanding lucrative global trade.

China underwent a series of MAJOR economic reforms that rocket-propelled the economy into a huge profit center for US companies.

And of course, the Internet became a worldwide sensation.

On the backs of these trends (plus a gift of relatively low interest rates by the Federal Reserve) the US stock market became the envy of the world.

It all ended in 2000 after the dot-com crash.

Stocks sputtered for a few years, started to rise a bit, then crashed again in late 2008 at the onset of the Global Financial Crisis.

The market finally bottomed out on March 9, 2009 when the S&P 500 hit the ominous level of 666.

And for the past decade, the market has been moving ever higher– up a total of 325% since then.

So far this current bull market has run an unbelievable 3,446 days, which means it’s just ONE WEEK away from officially becoming the LONGEST BULL MARKET IN HISTORY.

One thing we know for certain is that all markets move in cycles.

There are always ups and downs, booms and busts. Tough times ALWAYS follow the good.

And, at 3,446 days… within a week of the all-time record… this bull market is clearly VERY late in its cycle.

The nature of this particular bull market is also quite peculiar.

Unlike the 1990s, there are no game-changing geopolitical or technological trends underpinning this bull market.

Instead, the key driver of higher asset prices has been 10 years worth of nearly 0% interest rates, giving EVERYONE the ability to borrow cheaply.

This has driven real estate prices to all-time highs, in many cases to absolutely absurd levels.

Bond markets are still near all-time highs.

Companies like Netflix and Tesla which lose money and rapidly burn through their investors’ capital have no problems borrowing billions of dollars.

And there are still trillions of dollars worth of bonds out there with NEGATIVE yields. It’s ridiculous.

Many stock markets around the world are at/near all-time highs as well, with investors paying record high valuations for their shares.

This means that, in many cases, investors have literally never paid a higher price for every dollar of a company’s revenue, earnings, and assets.

And the shares of nearly every well-managed, high quality business have been bid up to mind-blowing levels.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett seems to have thrown up his hands with the ridiculousness of this market.

I’ve written before that Buffett has stockpiled $110 billion. But there’s nowhere for him to invest it.

Bargains are so scarce, in fact, that Buffett is going to resort to buying back shares of his own company, Berkshire Hathaway.

This is a pretty big deal.

Buffett has had a longstanding policy that he would not use company funds for stock buybacks unless the share price became materially undervalued.

But Buffett hasn’t made a major acquisition in more than two years; asset prices are simply too expensive, and he’s too seasoned to overpay for investments.

So, a bit anxious to deploy their massive pile of capital, Berkshire Hathaway’s board changed its policy on share buybacks.

Buffett now has far more latitude to use the company’s money to buy back its own stock.

It’s a subtle change, but the implications are clear:

Buffett has few places to invest his $110 billion cash pile. So he wants the freedom to buy more Berkshire stock (an asset he is intimately familiar with and which he controls).

Said another way, Buffett has so much cash that he had to break his own, longstanding rule in order to safely deploy capital.

It’s interesting that, while all of this is happening, small investors are piling into the stock market en masse.

The CEO of TD Ameritrade (one of the largest stock brokerages in the world) stated earlier this year that “[t]here is an enormous amount of new retail money coming into the market. . .”

Other brokerages like eTrade and Schwab have seen similar trends.

So while small, individual investors are piling in, Buffett is standing pat… and resorting to buying back his own stock just to have a safe place to deploy some capital.

No one knows how much longer this historic bull market going to last. Or what’s going to end it.

But it’s safe to say that there are fewer days ahead of us than behind us.

And, in times like these, it might make more sense being prudent than being greedy.

Source

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Was Hillary The Real Colluder?

You know the ‘Russiagate’ narrative is wearing thin on America’s thinking public when mainstream media are prepared to run such opinion pieces as Investors’ Business Daily just did…

Russian Collusion: It Was Hillary Clinton All Along

Russia Investigation: It’s beginning to look as if claims of monstrous collusion between Russian officials and U.S. political operatives were true. But it wasn’t Donald Trump who was guilty of Russian collusion. It was Hillary Clinton and U.S. intelligence officials who worked with Russians and others to entrap Trump.

That’s the stunning conclusion of a RealClear Investigations report by Lee Smith, who looked in-depth at the controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between officials of then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign staff and a Russian lawyer known to have ties with high-level officials in Vladimir Putin’s government.

