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Yes, your understanding is not aligned with the facts of the case. This was not close to an unfair abridgement of Mr. Jones's rights.

Timeline:

1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event.

2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos.

3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government.

4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes.

5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop.

6. The parents sued.

7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests.

8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the plaintiffs moved for a default judgement. The court accepted.

9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment.

10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings.

The award hearing was exceptionally dramatic and theatrical. The defense was repeatedly caught in lies and accidentally sent evidence to the plaintiff's lawyer, revealing Mr. Jones's perjury.

Let's not ignore the fact that Jones's lawyers also completely messed up the discovery process by providing the prosecution with everything, including correspondence they had with Jones essentially admitting everything.

The prosecution even told them that they had completely fucked up and did they intend to send everything, and the defense said "Yes". Then when these messages were brought up in court, the defense tried to say that they couldn't be allowed because they were private correspondence between them and their client. To which the prosecution supplied their conversation with the defense showing that tried to make them aware and gave them a chance to correct their error.

It was a monumental fuck up.

The key element you’re missing is that the lawsuit accused Alex Jones of knowing that he was lying. I.e., it’s not that he was speculating — it’s that he knew he wasn’t telling the truth.

To quote Jones:

“We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts of different people. I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.”

That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it.

Why so large? A few reasons. First, this was for 26 families, so a substantial number of people. Second, we’re not just talking emotional damages — we’re talking harassment that these folks received as a result of Jones’ lies. Third, a big chunk of the damages were punitive. Alex Jones has a history of lying to expand his audience, recklessly ignoring the effects of those lies. A judge decided that the verdict needed to be big enough to discourage Jones from continuing to lie.

(Arguably that didn’t work.)

> That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it.

I think the deliberate maliciousness of it should bare more punishment, but I still think $1B is extremely unreasonable.

It's also absurd to me that a judge should have the right to make up an arbitrarily big number as a means to inflect a secondary punishment. $1 million is discouragement, $1 billion is an attempt to destroy the business and his life. While I have no sympathy for Jones, I still find this problematic if what you're saying is true.

Judges don't have that ability.

They have the ability to determine punitive damages within guidelines (many states have caps, for example), and if the defendant feels the damages are unreasonable they have every right to appeal to a higher court. Eventually the Supreme Court may make an unappealable decision, but the appeals process has to stop somewhere.

And at some point society needs a way to tell people who ignore lesser consequences that they don't get to participate in that society any more. In this case I think Alex Jones crossed enough malicious lines to deserve it; he's in bad shape because he's the kind of person who accuses school shooting survivors of fraud even though he knew he wasn't true! He had every chance in the world to back off and apologize, but he didn't. He tried to avoid facing judgement by hiding behind bankruptcy. He is a very bad human being.

Now, is that always the case for this kind of judgement? Nope, sometimes the system fails. Some people would say Gawker is an example of that failure. I am not totally sure about that one, but even if it is... I'm reluctant to toss out an entire system unless it's a systemic problem. And Alex Jones experiencing consequences for lying for profit does not seem, to me, to be evidence of a systemic problem.

Thank you for engaging with me in good faith and helping me understand your perspective.

> And at some point society needs a way to tell people who ignore lesser consequences that they don't get to participate in that society any more. In this case I think Alex Jones crossed enough malicious lines to deserve it; he's in bad shape because he's the kind of person who accuses school shooting survivors of fraud even though he knew he wasn't true! He had every chance in the world to back off and apologize, but he didn't. He tried to avoid facing judgement by hiding behind bankruptcy. He is a very bad human being.

I do agree that he deserved to be punished, and it's interesting because I also agree he deserved it.

I suspect it's because I'm wired extremely libertarian that I don't agree with the $1b damages judgement.

Fundamentally I don't like a system which has the power to make you pay $1b because you lied and hurt people. Even though I acknowledge these things are bad I think are deserving of punishment.

