So how were the damage calculated? I get that this guy is a nutjob but how can saying something is a hoax get you a 1B fine?
Alex Jones is directly inciting people to go harass the plaintiffs so he bears liability for his actions.
Im genuinely asking because i don’t understand how this works.
I was under the impression that saying “Trump is a murderous liar” is fine, if I say “Go kill trump”etc then thats incitement.
Does that make sense?
If Alex Jones said "go kill these families," he'd likely be facing criminal charges. Instead, he made up specific claims which he kept repeating even after being shown evidence a reasonable person would accept as refutation of said claims.
To your analogy: if you said "Trump is a murderous liar who buggered my pet rabbit last Tuesday in New York," then were shown evidence Trump was in London and up to no buggery, and yet you kept saying it, yes, Trump might have a claim against you.
You could argue that using drones to kill people is murdering, you can point to times when he lied. It also just strikes me as different when saying things about someone who is in public office and saying things about private citizens who aren't in the spotlight at all.
If this was a soccer game he basically walked to the edge of the field and sat there the whole game and then complained that the refs were in a conspiracy against him because the opposing team was able to score unopposed.
This is what he did, and it's defamation. If I say "go kill Trump" that might be incitement (although it might not be if it's not credible.) If I say "Trump is a murderous liar," that's really just a personal characterization that can't be disproven - you can find things in his past that can be interpreted as murder, and things that can be interpreted as lies, whether that makes him a "murderous liar" is just banter. If I say that Trump molested a child, and I clearly intend for the charge to be taken seriously, that's defamation unless I can show the kid.
He was not sued for "incitement", he was sued for defamation.
To prove defamation, you need to prove that someone lied about you, and that those lies caused material harms.
You saying "Trump is a murderous liar" is largely fine because:
- A reasonable reader, familiar with the context of the place you are writing, would understand that you aren't making a factual claim that Trump murdered a person but rather you are expression a rhetorical political opinion.
- Trump is a public figure, which means you must meet the "actual malice" standard of reckless disregard for the truth.
- Trump must have been materially harmed by your statements for it to be worth suing you.
If you, on the other hand, falsely and deliberately recklessly said: "Trump murdered person X", repeated that claim for years, and convinced hundreds thousands of people that it was true to the point where Trump had to move houses several times due to ongoing death threats, then you would probably be liable for defamation.
The _context_ matters. The _breadth of your reach_ matters. The _actual harms caused_ matter.
No, defamation doesn't require you to specifically be named. It's enough for them to be identified with enough specificity that they are harmed.
> If a politician says the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading the disease
There are two claims in the phrase "the unvaccinated are terrible people for spreading disease".
The first claim, that they are terrible people, is not a statement of fact, but is rather an opinion. There is no factual, objective, way to determine whether someone is "a terrible person". So that part would not create the potential for liability.
The second claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" _could_ potentially be defamatory, but truth would be an absolute defense. The truth also doesn't have to be _perfect_ so long as it's "correct in the main". First, note that the claim "the unvaccinated are spreading disease" is still true even if the vaccinated are also spreading disease. So, your defamation claim would need to first convince the jury that the implication of the statement is "the unvaccinated are spreading disease *more than the vaccinated*". I think that implication is there, but it's a little more tenuous of a claim. Second, I don't think there would be any liability, since the vaccine has some efficacy. To defend against the defamation claim, it would be sufficient to show that the vaccine has any significant efficacy. You wouldn't need to demonstrate that the vaccine has perfect efficacy. The vaccine does have efficacy against COVID-19, so I think a defamation claim would fail here.
Finally, you'll need to go to the harms. It's going to be very difficult to demonstrate significant harm to any individual unvaccinated person, when the group includes 100M people. The harm is going to be _very_ diffused, and I think it would be difficult to demonstrate any economic harm.
So, on balance, I think a politician would still be very safe making the statement you suggested, even in light of the fact that a person doesn't need to be specifically named to press a defamation claim.
