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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Jones continued to inflict harm on families who’d lost children, and profited significantly from it both financially and politically. He defied multiple courts, too, so there was no question of premeditation or incapacity, just repeated decisions to cause harm year after year.

That’s the difference: true crime podcasts don’t cause harm on that scale, and few people are going to defy the authority of the legal system the way he did.

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While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones. Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.

It makes sense that Jones would lose the case, but the scale of the judgements was eye watering and is difficult to justify. The scale of the compensation is in a different world to the amount of damage done (intentionally, the bulk is punative). That changes the nature of what is going on.

> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.

Do you have any examples supporting the equivalence you’re claiming? The high judgements were caused by his defiance of earlier judgements so that pattern is really what we’re looking for.

Not OP, but Fox Settled the dominion lawsuit for $725M [1]. So this type of harassment means big judgments against you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...

How was that harassment? They directed a baseless smear campaign which posed a significant risk to Dominion’s business. Unless we’re defining “harassment” as “accountability”, that seems fair.

You're right, harassment might not be the right term when applied to a corporate entity. Either way these were both defamation suits.

I think the more important aspect is that both of these were cases where someone knowingly promulgated false information fully aware that their story was not supported by the facts. Real journalists don’t tend to do that both because it’s unethical and because it can be financially ruinous.

The situation is different in cases where the truth isn’t clear or where supporting evidence turns out to be fake because in those cases a real journalistic organization will retract or update their story. Had either of them been willing to do so, they almost certainly wouldn’t have even been sued. The Sandy Hook settlement was so large because it was obvious that Jones simply wasn’t going to leave the victims alone.

You can see dominion machines hacked live at DEFCON voting village.

Which wasn't the statements made by employees of Fox News. Perhaps if they had made such a statement they wouldn't have paid out several tons of money.

First, that’s not the same as what fox news alleged - if they’d simply run a “hacker x reported being able to alter the software” story they’d have been in the clear legally.

Second, elections are systems, not individual voting machines. Someone being able to tamper with unlimited physical access is not the same as being able to do so in an actual election (e.g. your bank’s PC probably aren’t perfect either but you can’t just sit down and start hacking them), and that’s only a small part of the actual system - as a simple example, if someone could make it record a vote for a different candidate than you tapped, it’d be caught by your review of the paper ballot which is actually counted. If they messed with the counting system, a hand recount would show huge discrepancies.

The underlying thing to remember here is that nobody seriously believed there was a problem. They started backwards from the desire to pretend Trump didn’t lose and repeated conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory as needed to say that outcome was real. That’s why they lost the lawsuit because it was clear that it was essentially political advertising pretending to be news, with complete disregard for the truth. That also forced the lawsuit since left unchallenged the smear campaign would have harmed Dominion’s business, whereas if there’d been anything factual the company would have been compelled to fix a real problem.

> I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones

They're telling him to stop. That's what the judgement really is. He refused to defend himself in court and he's been told that he needs to stop. And you need to stop carrying water for him unless you can point to a single specific thing that the court did to him that was not fair, and making vague and uninformed statements about the big picture result doesn't count.

He's been ignoring the courts. I don't know what you want them to do? I guess they could put him in prison, but I'm guessing that would be considered harsh too.

Again, for the 2nd time, its not what he's done, it's that he's ignoring everyone telling him to stop, including the government. I don't know what you expect the punishment for that to be. If it were you or I we would have had our asses dragged into prison a long time ago. He's only gotten this far because of his money.

Call me crazy, but I don't think the government should be able to "tell you to stop talking" about something just because it makes some people upset.

You’re welcome to try to get the laws against defamation repealed but until then there is a specific legal standard which was met in this case. If you think that’s unfair, perhaps start by asking yourself whether his lawyers made the same argument and why it failed.

Prison would probably be better. I don't think they should let him off the hook, but I'd expect a lot of people lie in court and flashy penalties for Jones aren't going to change that, so there are questions here about consistency of outcome for people going to court. Given that his lawyers were in on it it is questionable whether he does actually understand the risks of his actions, he appears to be getting very bad quality legal support.