Maybe a good analogy is kids on motorbikes – motorbikes are deathtraps and anyone who allows their kid to ride on a motorbike without deserves to have their head kicked in. But no more what stats I cite for whatever reason it's one of those things where people just say, "don't care, I should be allowed to do that even if I'm risking killing my kid". I'm kinda like that with everything. I don't know why. I don't choose it, I just seem to prefer liberty at the cost of harm in almost all cases.

A just society would be free to take care of individuals like Alex Jones in whatever why they see fit.

Thanks right back at you.

FWIW, I don't think "don't get to participate in that society" is exactly the same as punishment, but it certainly can have that aspect for the theoretical abuser so I'm probably quibbling over a semantic discussion. I just care much more about deterrence than punishment.

Kids on motorbikes is a good analogy. The line I'd draw is between dumb actions that cause harm only to the actor and dumb actions that cause harm to others. Another, more charged analogy is smoking in public -- I have no doubt that the world is better when fewer people do this. It both reduces harm to others by a measurable amount and, since it reduces the overall number of smokers, reduces the cost to society created by people with poorer health.

But wow there are a ton of implications to just blindly saying that's a good idea. The implication that it's OK to mandate behaviors in order to improve an individual's health is not one I'd accept universally, to choose just one example.

Ideally you want people to recognize that Alex Jones is a bad actor and ignore him by themselves, which mitigates the harm he's doing to others by lying. I have no idea how to get there, though.

> we’re talking harassment that these folks received as a result of Jones’ lies

Remember when BBC edited someone's speech to call citizens to storm and riot at a certain building?

An opinion would be something like "I think it's good that those kids were shot".

You could say that all day and people would not like you, but no one could do anything about it.

What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation.

Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".

> What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation.

> Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".

I agree. I'm disagreeing purely on whether $1 billion is a reasonable fine for deliberately lying. Not on whether he is guilty.

Honestly, I'm not sure about the $1B number, but it needed to at the very least be the amount he made from slandering them on InfoWars, otherwise he'd still have profited off it. That would probably bankrupt him either way.

What do you feel would be an appropriate punishment?

You've done a lot of whinging about how you feel the $1B is too much but that you do feel Alex Jones should be punished. Try staking out a position on what you think should happen instead of this continual "yes but not that" mess.

> and that it hurt someone's feelings

This is the part where it becomes impossible to have an honest discussion.

I think with Alex Jones in particular it's that people knew he had money, and so they wanted a piece of it. If you're a nobody and you say false things no one cares really. Look at all the randos on X spouting nonsense without repercussions. It didn't help that these people in power don't like him.

It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money. People in power will use it as an excuse to take your money away, unless you're allied with them, of course.

The victims went after a slanderer who systematically profited from his lies. Don't see why we should compare him to randos on Twitter.

The randos on Twitter didn't cause actual harm to the people they were slandering. You can't make a case for libel against them.

Sorry, you're saying the parents of kids killed at Sandy Hook were just using Jones as a payday?

> It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money.

Correction: As someone who has developed themselves as a media personality, it's dangerous to say false things, particularly if the saying of false things is explicitly intended to enrich themselves further as a media personality, and they're aware of the falseness of what they're saying.

When you add in the rest of the details the outcome starts to make a lot of sense!

Depp v. Heard is another famous US libel case, but more controversial. They ruled that Heard made false claims (not just speculation) that harmed Depp's career, and she intended for it to hurt his reputation. Alex Jones met similar criteria except much worse.

True though, you could be held liable if you used what you thought was real evidence to ruin someone's reputation, only to find out that it's false. I think it's on you to be careful of that.

The tik-tok psychic defamation case would likely be better comparison (which is on par with Depp v. Heard). She defamed an innocent college professor about committing murder based on tarot card readings and continued to do so after the actual murder was convicted and receiving cease and desist letters.

Local newspaper - https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/northwest/idaho/article3...

Legal Bytes (actual lawyer commentary) https://youtu.be/80h2048o7Fc

Agreed. And these punishments also seem completely arbitrary when many media corporations get away with outright lies all the time.