The media have spun a tale of Trump selling his soul to the Russians for campaign dirt to use against Hillary, beginning with the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting.

But “a growing body of evidence … indicates that the meeting may have been a setup — part of a broad effort to tarnish the Trump campaign involving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures and Department of Justice officials,” wrote Smith.

Smith painstakingly weaves together the evidence that’s already out there but has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which have become so seized with Trump-hatred that their reporting even on routine matters can no longer be trusted.

But he adds in more evidence that the Justice Department only recently handed over to Congress. And It’s damning.

Memos, emails and texts now in Congress’ possession show that the Justice Department and the FBI worked together both before and after the election with Fusion GPS and their main link to the scandal, former British spy and longtime FBI informant Chris Steele.

As a former British spook in Moscow, Steele had extensive ties to Russia. That’s why he was picked as the primary researcher to compile the “unverified and salacious” Trump dossier, as former FBI Director James Comey once described it.

Steele’s dossier, for which Fusion reportedly received $1 million, was largely based on interviews with Russian officials. And who paid that $1 million? As we and others have reported, it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, then under Hillary’s control.

The media knew all this, of course, but largely ignored it.

The great irony here is that, after more than two years of investigating, the only real evidence of collusion with Russians at all points to Hillary Clinton. It was she who hired Steele to dig up dirt on Trump using Russian sources.

But now, it turns out, it goes even deeper than that.

Events surrounding that now-famous June 2016 Trump meeting suggest it, too, was a concoction of Hillary Clinton and her deep-state allies. And that meeting was the basis for much of the later Russian collusion “investigation,” if it can even be called that.

Bruce Ohr, the No. 4-ranking official at the Justice Department, “coordinated before, during and after the election” with both Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson and with Steele, notes Smith.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Ohr’s wife Nellie, a sometime employee of the CIA, was also working for Fusion GPS.

The FBI fired Steele in October 2016 after it discovered that he leaked information to the press. But that meant nothing. Bruce Ohr merely continued as the conduit from Fusion GPS for information related to Steele’s bogus Trump dossier.

The FBI and Justice used information from that 35-page document as the pretense for the FISA wiretap on Trump aide Carter Page. Far from being limited in scope, those wiretaps in essence provided a backdoor key to the entire Trump campaign — and the basis for the Russian investigation.

So far so good.

But an earlier investigation by RealClearPolitics showed that as early as March 2016, the FBI, other Western intelligence sources and Clinton campaign operatives contacted the Trump campaign about potentially damaging information about Clinton.

They were in effect live-trolling the campaign.

This is significant. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Putin-connected lawyer who contacted the Trump campaign about having dirt on Hillary Clinton, was a client of Fusion GPS when she met with Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump campaign.

And she was accompanied by a former Soviet military counterintelligence official, now working as a lobbyist, named Rinat Akhmetshin.

Let that sink in for a moment.

What’s especially curious is that GPS’ Glenn Simpson admits he had dinner with Veselnitskaya both the night before and the night after the Trump Tower meeting.

Any possibility there was no discussion of the meeting between the two? Seems highly unlikely. Veselnitskaya herself subsequently claimed that the talking points for her meeting with the Trump people were provided to her by Simpson.

Once in the meeting, she quickly dropped the promises of having dirt on Hillary Clinton and instead brought up Russia’s long-standing desire to get rid of the Magnitsky Act, under which the U.S. imposed sanctions on a number of Russian moguls and government officials.

In short, they were baiting a trap for the Trump campaign to make it appear as if they were colluding with Russian officials.

Given the nonstop media coverage following leaks by the FBI and Justice, it seems the meeting served its purpose: It sowed the seeds of suspicion about the Trump campaign’s supposed Russian collusion.

The evidence goes even deeper than what we have summarized here. We suggest you read Smith’s piece, linked above.

Congress, using the documents it pried out of the Justice Department after repeated requests, is busy getting at what might turn out to be the scandal of the century. And Congress is now doing the work the Justice Department and FBI won’t.

“So here you have information flowing from the Clinton campaign from the Russians,“ House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes told Fox News on Sunday.

Was Hillary The Real Colluder?

