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.
Lemmy.world, one of the largest instances said it costs around $1500 per month and about $200 to set up, I don’t think it’s expensive. If all of one state’s government puts it on Mastodon, then everyone under that can post as well under that umbrella. This isn’t a huge deal or groundbreaking.
How much does their paid staff cost?
State government doesn’t operate on a volunteer basis.
To do what? They have websites they maintain already. There are already companies switching to Mastodon like BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63534240
Who says the government has to hire anyone? Have the sysadmin set it up, have your existing Twitter staff swap to using mastodon, done.
But nobody will see it if it’s on Mastodon