Civil rights lawyer quits X after Alex Jones’ return to platform

Prominent civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill is abandoning X, formerly known as Twitter, following the announcement that Elon Musk would be reinstating conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ X account after a five-year ban.

After encountering a post mentioning the life and memory of Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, a first-grader murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre, Ifill said she took it as a sign to quit the social media platform and post solely on Threads.

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

Ifill, former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, has been a staunch gun control advocate. Ifill said with the return of Jones to the social media site, it “cannot be a place where I put my energy, my ideas, my plans, my joy.”

“Just know that we created something amazing here. It was so good, they wanted/needed to destroy it,” Ifill said.

Jones was previously suspended from X in 2018 for violating the company’s “abusive behavior policy.” Jones repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax, and relatives of many victims successfully sued him for nearly $1.5 billion. Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech advocate, said the move to restore Jones’ account was about protecting First Amendment rights.

Musk bought X for $44 billion last year and had criticized the platform for not allowing a full diversity of views to be shared before he bought it. He has since welcomed back previously suspended users such as former President Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).