Alex got financially destroyed because he blatantly and repeatedly failed to comply with court orders. Simple orders like "show us your financials".
He was defaulted because he and his lawyers chose not to participate in the civil legal process.
As for "wrong words" if you watched, it was not just a few "wrong words" it was YEARS of vilifying the sandyhook parents. It was hiring "reporters" to go harass them. It was sending someone on a mission to disrupt a fun run.
And further, because it brought in customers, he ignored anything that countered the narrative of "sandyhook was fake" Even as recently as last week he was calling sandyhook staged.
He then went on to lie, repeatedly, in court and deposition (which was shown multiple times).
But finally, free speech does not mean "I can say whatever I want whenever I want". Libel and slander have been a part of the civil code since literally the foundation of the country. Lie, knowingly, in a way that harms people, and you'll pay a price. It was WELL demonstrated that Jones and his crew knew they were lying but continued anyways.
I normally would agree with you - I'm very pro free speech - but what Alex Jones did was not just "the wrong words", it was blatant slander that permanently ruined the lives of these people. I understand why you're concerned, but we've had slander laws forever, and this is exactly what it's used for.
>whose life has been ruined permanently, and how? genuinely curious.
Imagine losing your child in a mass shooting, and then having someone get up on their soapbox in front of a massive audience and, repeatedly, drum up outrage from their audience towards you. Why? Because they say that no kids were killed in that mass shooting. That it was bogus. Your child never existed, and you are a liar and a crisis actor.
The audience gets angry, hits you up on social media. Googles you, starts calling you. Some people start showing up at your house, harassing you at your place of work. You want it to stop, but this dude on his soapbox just keeps going, getting himself angrier about it, and his audience angrier. They keep calling. They keep hounding you in public. You change jobs, but they find you. You move, but they find you.
You lost your child, but you always - year after agonizing year - have people coming up to you and telling you that that's not true and that you're a horrible person. Grief is a hell of a thing to deal with, but society won't even let you properly fucking process your loss.
>whose life has been ruined permanently, and how? genuinely curious.
I hope you're trolling.
You want to know whose life has been ruined? The 26 elementary school kids whose heads were blown off by a deranged asshole.
You want to know whose life has been ruined? The parents who had to move 5-6 times because Jone's deranged followers kept stalking them and actively engaging in some of the most inhumane, heartless and disgusting behavior I've ever seen from one human to another. I'm a native of Fairfield County and have seen some of these assholes firsthand, and it is truly disturbing.
You know whose life wasn't ruined (until now)? The guy who went around harassing the grieving parents and inspiring a legion of paranoid internet tough-guys to do the same, and profiting over $815k a day for over a decade by doing so.
$815k a day? Wow. I would’ve never thought that Infowars could make so much money. I’ve seen some others in the thread mention Jones’ millions, are his financials available? I thought he’d lied and obfuscated them in order to go bankrupt.
> A lawyer for Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis died in the 2012 attack, presented records on Wednesday showing that Infowars made more than $800,000 a day at one point in 2018 (Mr. Jones said the amount stemmed from a particularly lucrative period during the Conservative Political Action Conference).
> Bernard Pettingill, Jr., a forensic economist and former economics professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, testified on Friday that Mr. Jones “is a very successful man” and that his and Free Speech Systems’ combined net worth likely fell between $135 million and $270 million.
> Business records released during the proceedings indicate Mr. Jones has reaped more than $50 million annually selling diet supplements, gun paraphernalia, body armor and doomsday prepper gear by hawking conspiracy theories to millions listening to his radio and online show. Jesse Lewis’s parents are requesting $150 million in compensatory damages. More important than money, Ms. Lewis said on Tuesday, “I hope to accomplish an era of truth.”
The $815k/day appears to be the average of a peak reporting period. A more reasonable number is that it was getting $125k/day profit overall and it had one week were it made 6x that amount.
> The $815k/day appears to be the average of a peak reporting period. A more reasonable number is that it was getting $125k/day profit overall and it had one week were it made 6x that amount.
Great point - thanks for the clarification!
As for the total amount of profit, yeah, that's still absurd - $125k a day in profit for a sustained period of time.
