To some extent, Twitter has long operated under a policy of indecision, making seemingly random rulings about who and what is allowed on—or endorsed by—its site. In 2016, for instance, the company decided, apparently without reason, to “unverify” white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos, later banning him altogether. Jack Dorsey acknowledged the chaos in a tweet thread last week, writing, “We’re fixing that,” and promising to “not [take] one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term.” But on Tuesday, Twitter appeared to do precisely that, placing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has become an avatar for the enemy in tech’s ongoing war against fake news, in what essentially amounts to a time-out. The seven-day suspension, in which Jones can browse his timeline but can’t tweet, like, or re-tweet anything, is thanks to a video in which he directs his followers to arm themselves with “battle rifles” to attack the press. “Now is time to act on the enemy before they do a false flag,” he says in the clip, which violates Twitter’s ban on inciting violence. (Infowars’ Twitter account is not affected by the punitive measure.)

Until last week, Jones and his fringe Web site had largely operated without much oversight from the online platforms where their content flourished, buoyed by a like-minded army of mega-trolls. But when Apple announced that it was kicking the majority of Infowars content off of its apps, Jones’s luck ran out. Spotify, Facebook, and YouTube quickly followed suit, as did smaller companies like Pinterest and Stitcher. But Twitter held out, claiming that Jones hadn’t violated its rules. Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, wrote a memo to employees noting that if Jones had posted to Twitter what he’d posted on other sites, he would’ve been banned. It’s unclear whether Harvey’s claims were purposefully misleading, or whether Twitter simply failed to conduct an adequate sweep of its own site, but they were quickly bunkered by a CNN report showing that many of Infowars’s Facebook and YouTube posts had also appeared on Twitter, and appeared to violate the platform’s guidelines. A Twitter spokesperson later acknowledged that the content identified by CNN broke its rules, but said that Jones and Infowars would nevertheless be allowed to remain on the site.

It’s not too difficult to divine what may have inspired this lenience: Dorsey has seemingly dedicated himself to placating his right-wing users, appearing on Sean Hannity’s radio show to reassure listeners that Twitter is not out to get (i.e. “shadow ban”) them. His appearance drew positive reactions from the right, and Hannity has since claimed to have a “means of communicating” with Dorsey directly, recently telling a caller who fretted that Twitter deleted his “MAGA re-tweets” to “give us your evidence, and I swear I’ll forward it right over to him.” Yet while Dorsey remains firm in his desire not to follow other tech companies in eradicating Jones—hearkening back to Twitter’s original, sometimes misguided mission as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party”—even some inside the company are losing patience with him. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that some Twitter employees have “heaped ire” on Dorsey for failing to take action against Infowars and its chief peddler. For days, the Times noted, the company had been “embroiled” in “urgent” internal conversations about how to “evolve and explain its policies for what can and cannot be posted on its site.”

If this half-hearted Jones wrist slap is what’s come of said deliberations, it’s clear that Twitter still has a long way to go. The decision itself represents a bizarre double standard, particularly given the sheer volume of content Jones and Infowars have posted over the years that violates Twitter’s rules. Freezing Jones’s account temporarily doesn’t appease those calling for him to be banned, and only infuriates Jones and his base—“@RealAlexJones is now in @Twitter prison!” the Infowars account tweeted Tuesday night. In effect, Twitter’s bizarre attempt to find a middle ground is as pointless as it is toothless.