Nunes, who heads Congress’ investigation into the matter, said it was likely that information “was handed directly from Russian propaganda arms to the Clinton campaign, fed into the top levels of the FBI and Department of Justice to open up a counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign that has now colluded (with) nearly every top official at the DOJ and FBI over the course of the last couple years. Absolutely amazing.”

We have to agree. If all that is true, it is absolutely amazing. After all, these are serious felonies, using the federal agencies to spy on a political opponent in league with a hostile foreign power.

As we said, the only real collusion appears to be on the part of the Clinton campaign — aided by the Obama administration, CIA chief John Brennan and a handful of high-level officials at the Department of Justice and FBI.

What’s next? It’s possible the collusion investigation soon will turn from Trump to Clinton.

If so, it could lead to more resignations and possibly jail time for those involved. That includes perhaps even Hillary Clinton, who sits at the political epicenter of all this illegality.

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The FDA Declares War on Yet Another Drug: Reason Roundup

Kratom death reports are rubbish, say advocates. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claims 44 deaths over a 9-year period have been associated with kratom, a Southeast Asian tree whose leaves have mild psychotropic effects when chewed or consumed as tea. A new white paper from molecular biologist Jane Babin suggests the FDA is full of crap.

Babin was hired by the American Kratom Association to look into the FDA’s claims, which the agency has been using to support a crackdown on kratom and its classifying as a Schedule I drug. Babin’s paper argues that the FDA “is pushing a false narrative in order to have kratom banned in the U.S.,” as the Washington Examiner puts it.

The research suggests that while people may have taken kratom, other factors killed them. Certain death certificates, for instance, showed that people had been abusing other drugs at the same time or took powdered kratom that contained toxic chemicals. One of the deaths was attributed to falling through a window, another was a homicide in which someone was shot in the chest, and another involved a person suffering a heart problem while swimming. The group also found two instances where deaths were reported twice.

The FDA has cited these alleged “kratom deaths” in placing the drug on an import alert in 2012, in rescheduling recommendations to the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2016 and 2017, and in a 2017 public-health advisory. The warning said kratom was a “narcotics like opioid posing a deadly risk.”

The agency “has relied on a strategy of manipulating, obscuring, and ignoring science in its inexplicable zeal to impede public access to the natural botanical kratom,” states Babin’s white paper.

The FDA has also misled the DEA, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) with incomplete, inaccurate, extrapolated, and distorted information on adverse events and deaths allegedly associated with the use of kratom to encourage unwarranted legislative and regulatory restrictions on kratom at the federal, state, and local government levels. Any public policy decision-maker (or staff) or media reporter, seeking to validate the FDA claims in policy deliberations will encounter a massively manipulated and sloppily documented public record.

Dave Herman, chairman of the American Kratom Association, suggested that “the FDA’s effort to frame kratom as a culprit in these otherwise unrelated deaths” was not just “sloppy and lacking in scientific integrity” but also “done deliberately.”

Reason has covered the FDA’s efforts against kratom for a few years now. “Is kratom the new marijuana?” asked Jacob Sullum in the January 2017 issue. See more here.

FREE MINDS

An Ohio judge keeps denying name changes for transgender teens. Formal name changes are required by law if kids at public schools want the teachers and administrators to stop using their old names. From The Washington Post:

One afternoon, slouched over a desk in a study hall classroom, Elliott, 15, was outed by an unwitting ninth-grade teacher who called him Heidi—his birth name or as the transgender community terms it, his “dead name”—while taking attendance. Ohio is one of several states that requires a court order granting a legal name change before a school can adjust its records.

So on June 18, Elliott and his parents, Kylen and Stephanie Leigh, went to court to make his name change official, appearing in front of Judge Joseph Kirby at the Warren County Probate courthouse in Lebanon, Ohio. They expected the hearing to be a formality, but Kirby’s questions and commentary quickly turned to gendered toilets and Caitlyn Jenner, according to court transcripts.

Four days later, Kirby denied Elliott’s name change. In the three-page decision, he referred to Elliott as “she” and “her” because using his preferred pronouns made it “difficult to read,” Kirby wrote in a footnote. The judge issued denials for two transgender 14-year-olds the same afternoon.

Now Elliott, along with two other teens and their families, has filed a class action lawsuit against the judge.

FREE MARKETS

The FBI has warned banks about impending ATM chaos. In a leaked, private memo sent last Friday, the FBI said that it “has obtained unspecified reporting indicating cyber criminals are planning to conduct a global Automated Teller Machine (ATM) cash-out scheme in the coming days, likely associated with an unknown card issuer breach and commonly referred to as an ‘unlimited operation.'”

