Anyone can have saw the incoming blow. What the world didn’t expect was how much Alex Jones would pay for weaponizing disinformation and causing the Sandy Hook family to suffer as they mourned their lost loved ones.
Jones was found responsible for defaming the parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School nearly a year ago, in November 2021, when Connecticut judge Barbara Bellis make a default judgment against the world’s most famous shocker and conspiracy theorist. In fact, most people know Jones crossed the line after he came up with the idea that the 2012 mass murder of 20 children, 6 educators, and the attacker’s mother was one.” government operations” while speaking on an Infowars . broadcast in April 2013. That will be the first time he repeats the lie. Yesterday, a Connecticut jury decided he would have to pay everything.
The decisions against Jones in the Texas and Connecticut courts amount to $1.014 billion by the family of victim Sandy Hook and an FBI agent responding to the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Attorney fees will be added to that total in a month. Jones is quickly learning the cost of “free speech” that has allowed him to distort reality in a web of lies — and that is a staggering number. But there may also be lessons to the foundations that over the years have enabled Jones to rise — and the potential consequences for them.
“By any standards, this is a grand jury award in a defamation case,” said Lyrissa Lidsky, an American constitutional law scholar at the University of Florida Law School. “It seems to reflect the grand jury’s indignation at Jones’ behavior in profiting off lies about murdered children.”
The verdict also sends a message to anyone thinking of deliberately deploying disinformation to disrupt people’s lives for financial gain: Think twice – or risk being swayed by similarly large damages. Stephen D. Solomon, a journalism professor at New York University and founding editor of the online news and educational resource website, said: See first revision.
The jury that decided the financial punishment for Jones seems certain to have heard from Christopher Mattei, an attorney representing the Sandy Hook family in Connecticut. “Your job is to make sure he understands the extent of the wreckage he has caused,” Mattei said in his final argument, “because you well know he doesn’t get it. .”
The decision could mark the end of a decade of users spreading misinformation on social media with little consequence, as platforms are reluctant to step in and censor them.
It’s lost more than five years Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple, and Spotify banned Jones for spreading mythical conspiracy theories to his millions of audiences. A report at the time mentioned the social network’s inactivity as “A timeline of vacancies.” By the time the platforms went live, Jones had built Infowars into an alternative media powerhouse, and his army of followers was ready to follow him to the social media platforms. Court documents released during a concurrent trial in Texas show that at his peak in 2018, Jones was earn 800,000 dollars a day from members of Infowars, and at one point he paid himself $6 million a year. That money is – of course – generated based on a lie and enabled by social media platforms that turn a blind eye because it gives them their most prized metric: attention. Jones specifically focused on the families of Sandy Hook victims, claiming without any evidence or credibility that their children were the triggers of the crisis and that the losses were bogus. . Jones turned the majority of his audience against them in harassment campaigns that repeatedly denied the existence of their children, even as they tried to grieve their losses.