Where is this accusation made by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit? The only accusation I see is that Jones and his associates made defamatory false statements about the plaintiffs. As far as I can tell, that was the basis for the ruling, not any claims of incitement.
Of course, you can argue that there's no direct causal relationship because Jones or whoever can say 'I'm not saying to do something, but....'. But so what? If an outcome is statistically predictable there doesn't have to be a direct nexxus, a proximate one is sufficient.
That might be your personal opinion, but it's not the law. If nutjob A makes a defamatory statement about you, but doesn't tell anyone to do anything, and then nutjob B harasses you after hearing what nutjob A said, nutjob B is the one who is legally responsible for the harassment. Nutjob A is responsible for the defamation, but not for what other nutjobs might decide to do.
Now if nutjob A explicitly said things along the lines of "you should go after this person", instead of just making defamatory false factual claims about them, that would be different. But I have not seen any claims by the plaintiffs that Jones said anything like that. They're just saying he made defamatory false statements.
> If an outcome is statistically predictable there doesn't have to be a direct nexxus, a proximate one is sufficient.
This legal theory is a recipe for disaster. There's a reason why the law requires direct evidence for things like this.
I have, and I didn't see anything about claiming damages based on harassment.
> then you can express your opinion on how it's deficient
I haven't said anything was deficient.
Courts and jurors are completely fine with finding that the behavior of nutjob B (and C and D and E and F) that are predictable from the defamation are part of the damages associated with the defamation.
So, yes, nutjob A _does_ have legal liability for the damages caused by nutjobs B and C and D and E and F that are a predictable consequence of the defamation.
The law does not require "direct evidence" of the connection to every instance of harassment. It requires enough evidence that a jury can decide a "but for" causation is more likely than not. Jurors are perfectly capable of making deductions and inferences such as "person A with a massive platform lied repeatedly for years", and then "hundreds of nutjobs harassed plaintiffs based on the same lies", connecting those two facts, and deciding that it's more likely than not that the nutjobs wouldn't have harassed the person if not for person A's lies.
Do you have any actual cases where that was the ruling?
Almost always the economic harms that arise from defamation are the result of third parties responding to the defamatory content. If you couldn't incorporate the actions of third parties into the calculation of economic harm, then there would almost never be economic harm from defamation.
As for specific court cases, take a look at Gibson Bros., Inc v. Oberlin College. A jury awarded Gibson's Bakery $11M in compensatory damages (and another $33M in economic damages). Of the compensatory damages, Gibson had argued that, among other things Oberlin college should be responsible for the damages arising from:
"They blamed Oberlin for repeated vandalism and property damage and for Grandpa Gibson breaking his back while investigating the source of someone pounding on his apartment door in the middle of the night"
https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/9/2022/2022-O...
Two other examples, of course, would be the recent Alex Jones cases in TX and CT where the same reasoning also let to economic damage awards...
I understand that this is the opinion of you and others. That doesn't make it the law.
> take a look at Gibson Bros., Inc v. Oberlin College
In that case, there was evidence of communications by college officials saying things like "I hope we rain fire and brimstone down on that store". Also, the college has a responsibility for the behavior of its students that Alex Jones and his associates and employees do not have for the behavior of random nutjobs that have no association with them. So the facts in the cases are different and I don't think the Oberlin case shows a general justification for "damages from harassment" being part of a defamation claim.
> Two other examples, of course, would be the recent Alex Jones cases in TX and CT where the same reasoning also let to economic damage awards...
I didn't see that in any of the actual legal documents in those cases.
It's not really a question of law. It's more a question of fact ("were these claimed economic harms caused by the statement"), which means its a question for the jury. Which means it's the opinion of the jury that matters.
As far as "the law" on this topic, typically the most relevant thing will be the jury instructions. These will vary from state to state, but let's take a look at Virginia's since those were the first I found online.
I'll highlight again my claim that we're evaluating:
"Courts and jurors are completely fine with finding that the behavior of nutjob B (and C and D and E and F) that are predictable from the defamation are part of the damages associated with the defamation."
Let's look at the 37.100 for Actual Damages from the VA pattern jury instructions: https://www.vacourts.gov/courts/circuit/resources/model_jury...
