The conspiracy theorist was banned from Twitter - now X - but its owner has now reinstated him.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has had his account on X - formerly Twitter - reinstated by Elon Musk.

Musk asked users to vote in a poll whether or not to lift a Jones ban pre-dating his ownership of the platform, signalling he would honour the result.

Around 70% of roughly two million respondents voted to lift the ban.

Jones is most notorious for falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, in which 20 children and six adults died, was “staged”.

He was ordered to pay $1.5bn (£1.32bn) in damages to family members of the victims, after courts found he had caused them to be subjected to harassment and death threats with his false claims.

  • @Nurse_Robot
    14•11 months ago

    Sometimes I scroll YouTube shorts when I’m bored, and there will always be at LEAST one Alex Jones short that pops up, despite my only engagement being to quickly downvote it and skip it. It drives me crazy

    • circuscritic
      26•11 months ago

      Clicking on the short is engagement.

      Downvoting is engagement.

      Commenting how much you hate, disagree, or feel stupider for watching, is engagement.

      Scrolling past the clip and entirely ignoring it, is not engagement.

      So… Don’t engage, and remember:

      Being happy reduces engagement.

      Being angry increases engagement.

      The algorithm doesn’t care how you feel, just how long it can keep your attention.

        • circuscritic
          3•11 months ago

          Only for the engagement metrics used to set advertising prices and bill the ad buyers.

      • @Nurse_Robot
        -1•11 months ago

        From socialvideoplaza.com

        You’ve probably heard the myth that dislikes are a form of engagement. And since engagement is the social currency in which YouTube videos are paid, it makes your video perform better in the YouTube rankings. If that information was true in the first place, it is outdated now.

        [the dislike button] is used in the algorithm for a couple of things: It is a sign to the algorithm that it should suggest less videos of that creator to the viewer.

        • circuscritic
          2•11 months ago

          As trustworthy a source as socialvideoplaza.com clearly is…

          Google has a different take:

          YouTube engagement metrics (views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions) reflect how many times your YouTube video or channel has been interacted with. These metrics can be an important measure of your video or channel’s overall popularity.

          https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2991785?hl=en

          Mozilla also disagrees, here’s a link to their study and some below articles diving into it

          https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/youtube/user-controls/

          https://www.androidauthority.com/study-youtube-dislike-button-bad-recommendations-3210676/

          A Mozilla study found that YouTube’s “dislike” button was ineffective against bad recommendations.

          https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2022/09/20/youtube-dislike-recommendations-mozilla/

          …those buttons do little to purge unwanted videos from the personalized recommendations that YouTube feeds to users, according to a study published Tuesday by Mozilla, the foundation behind the Firefox web browser.

          For example, using the “Not Interested” button only prevented 11% of recommendations for similar videos, Mozilla said. The “Dislike” button only stopped 12%. The most effective control is the “Don’t recommend this channel” button, which works less than half of the time at 43%.

          So…it looks like affirmatively engaging with a video, even with a dislike, is engagement and is unlikely to change what types of content YT feeds you.

          Now, from my anecdotal experience, the only way to remove, or reduce, unwanted content categories from your YT feed is a combination of flagging them as not interested AND searching/watching a new category of content to replace it with. Not perfect, but manageable. Oh, and using Piped/proxied services e.g. Newpipe.

      • @Nurse_Robot
        -3•11 months ago

        I don’t click on it, I have never watched more than 10% of one before scrolling past, I have never commented.

        • Lemdee
          3•11 months ago

          I have never watched more than 10%

          You gave 10% engagement and voted with your downvote! Double engagement!

          • @Nurse_Robot
            -2•11 months ago

            From socialvideoplaza.com

            You’ve probably heard the myth that dislikes are a form of engagement. And since engagement is the social currency in which YouTube videos are paid, it makes your video perform better in the YouTube rankings. If that information was true in the first place, it is outdated now.

            [the dislike button] is used in the algorithm for a couple of things: It is a sign to the algorithm that it should suggest less videos of that creator to the viewer.

            • Lemdee
              3•11 months ago

              Also from socialvideoplaza.com

              This site is not a part of the YouTube website or Alphabet. Additionally, this site is not endorsed by YouTube in any way.

              Your random quote from a random website doesn’t mean much against the experience of myself and others and how massively disliked videos still get tons of traffic. If you don’t want to see certain content don’t dislike, just keep moving and don’t engage at all. My feed only improved after doing this, when I was disliking videos I kept getting the content I disliked. I didn’t engage and now I don’t see content I don’t want to anymore.

            • circuscritic
              2•11 months ago

              If you’re going to keep posting this same factually incorrect comment, I’ll keep posting my response:

              As trustworthy a source as socialvideoplaza.com clearly is…

              Google has a different take:

              YouTube engagement metrics (views, likes, dislikes, and subscriptions) reflect how many times your YouTube video or channel has been interacted with. These metrics can be an important measure of your video or channel’s overall popularity.

              https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2991785?hl=en

              Mozilla also disagrees, here’s a link to their study and some below articles diving into it

              https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/youtube/user-controls/

              https://www.androidauthority.com/study-youtube-dislike-button-bad-recommendations-3210676/

              A Mozilla study found that YouTube’s “dislike” button was ineffective against bad recommendations.

              https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2022/09/20/youtube-dislike-recommendations-mozilla/

              …those buttons do little to purge unwanted videos from the personalized recommendations that YouTube feeds to users, according to a study published Tuesday by Mozilla, the foundation behind the Firefox web browser.

              For example, using the “Not Interested” button only prevented 11% of recommendations for similar videos, Mozilla said. The “Dislike” button only stopped 12%. The most effective control is the “Don’t recommend this channel” button, which works less than half of the time at 43%.

              So…it looks like affirmatively engaging with a video, even with a dislike, is engagement and is unlikely to change what types of content YT feeds you.

              Now, from my anecdotal experience, the only way to remove, or reduce, unwanted content categories from your YT feed is a combination of flagging them as not interested AND searching/watching a new category of content to replace it with. Not perfect, but manageable. Oh, and using Piped/proxied services e.g. Newpipe.

    • @DannyMacEnglish
      2•11 months ago

      I get random right and far right posts too.