I think that's nearly as much as the highest paid soccer player in the world makes in pre-tax salary. Think about that for a moment. A guy who spreads conspiracy theories in one country aimed at a small portion of the population makes more in a day than the highest paid athlete in the world's most popular sport.
The families are being stalked, harassed, and threatened with violence by Infowars viewers who think the victim's families are crisis actors that faked their children's deaths, and that will likely continue forever. It's not people like you, it's the psychos that follow Alex Jones.
Do you have a source? I've both never heard this, or seen the clips. And I know a lot of people who HATE Jones and his fanbase, so I can't believe it would slip by them.
The common law has been developing for hundreds of years. It is an extraordinary institution and an important part of Western traditions.
At its best, the common law has allowed a finely balanced rule to develop - not in a vacuum, but incrementally and iteratively proven in thousands of real-world cases.
Some of the best minds of our civilizations have tussled over these guidelines, and the more lawsuits that have occurred, the better-developed that area of law, in general.
The United States' approach to the common law of libel and defamation has been strongly shaped by the First Amendment - and that Amendment was not nearly as strong a century ago, remember. It has been accorded more respect and power over time, and that is a wonderful thing.
All of this to say: you're ignoring the entire edifice of law concerning free speech, libel, and defamation. The balance of free speech vs libel and defamation is a defining feature of the success of our society, not its failure.
I don't know much about it, but many great countries agree with you in practice and so it must have a lot going for it. Still, I like the bottom-up approach the common law provides.
You couldn't lie in the 1970s or 1980s. If you did, you would be sued for libel or slander (depending on how exactly you lied).
In the 90s, 00s, and 10s, we somehow forgot about libel / slander laws. I'm happy to see that something as egregious as Alex's Jones's lies here are finally getting punished, but I'd like to see more protection from libel/slander in modern 2020s era America.
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Lies, traditionally speaking, have NEVER been covered by the 1st Amendment. I dunno why we stopped punishing them as a society. But its a good thing that we're remembering about them today.
At risk of being pedantic, the bar for defamation is considerably higher than “lying”. Very relevantly for cases like this, the plaintiffs were required to show that the false statements caused them harm, where the easiest kind of harm is financial harm (like losing your job because of the lie).
Notably, I can put up a billboard in my town that says “All of dragontamer’s code is buggy and it makes your computer smell bad”, and we’d be a long way off from you successfully suing me for defamation.
> the plaintiffs were required to show that the false statements caused them harm
IIRC, only for public figures.
The bar is far lower for private figures btw. A lot of libel/slander that would pass for public figures (ie: Politicians) are absolutely illegal and would be charged if levied against private figures instead (such as me, or the Sandy Hook victims)
> Notably, I can put up a billboard in my town that says “All of dragontamer’s code is buggy and it makes your computer smell bad”, and we’d be a long way off from you successfully suing me for defamation.
Hmm... I think the bigger issue here is whether the suit would be enough reputational damage to even get to damages. IIRC, there's minimum amounts of damage done before any suit is even considered (me lawyering up would cost more than the reputational damage in that case, so it just wouldn't be worth it).
The bar is set at a certain level of damages that I expect to get awarded (and courts also reject any case where the damages are too low). This is more due to pragmatism / the innate inefficiencies of court cases that make it less likely for all cases to be considered... rather than what is strictly legal or illegal.
IE: Even if we were to make it easier to sue for smaller amounts of reputational damage, no one would do it because of the high costs of lawyers in general (and high costs of a full court case).
Harm is required in all defamation. Public figures additionally must prove “actual malice” on the part of the defendant, which is a term of art distinct from the common usage of “malice”
Per se defamation establishes that harm has occurred whether or not it is specifically proved. I was going to well-actually the same comment you did, and instead bided my time to well-actually the predictable response.
At any rate: per se defamation isn't at play in this case.
Much appreciated. I should have spelled this out more directly in my original comment, but this is what I meant about some kinds of harm being more obvious. Defamation per se exists largely to handle cases where harm occurred but it’s tough to point to a specific instance or assign it an easy dollar figure.