> ...in determining the amount of damages to which he is entitled, you may take into consideration all of the circumstances surrounding the statement, the occasion on which it was made and the extent of its publication, the nature and character of the insult, *the probable effect on those who heard the statement*, and its probable and natural effect upon the plaintiff's personal feelings and upon his standing in the community and in business
I've indicated the key section which directly supports my claim. I'll turn it over to you. Can you find a state's pattern jury instructions that *don't* behave the way I suggest? I'm not familiar with all 50 states defamation laws, but I'll be very surprised if you find a single state that doesn't allow the jury to include the predictable actions of third parties based on the defamation as part of the harms of defamation.
"The probable effect on those who heard the statement" is ambiguous. Does it mean the effect on their opinion of the plaintiff? Or does it mean the effect on their actions?
Legally, I believe it's the first. The defendant can be held responsible for the probable effects of their defamatory false statements as far as inducing negative opinions in others regarding the plaintiff. But the defendant cannot be held responsible for some other nutjob, who is not an associate or employee or in some other relationship with the defendant, choosing to harass the plaintiff based on nothing more than defamatory false statements. There would have to be something in the statements that explicitly incited others to commit wrongful acts, instead of just inducing them to hold negative opinions. And, as I have said, in the Alex Jones case I have not found anything that alleges or attributes incitement on the part of Jones.
This is an instance of a more general legal principle that individuals are free agents and are presumed to be in control of their actions, so no third party can be legally responsible for what an individual chooses to do (in the absence of some legally recognized relationship such as principal-agent). Explicit incitement can go against that presumption, but simple false statements that could reasonably induce a negative opinion cannot.
They're jury instructions. There isn't further legal analysis. These words mean precisely what a jury of your peers interpret them to mean. That's it.
You don't get to make a legal quibble over a juror's reasonable interpretation of the instructions. If there's ambiguity, it's up to the jury to resolve at that point (and often jury instructions deliberately have some ambiguity to them—because the job of the jury is to apply sometimes ambiguous phrases such as "reasonable care" to specific facts).
So you can't say "oh, most of society is just misinterpreting the jury instructions", because that just means you might very well lose the argument before a jury!
You say there's ambiguity. Fine. I left a challenge for you. Can you find a single state where the jury instructions are unambiguous and foreclose on my interpretation? One state where the actual harm jury instructions clearly don't allow damages from the predictable actions of third parties?
Frankly, I'm done with the discussion until you try. I've put in effort to cite cases and jury instructions to support my positions, while you've cited nothing but your own opinion.
And how do we find out what that is? We find out by looking at what happened in actual cases.
In the Gibson case that you cited, I saw nothing that indicated that the jury awarded damages based on harassment by unrelated third parties. There is a mention of Grandpa Gibson "breaking his back", but there is nothing to indicate that the jury awarded any damages based on, for example, medical or other costs associated with that back injury. According to your position, damages for that should have been included. On mine, they shouldn't (the Gibsons would have to recover such damages from whoever was pounding on their apartment door in the middle of the night). So this instance supports my position, not yours.
Similarly, in the Alex Jones cases, I see no indication that the juries awarded any damages based on harassment by unrelated third parties. Which, again, is consistent with the position I have been arguing.
"I don't see something" is not evidence that it doesn't exist.
> So this instance supports my position, not yours.
Does it? You haven't cited anything beyond "I haven't seen it". If you want to claim it supports your position, show your work.
Show the breakdown of the $11M in damages, and show that it excludes property damages, and the medical damages.
"I see no indication that..."
Again, I'm not going to carry this conversation forward unless you actually start citing sources, and pointing to the breakdown of damages if you claim it supports your position.
For all you've demonstrated, "I've seen no indication" may only be evidence that you haven’t looked.
Their actions come closer to criminal. Alex Jones isn't being criminally investigated; this is all civil.
Obviously, it's easier for the authorities to act first, then the families can sue.