“Historic compromises have included small-to-medium size financial institutions, likely due to less robust implementation of cyber security controls, budgets, or third-party vendor vulnerabilities,” the agency told banks. “The FBI expects the ubiquity of this activity to continue or possibly increase in the near future.”

QUICK HITS

  • GarJo is back! Gary Johnson’s “surprise re-entry into politics—as recently as five months ago he told Nick Gillespie ‘I’m done with elected political office’—came about when the original Libertarian Party nominee for [New Mexico’s] Senate…decided to step aside after seeing strong polling support for the two-time former governor,” explains Matt Welch.
  • Christine Hallquist, a Vermont trans woman, was elected last night as the Democratic nominee for governor. “She is the first transgender candidate for governor among either major party,” notes The New York Times. GOP gubernatorial candidate and ex-congressman Tim Pawlenty lost his bid. See more takeaways here from the Tuesday primaries in Connecticut, Vermont, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
  • Alex Jones has been suspended from Twitter.
  • The Food and Drug Administration moves to shutdown “opioid alternative” Poppy Seed Wash.
  • On incels, social science, evolution, and how we trick ourselves into believing we’re better people than we are.
  • A federal judge will allow British actress Kadian Noble’s sex-trafficking suit against Harvey Weinstein to go forward.
  • “The way we save the world is not by forming a Gen X Rapid Reaction Strikeforce with a mission to somehow make it 1985 again” author Matthew Hennessey tells National Review. But “I have some contrary opinions about culture’s drift toward a Utopian, semi-socialist techno-paradise premised on the idea that privacy, free speech, edgy comedy, and newspapers have outlived their usefulness.” Hennessey admits that in his new book, Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials, he uses the word millennials as a stand-in for certain set of values, not a demographic marker. “The word is useful to me mostly as a proxy for the app-soaked, Millennial-friendly world that is still busy being born all around us.”
  • Somerville, Massachusetts, Mayor Joseph Curtatone, has been calling for a boycott of Sam Adams beer after its owner had dinner with President Trump.

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US Industrial Production Slows In July After Big Revisions

US industrial production rose just 0.1% MoM in July, missing expectations after June’s print was revised higher to a 1.0% MoM gain.

 

Manufacturing production also slowed from +0.8% MoM in June to +0.3% MoM in July…

But growth is growth and YoY, Industrial Production is rising at its fastest since Feb 2012…

 

 

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Tech Stocks Slammed After Tencent Shocker

In addition to growing fears about Emerging Market contagion (where despite the Turkish Lira’s latest surge, we have seen the Chinese Yuan tumble to fresh one year lows amid a surge in the US Dollar), this morning traders were stunned by Chinese tech giant Tencent, which came out with numbers that were simply awful, missing on the top and bottom line, reporting revenue of CNY 73.7BN, below the CNY 77.7BN expected, More importantly, its profit of CNY 17.867BN was far below the CNY 19.3BN expected, and down from CNY 18.231BN a year ago: Tencent’s first profit drop in a decade.

The news sent Tencent ADRs tumbling to the lowest level since August 2017.

Tencent’s earnings disappointment, which sent the stock plunging and dragged EM futures lower…

…followed an drop earlier in the session in shares of Asian video game companies such as Tencent, Nexon and Nintendo on concerns over delays in new games releases in China, as Beijing halted approvals for game licenses. As Reuters notes, many firms have been awaiting games sales licenses since March after Beijing reformed and reorganized the government bodies that oversee the sectors earlier this year.

Tencent’s plunge hit other Asian tech names in sympathy, with other members of the “Asian Acronyms” tech stocks, either BATs (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) and TATS (Tencent, Alibaba, Taiwan Semi, Samsung), sliding sharply.

It also slammed ETFs tracking Chinese equities with significant exposures to Tencent.