But it would naturally lead to lawyers letters and probably your apology and a costs settlement on the steps of the courthouse. The settlement might be zero sum, but you would expect a competent lawyer to advise you to back down gracefully all things being equal, assuming you lacked any evidence for a truth defence.
Oftentimes, the outcome isn't about winning in court. It's about the restitution of the potential harm.
It's not what you said. You said successfully suing. Most suits don't go to a win in court, they terminate before that, and terminate in lawyers letters before paperwork hits a court.
I am continuing to assert you're just wrong. I'm not a lawyer btw.
It's honestly pretty hard to work out what you're trying to assert here. The parent commenter is trying, reasonably, to establish the distinction between "lying" and "defamation". It seems like you're saying "being sued is so expensive the distinction doesn't matter". Ok, sure? That doesn't have anything to do with what they're saying, and, in the context of the grandparent comment --- about libel laws being tightened up --- isn't responsive there either.
(A distinctive feature of modern libel law is SLAPP, which permits fee recovery for defamation suits that aren't well-founded, but that works against the I argument I think but am not sure you are trying to make.)
For others' curiosity: A SLAPP is Strategic lawsuit against public participation, a strategy for plaintiffs to silence opponents by way of burdening them with an onslaught of lawsuits and hoping they are scared away by potential legal costs of mounting a defense thereby resulting in them just giving up. The potential for this strategy to have chilling effects gave rise to anti-SLAPP laws.
If anybody has made it this deep in the thread and has curiosity left to spare, I’d like to recommend https://legaltalknetwork.com/podcasts/make-no-law/ , which is no longer active but whose episodes remain highly valuable in understanding first amendment law.
I think in theory he's still making these, but what you really want to do is subscribe to "Serious Trouble", Ken White's (same guy) podcast with Josh Barro.
Curious: when are you guys listening to these podcasts? While driving? While out for a run or something? Certainly not when on the computer right - cause god knows I couldn’t do that kind of multitasking. I’d love to go through the archive of past Ken White podcasts but I don’t know how to make the time for it. Are you listening to them at 2x speed?
I have a 1 month old, so I suddenly have both a ton of time spent driving to the store to get supplies and a ton of time spent just sitting and rocking back and forth.
I don’t think this is the most efficient way to carve out time for podcasts :D
Anyone can sue anyone at any time. I can sue you claiming that this comment you made is defamatory towards me.
I’m saying that the suit wouldn’t end with a settlement or an apology or me doing anything; it would be thrown out for not meeting the standard for defamation. Tort is relatively boring, IMO, but the standards for various suits are well defined and publicly documented.
Lies are covered by the first amendment. There is a rather narrow exception for lies that can be proven to have harmed somebody, and you can prove that they knew that they were acting negligently (i.e. knew that it would case harm and knew that it was false). Those are very high bars to meet.
Beyond that, you can lie your head off. Jones has been lying for decades. This is the first time that it was so egregious that somebody managed to drag it across the finish line for a civil judgment.
"Lies are covered by the First Amendment" is not good legal analysis. Material misstatements of fact that cause damages are all actionable, regardless of how egregious they are. Statements of opinion, or unintentional misstatements of fact regarding public figures, or misstatements of fact that cause no provable damages are "protected", in the same sense all speech is protected.
Wrong. The bar for negligence is "should have performed X, but failed to do so".
Ex: A toddler dying by falling off a deck is negligence. The homeowner "should have repaired the deck", but failed to do so. (This bar would lead to negligent homicide or manslaughter, depending on jurisdiction).
Similarly, a journalist "should have done basic research", but failed to do so, is negligence. Its a much easier bar than "malice" (ie: knew it was false, but lied anyway).
EDIT: According to LII on libel: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/libel, there seems to be different awards for negligence, recklessness, and malice. Negligence is capped at actual injury, while recklessness and above can have punitive damages.
EDIT: Alex Jones's $965M penalty here is likely punitive? (I don't know for sure), which suggests that it was at least of the reckless level and proven so in court?
(1) No, again, the damages announced today are compensatory, not punitive.
(2) If we're talking about the "actual malice" standard, then the standard is recklessness, not negligence.
(3) None of that matters here, because Jones lost the trial by default (the evidence would have clearly shown Jones to have met the actual malice standard, but it's a moot point).