The whole thing is senseless, the harassers are crazy people who believe that it was all "false flags" (for what? who knows), when these kids did die. Each harasser that is caught need to be shown the photos of these poor dead kids and forced to watch them, it will haunt them forever. As for Jones, he is a billionaire, this tragedy made is filthy rich, that's the only reason he exploited it. He probably never believed himself in these things.
Relevant to that process, Jones took the stand in his own defense, to show remorse and indicate why the jury should find for a lower penalty, and... Did the opposite of that. He lost his temper and managed to strongly indicate he had learned nothing and showed no remorse. Juries tend to take a particularly dim view of such behavior (often even dimmer than a judge, which is one of the reasons so many states don't involve the jury in the process of assigning penalty).
Interestingly enough, the judge also has the authority to assign penalty here (Jones' behavior on the stand and in court was egregious) and has not done so yet. Her say comes soon.
These damages are absolutely insane for emotional distress and defamation. The average lifetime earnings of a US citizen are $1.7 million. These damages essentially allege that each plaintiff suffered emotional distress so severe it was over forty times the average person's lifetime earnings. That's plainly absurd.
That's an excellent legal argument, is the kind of thing that could probably win before a judge... And has no bearing on what a jury finds. In general, the reasoning of a jury is private to the jury. They can award maximum damages because they think Jones is ugly (all you have to do is get fourteen people to agree that's a fair thing to do to the man; hypothetically, the averaging effect over so many folks is a back-stop. That back-stop backfires if the defendant is particularly loathsome; recall how long it took to seat a jury for Martin Shkreli).
This is why damages are, in so many places, not put before a jury.
While I think there are many people would forgo that protection or pay less for protection it's one of the ineffable personal balances of security/cost/ease of life that I could easily see a jury saying "if they went the perfect security route then they could easily spend this much".
You can't ignore that cost just because they'd normally never earn enough to pay for that security... much like a company that causes an illness is on the hook for cost of treatment even if a person couldn't normally afford to treat themselves.
His lies had a measurable value of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, so the plaintiffs' reputations had that value, and damages should be calculated against that.
By this measure, if I intentionally harass someone on Twitter I'd have to pay the victim about $50 (on a good day). Since Alex Jones has a much larger following, he'd therefore have to pay more proportional to that.
I found that line of reasoning... well, reasonable. But then again, I'm not impartial here.
I'd argue traditional media reaches many more people and the impact of intentional lies is that much greater.
Media is constantly being sued for defamation. The difficult part is showing they had evidence they were lying. That was overwhelming in these cases, which is what makes them unique.
I'm not at all a fan of lying, not in the least and think news companies get off way too easy... but $1 for every lie * every person who heard it... that's just a little wishful, lol
That doesn't make it any less reasonable of a standard.
Just reporting something incorrectly isn't punishable at all. Publishing something poorly sourced isn't punishable. Stating a disagreeable opinion isn't punishable. What Jones, Fox and Newsmax did was done with active malice.
I'm probably just a bit bias, as I remember a bit of a fiasco with content creators relatively recently with the Johnny Depp trial.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/02/johnny-...
here's an excerpt from the editor's note: The first published version of this story stated incorrectly that Internet influencers Alyte Mazeika and ThatUmbrellaGuy had been contacted for comment before publication. In fact, only Mazeika was asked, via Instagram. After the story was published, The Post continued to seek comment from Mazeika via social media and queried ThatUmbrellaGuy for the first time.
So did the original author simply lie? Did they forget that they never contacted these people? What was the punishment? Clicking on her profile it appears she still publishes regularly.
I just am not a fan of that "loophole." What's to stop FOX news from saying "we just heard all of this bad stuff about the voting machines?" What if its just the opinions of the hosts that the voting machines are compromised?
Not at all saying this is what happened. Just saying its kinda frustrating that _if_ you're smart about it and change your actions, you can still have the same effect of misleading millions of people but be entirely "OK."
