At the heart of the issue is Jones’ bankruptcy. A trustee is selling off his assets to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages to the families of the victims of a school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012. Those assets include four X accounts related to Jones with nearly 4 million followers combined. Musk’s hat is now in the ring, however, because his legal team is arguing those accounts aren’t actually Jones’ property to sell. X “is plainly the owner of the X Accounts,” counsel for X wrote in its objection, filed on Monday. “The Trustee cannot sell, assign, or otherwise transfer what it does not own or have an interest in.”The implications for X—and Musk—couldn’t be more significant. A ruling against X, formerly Twitter, could significantly weaken its control over the platform infrastructure that hosts 415 million active monthly users if accounts can be bought and sold without its permission. On the other hand, critics of Jones’ relentless 12-year campaign against the families of young children who were murdered at school hailed the July 2024 order for Jones to pay damages. Jones spent years falsely decrying the childrens’ deaths as a hoax, and derided the grieving families as “crisis actors.”X’s objection was filed as part of the ongoing litigation in Jones’ case, and his attempt to stave off satirical outlet The Onion from purchasing his Infowars site. A U.S. bankruptcy judge, Christopher Lopez, is set to decide the fate of Jones’ X accounts, and whether they, should be included in the liquidation of his assets as part of his bankruptcy. Who owns an X account: a user or X? In 2018, Twitter banned Jones for “abusive behavior,” but Musk reinstated Jones’ account in December 2023 after polling users as to whether he should. Some 70% of users voted in favor of Jones being readmitted to the site. “The people have spoken and so it shall be,” Musk responded before restoring Jones’ account.X’s terms of service could imply that the user owns their account—because they explicitly retain ownership and rights to the content they post and share, Daniel Fletcher, a UK-based lawyer specializing in intellectual property, told Fortune. “However, it’s worth noting that, to some extent, a degree of this ownership and rights is shared with X.” The terms—which a user must agree to in order to open an account—state that any user grants “broad, royalty-free license to make their content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.” That means that while a user’s X account—and their posts—is technically their own intellectual property, Fletcher said, “the actual rights they have in respect of their content are quite limited.”“This is a very novel argument that X is making; we haven’t seen it before,” Adam Weissman, an intellectual property lawyer, told Fortune. An entirely new argument emergesThe terms of service—which govern every social media platform—will invariably mention ownership, though each platform is distinct. At X, Weissman said, ownership refers to the actual content a user creates, not their account itself.“There’s a lot of language about X being able to disable your account or temporarily remove access to it,” Weissman added. “But as far as I know, there’s no language specifically laying out who owns it.”Over the summer, Weissman said, some arguments have emerged between employees and companies over who owns a corporate social media account. But Weissman said he’s “never seen the argument that the platform owns it.”“This might be the first time that argument is truly addressed,” he said.As for Jones’s bankruptcy proceedings in particular, if Musk and X are somehow successful in establishing ownership of the accounts, the new question will become: what does an account actually consist of?“There are already terms and services about private information and personal information within the account,” Weissman said. “So the difficult piece will be, what does it mean to own the account? Where does it leave us? You don’t own your followers—that’s obvious. So I’m curious what they actually mean by this.”X’s involvement in Jones’s case seems like a stall tactic, Weissman said. “Like they’re throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks.”Terms of service suggest otherwiseEvery platform’s terms of service explicitly states that the user owns their content as far as copyright goes, Weissman said, though each uses its own specific language, and grants license to use content in different ways.On X, the license to use content is very broad, Weissman said. “They have a wide scope of what they can do with your content without having to get your permission. That, however, is not synonymous with the account. The terms, from what I recall, do not state explicitly who the owner of the account is.”Luckily, a normal user who isn’t attempting to become an influencer or build a sizable following is unlikely to need to worry much about these details.“Most individuals who don’t already make money off of their account are not giving a second thought to this,” Weissman said. “But anyone trying to make money off the platform needs to think of what they’re putting on there, because these platforms can turn around and leverage the content without their permission.”In fact, content creators will often be thrilled at the additional coverage, even if it’s a legal overstep. “It’s often not exploited to a degree that people are upset about,” Weissman said. “But the possibility has always been there.”Per X’s terms and conditions, a user retains their rights to “any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content).” But “by submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download, and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed, for any purpose.”“I think it is interesting that Grok, X’s AI tool, answered that X owns the accounts,” David Carstens, an IP lawyer in Plano, Texas, told Fortune. “But when you review the X Terms of Service, it seems far more likely that the user owns his account.”
