Elon Musk has cited a Bible verse as a reason why he won't reactivate the Twitter account of a US conspiracy theorist. 

After the social media platform, which Musk recently acquired, reinstated controversial figures such as Donald Trump, Kanye West and Andrew Tate, Musk was asked on Twitter if he would lift the ban on Alex Jones.

Jones was recently ordered to pay the equivalent of £400m in damages for his defamatory claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting.

@SamHarrisOrg tweeted: "Is it time to let Alex Jones back on Twitter, @elonmusk? If not, why not?"

Musk replied referencing Matthew 19:14: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven."

The ruling against Jones on 10th November came a month after a jury in the US state of Connecticut, found that Jones and the parent company of his Infowars website must pay more than a dozen relatives of Sandy Hook victims nearly £844m ($1bn) in compensatory damages for falsely claiming they were actors who staged the primary school shooting as part of a government plot to seize Americans' guns.

Meanwhile, a coalition of civil rights activists on Monday were urging Twitter's advertisers to issue statements about pulling their ads off the social media platform after its owner Musk lifted the ban on Trump's account.

His account, which Twitter had suspended after the US Capitol riot on 6th January 2021 citing the risk of further incitement of violence, was reinstated over the weekend. Some 90 per cent of Twitter's revenue comes from selling digital ads.

The groups in the Stop Toxic Twitter coalition complained that Musk had vowed to advertisers that Twitter would take a considered approach to reinstating banned accounts and convene a new content moderation council. No such council has been created.

(Additional reporting by Reuters)