I think that's a very interesting aspect of this decision. Alex Jones is a very easy person for some people to hate, but will those same people cheer on Trump suing news outlets over the piss dossier and other fabrications, or Kyle Rittenhouse suing people who reported he shot three unarmed black people? And these were things said by actual purported news outlets, not just a guy whose entire schtick is clearly intended to be more entertainment than actual information.
This decision could usher in a new era of fact-based news reporting if it manages to set legal precedent for cases from both sides of the political aisle. But I'm not sure if I can trust either judges or the media to take the next steps required to make that happen.
If you do that and have a track record of consistency, then your legal liability is pretty minimal.
Well, I guess there's degrees of lying.
I 100% understand what you're getting at though and I do believe _most_ companies and journalists do practice this... however I've noticed a trend where you'll have a headline or statement that is based on "anonymous sources" or "twitter user says X." Intentionally packing in as much of the claim as possible while minimizing the "source."
One of the most recent examples is from yesterday.
This is the headline VICE News put out yesterday: Elon Musk Spoke to Putin Before Tweeting Ukraine Peace Plan: Report https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake44z/elon-musk-vladimir-pu...
No reasonable person could infer that the entire headline is based off of a claim that has been denied by everyone involved. Musk can weather "negative" headlines like that but I'm more concerned about those that don't have the luxury of shrugging that off.
>And when you do make mistakes, you should have a practice of correcting them and documenting the fact that you did so, so that your audience is about equally likely to encounter the correction as they were the mistaken report.
I want to believe that... but there's certainly enough examples of people having their reputation completely trashed by the media with the truth only coming out years later. News companies have incentives to get views/clicks. I can't imagine "we messed up" is as attractive as "this person is a monster."
I 100% agree that they should make best effort to correct stories.
No. No, it should not be.
And, since there was profit from the lying, shouldn't the damages be greater than the profit from the lies?
Yes. Yes, it should be.
And, legally, I'm pretty sure (but IANAL) that "deliberately lied", "repeatedly", "for profit", and "causing harm" were very relevant in deciding how much the fine should be.
(Except, as entiex pointed out, that this was only compensatory, not punitive. Still... the harm went on and on and on for the families, as the lies went on and on and on. Is that allowed to be figured into the amount of compensatory damage? I think so.)
My overall point: It wasn't just "saying something is a hoax". It was much more than that, and therefore the damage is much more, so the fine is much more, and justly so.
i hate double standards
Yes, we should everyone accountable for slander & libel. Even journalists.
>i hate double standards
Aren't we? Please provide examples of actual defamation (i.e., lies that were known to be lies, that caused damage to the subject of those lies) that haven't been the subject of legal proceedings?
Edit: Changed "libel" to "defamation" to be more inclusive as to give you more opportunity to provide examples.
The Jones trials entered the public imagination because he's a character and his defense was clownishly incompetent in a way that takes no legal training to laugh at.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-05/alex-jone...
Liars on CNN get fired. Plaigiarists at the New York Times get fired.
Let's contrast this to ... say ... Fox "News".
Oh, wait, Fox testified in court that they weren't news.
Sorry, my fault.
Yes.
You can sue news media companies under the same laws Alex Jones was sued. People do it all the time.
That's not much of a breakdown, and if anything it seems to go against the idea that these dollar amounts aren't punitive. Are we supposed to assume that that particular plaintiff would have been $60 million richer if Jones hadn't had said what he said? Ridiculous.
The emotional distress damages are more subjective, of course, but I still don't see the amounts as any less punitive at this point.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/12/us/alex-jones-verdic...
> This case presented the greatest financial risk to Mr. Jones, because he was found liable of violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, by using lies about the shooting to sell products on Infowars. There is no cap on punitive damages under that law.
> ...
> The next step will be for the judge to consider punitive damages, which would be in addition to Wednesday’s verdict.
The article How the jury divided $965 million in damages among the plaintiffs in the case. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/us/politics/alex-jones-da...
This has a breakdown of the compensatory damages and you get things like:
> Defamation/slander damages, past and future: $60 million
> Emotional distress damages, past and future: $60 million
> Total damages: $120 million
for one defendant. As there were 14 defendants, this can sum up quite quickly.