Alex Jones and his InfoWars outlet were permanently banned from Twitter in September, after years of promoting conspiracy theories about tragedies like the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings.
The move seemed to be a deathblow for InfoWars. Just weeks before it had been kicked off platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
Now, with his Twitter accounts shuttered, Jones had no way to communicate with the hundreds and thousands of followers.
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Except those accounts weren’t shuttered.
In fact, two months after Jones and InfoWars were supposedly shunned, a number of accounts remain live and tweeting.
On Tuesday, the Twitter account for InfoWars’ “Real News” show with host David Knight promoted Knight’s claim that Hillary Clinton is “50% Reptilian DNA.”
The Twitter account for the InfoWars store is still operational as well, promoting sales of Jones’s bone broth and iodine supplements. InfoWars’ “News Wars” account is also up and syndicating InfoWars videos. Together, the three accounts have more than 25,000 followers.
All three Twitter accounts are listed on the InfoWars site as official InfoWars social media, meaning they wouldn’t be hard for Twitter to find. But the InfoWars social media page notes it’s only “a small list of our main profiles,” suggesting InfoWars is using other social media accounts to evade the ban.
The @InfoWarsReports Twitter account, for example, isn’t listed on InfoWars’s official social media page. But it promotes InfoWars content multiple times a day, and has been used to embed video clips on the main InfoWars site.
In August, when a ban for Jones’s more popular accounts looked increasingly likely, InfoWars staffers started using the less-prominent account to embed videos on its site.
Jones and Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment.
With the more popular InfoWars accounts gone, smaller accounts like InfoWarsReports have filled the gap by promoting misinformation and conspiracy theories published by Jones and InfoWars to its nearly 27,000 followers.
InfoWarsReports’ October tweets have included the claims that the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was a “false flag” and promotion for an InfoWars interview with white nationalist Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy.
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@InfoWarsReports received a huge jump in followers after the main InfoWars pages were banned, according to social media analytics site SocialBlade, receiving 2,500 new followers over the past 30 days.
Twitter has taken some action after its initial ban to stop other InfoWars accounts. In late September, Twitter banned the Twitter account for InfoWars’ War Room show, which is co-hosted by former Trump adviser Roger Stone.