He could be go to court every day of his life, lie continuously, fight them every step of the way and it still wouldn't do a level of harm that justify some of the payouts. They are huge, numbers have been tossed around in the range of billions. The engineering value of an entire human life is only around the 10 million mark. And the courts agree with a lot of that because these are punitive damages, so it is very much a judgement call about what is appropriate. It doesn't look like the judges are doing a great job on that front. The punishments are too extreme; from the outside it looks like Jones targeting these people was the best thing that ever happened to them by a wide margin.

> While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones.

As a single human being, he's literally not capable of suffering as much as the bereaved relatives of a classroom full of murdered children, shortly afterwards made the targets often by name and photo of the most insane people in the country.

> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history.

Is this even an argument? They get sued all the time, and lose. They haven't ever viciously and endlessly gone after the parents of a classroom full of dead children. They did go after Richard Jewell and Steven J. Hatfill, though.

My understanding is he didn't lose the case on the merits. During discovery he was required to hand over documents from his Google account, but Google had locked his account and he couldn't get access. The judge then ruled he was in default for failing to produce.

This is obviously a massive abuse of the justice system, violating the maxim that the law does not compel the impossible. But, since the prevailing opinion (including both judge and jury) observably is "enh, fuck that guy" nobody much cares. However the shoe is going to be on the other foot sooner or later. It may be that hounding Alex Jones wasn't worth the precedent (making this style of lawfare acceptable, not an actual legal precedent) that this case sets.

I can easily imagine a case where, say, X blocks discovery in a similar way to achieve a similar outcome for someone on the left. Do we want this to be how we do things?

This is not at all what happened. I can't speak to his Google account, but Jones failed to produce text messages from his phone referencing Sandy Hook, claiming they didn't exist. Then his lawyers mistakenly sent a copy of the entire contents of his phone to the prosecution, showing that the text messages did in fact exist, and would have been found for a simple keyword search for "Sandy Hook," demonstrating that they were trying to conceal these messages from the court.

Jones lied under oath that he did not have the messages he had been ordered to provide but then accidentally turned them over, which came out quite dramatically in court:

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-62416324

Any time someone tells something is “obviously a massive abuse of the justice system”, ask them for details. Many people lie for political reasons knowing that their followers will not check the facts, but those claims usually fall apart as soon as you do. Lying to a judge or doing something you were ordered not to do is going to get you in trouble no matter what else is going on.

In the case of discovery about Google, note that there were two separate problems:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/alex-jones-and-infowars-were...

The first was that he lied about a spreadsheet not existing, and then the defense got evidence that it did - since that behavior was habitual, a judge is going to punish it more harshly than an isolated mistake which is promptly corrected.

The second problem was that he was trying to use the defense that he didn’t profit from Sandy Hook stories while not providing data which could have been used to test that claim. The judge didn’t jail him for that, but he wasn’t allowed to make an unverified “trust me bro” claim.

When was the last time he was profiting from Sandy Hook conspiracies? I heard him apologize for it years ago and say he doesn't believe it.

And true crime podcasts definitely do cause harm, the fans of those shows love playing vigilante detective, stalking and harassing people close to the case to get information. I remember a few years ago there was an incident where they were protesting outside of some guy's house because he was a suspect in his girlfriend's disappearance, so he couldn't even go outside. True crime is an entire industry monetizing tragedies in realtime on a scale the Sandy Hook conspiracies never came anywhere close to.

The deposition of his father clearly laid out that they saw spikes in sales when the sandy hook conspiracy was mentioned and actively sought to replicate it.

This doesn't answer the question about when this was occurring.

With someone like Alex Jones, the statement 'I heard him apologize for it' is pretty much meaningless as he demonstrably changes his stance constantly to fit the most useful minute-to-minute narrative for himself.

You basically need to look at the long-term complete picture of how he characterizes his role (I'd suggest https://knowledgefight.com/ as a great source for this) in relation to Sandy Hook.

I cannot recall a specific instance of him apologizing, but I'm convinced he has at one point or another done so. But the number of times he's minimized, ignored, mischaracterized or outright lied about his involvement and impact on the Sandy Hook victims far, far, (FAR) outweighs the actual times he's ever admitted fault and/or apologized.

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