  • IShares MSCI China ETF (MCHI) fell 4.8%; the fund has $3.4 billion in assets, and has a 16.2% exposure to Tencent
  • IShares China Large-Cap ETF (FXI) fell 4.5%; the fund has almost $4 billion in assets, and has a 8.6% exposure to Tencent
  • SPDR S&P China ETF (GXC) fell 3.5%; the he fund has $1.1 billion in assets, and has a 14.1% exposure to Tencent
  • Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets ETF (VWO) fell 2.5%; the fund has $59 billion in assets, and Tencent is its largest holding (5.3%)

As Bloomberg Arie Shapira writes, the Tencent debacle “might get the tech and general market bears riled up again, the same ones who came out of hibernation in late July after the Facebook and Twitter earnings blowups led to a three-day mini-panic in the FAANGs.” Furthermore, the recent action in the semiconductors is also helping the bears’ case, with the SOX underperforming yesterday and having now fallen 3.5% in the past four sessions vs the S&P 500 off 0.6%.

The weakness in semis can be partly explained by other earnings disappointments out of Asia, namely China’s Sunny Optical (a ~$13b market cap smartphone lens maker that lost nearly a quarter of its value on Tuesday) and Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision. Another ugly sign is the persistent decline in Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi, which slid below its July IPO price to end the day at an all-time low.

And while one can’t exactly call it “contagion”, the Chinese tech giant slump has hit the Nasdaq, with futures sliding well below yesterday’s lows, and killing the Tuesday dead cat bounce in the process.

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Twitter Suspends Alex Jones Over Offending Tweet

The campaign to silence Alex Jones finally crossed over into Twitter – which until now had faced intensifying public scrutiny for its hands off approach and criticism of Mr. Jones’s posts on the platform – when on Tuesday, Twitter suspended the conspiracy theorist and blogger for violating the social media company’s policies, in a stark reversal for Jack Dorsey who previously bucked the trend by other tech giants to muzzle the InfoWars creator.

As CNET first reported, Jones’ account was put in “read only” mode and will be blocked from posting on Twitter for seven days because of an offending tweet, the company said. While Twitter declined to comment on the content that violated its policies, a Twitter spokesperson told CNN the content which prompted the suspension was a video published Tuesday in which he said, “now is time to act on the enemy before they do a false flag”

Last week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey defended the company’s decision to not suspend Infowars and Jones from the platform, claiming they had not violated Twitter policies.  As Apple removed links to some Infowars podcasts and YouTube terminated some of its channels, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey said his company didn’t remove Jones or Infowars because neither had violated the platform’s policies.

“We’re going to hold Jones to the same standard we hold to every account, not taking one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term, and adding fuel to new conspiracy theories,” Dorsey said in a tweet last week. He later added that it was critical that journalists “document, validate and refute” accounts like those of Mr. Jones, which “can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors.”

After a CNN report identifying numerous past tweets from Infowars and Jones that did violate Twitter’s rules, those posts were deleted.

Tweets by Infowars and Jones deleted last week included posts attacking transgender and Muslim people; a claim that the 2012 shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax perpetrated by “crisis actors”; and a video calling David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland, Fla., high-school shooting, a Nazi.

As Rolling Stone notes, while Jones and his sympathizers have cried censorship following the actions of YouTube, Facebook, Apple and others, internet-content platforms specifically reserve the right to suspend users or delete content found to violate of their guidelines — indeed, Infowars’ own terms of service includes such a provision.

Twitter’s crackdown came more than a week after technology companies, including Apple, YouTube and Facebook removed content from Jones and his site, Infowars. As the WSJ notes, the actions against Infowars intensified a growing debate over what role tech companies play in policing controversial content on their platforms while they simultaneously support the principle of free speech.

It is unclear if the ongoing censorship of Alex Jones is having the desired effect: as we noted over the weekend, Silicon Valley’s coordinated purge of all things Infowars from social media has had an unexpected result; website traffic to Infowars.com has soared in the past week, according to Amazon’s website ranking service Alexa. 

 

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Andrew Cuomo’s Accidental Crime: New at Reason

During a visit to the Adirondacks last week, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recalled retrieving a feather shed by an eagle that “swooped down right next to us with this beautiful, graceful glide” as he was canoeing with his family on Lake Saranac. Cuomo did not realize he was confessing to a crime.

As the Associated Press pointed out, picking up that feather was a federal offense, punishable by a maximum fine of $5,000 and up to a year in prison. Cuomo, who said he would remedy the situation by returning the feather to the lake or surrendering it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, clearly does not expect to be punished for a crime he committed inadvertently. Therein lies a lesson he should take to heart, Jacob Sullum writes.

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