Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill leaving X after Alex Jones account reinstated

Prominent civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill announced she is leaving X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, due to the Elon Musk-owned platform reinstating far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s account. 

Ifill, a former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, announced her departure from the platform after encountering a post that mentioned the life and memory of Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, one of the 20 children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. 

“Alex Jones tortured these families who suffered the unimaginable. He has monstrously led a campaign of gaslighting and assault on the spirit of Sandy Hook families & desecrated the memory of those murdered children,” Ifill wrote in an X thread Sunday. “He is a ghoul. His return to this site completes its utter degradation. We are in a war for the human soul.” 

“And so with arrival of Alex Jones, this cannot be a place where I put my energy, my ideas, my plans, my joy,” Ifill added. “Just know that we created something amazing here. It was so good, they wanted/needed to destroy it.” 

Musk on Sunday announced the controversial host’s return to the platform, conducting a poll Saturday asking users whether he should reinstate Jones’s account. The poll’s results showed 70 percent of respondents were in favor of Jones returning to the platform. 

In 2018, Twitter said it had “permanently suspended” Jones, along with his Infowars account, for violating its abusive behavior policy. The platform received criticism at the time for not taking action against Jones earlier.

Jones has pushed the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 — in which a gunman killed 26 people, 20 of which were children between 6 and 7 years old — was a false flag event designed to shore up support for gun control. 

The families of the victims sued the Infowars host over the conspiracy theory, resulting in a nearly $1.5 billion judgment against him. 

Ifill, the cousin of late PBS journalist Gwen Ifill, told her 445,000 followers on X that she was moving to Threads — Meta’s newly launched microblogging platform — while also encouraging media outlets to increase their activity on platforms other than X.

“News orgs please post more on Threads, Post, Spoutible, so we can continue to have access to your reporting, videos and content,” Ifill concluded in her thread.