> (2) If we're talking about the "actual malice" standard, then the standard is recklessness, not negligence.
My understanding is that "actual malice" only applies to public figures. Not private figures?
EDIT: I should note that I'm working off of roughly high-school journalism + high school law levels of analysis here. I recognize I'm no expert in this subject, but we were forced to study this topic in my Journalism class before we were allowed to publish the school newspaper. I can believe it if my teacher was being extra-conservative with regards to the subjects we were allowed to cover.
Jones lawyers attempted to claim that the Sandy Hook parents were in fact public figures (again, this is all mooted by Jones eventual default of the defamation cases themselves; the conduct standards we're talking about apply pretty much entirely to the question of whether you're culpable in the first place, not what the damages are.)
I haven't followed the full details of this case specifically. And it seems like there's multiple different cases of defamation vs Alex Jones for Sandy Hook... and my own memories could be getting mixed up between them.
Good to discuss these various details in any case. Reckless vs negligence (and other such details) are very important to understand the case.
As I understand that’s not correct. Recklessness is “I did something I knew I shouldn’t have done” and negligence is “I didn’t do something I knew I should have done”.
The only thing worse than Godwin's Law on the internet is discussions of the first amendment. I've seen the exact same arguments and misunderstandings repeatedly.
It's a highly subtle right that does not mean what most people think it means. Trying to apply it in this case won't bring any value to your argument.
The reason why libel and slander laws worked was in part due to broadcasters having contributory liability that would hold them liable for broadcasting someone else's libel or printing someone else's slander. This long-standing principle - that the law does not chase pointers - is something the Internet was exempted from. CDA 230 created a new category of entity that is neither speaker nor publisher and thus exempted from defamation liability[0].
Also, the law itself is actually quite weak for very obvious 1st Amendment reasons. It has built-in exceptions designed to keep it from becoming a censorship tool. However, the context in which that law exists has made the exceptions wide enough to drive trucks through.
You see, CDA 230 alone would not have dynamited the foundations of libel or slander law. Back then, the entities shielded by these safe harbors were supposed to just be web hosting providers. But technology moves on, and now we have Facebook and Twitter, which act almost identically to broadcasters except without the liability. And since they've pushed everyone to make everything public, that makes everyone a public figure[1].
If you are a public figure, it is harder to be defamed. This should be obvious, if I say Donald Trump has a narcissism problem or just mis-state the size of his wealth I should not have to defend a multi-million dollar lawsuit from him[2]. However, if I, say, get defamed by someone and respond to them on Twitter, that makes me a public figure now - which means the bar is also raised for me as a plaintiff. This is how Elon Musk got away with calling one of the Thai cave rescue divers a pedophile, for example.
[0] DMCA 512 does the same with contributory copyright liability, though with the extra step of having to give anyone with a registered copyright total censorship powers over your platform in order to get the liability exception.
[1] Technically this is a "limited-purpose public figure", which basically means "you aren't a public figure, but you stuck your nose in the debate, so for this particular time we're going to act as if you were one".
[2] Not like it stopped him - the US court system has very few ways to stop a baseless suit before it is filed.
Your speech has power. That’s why we carve out free speech protections from the government so you always have some measure of power against it. That power also means it can be used to damage others.
Being made to pay for damages you caused via speech is not censorship in the same way that being made to pay for damages you caused via fire is not censorship.
If you want to argue that it doesn’t have the power to damage, then who cares if it is censored. If you want to argue that you should be allowed to damage others with impunity and no consequences you’ll find most of humanity turning against you.
Perhaps it's cynical rather than disingenuous. ~30% of people derive more satisfaction from seeing someone worse off than they do from mutual benefit - not even a zero-sum mindset, but a negative-sum one because such people are willing to incur a loss as long as it correlates with someone else experiencing a greater loss.
Put this depressing fact together with a highly networked communications infrastructure, and you can see there's a big economic incentive to talk shit about others. The US has an entire media sector built around the opinion columnists and radio/TV hosts whose whole brand is aggressive belittlement of others, or bullying as entertainment.
In the context of the user making a very inaccurate comment about the free speech rights of someone running one of the largest conspiracy theory websites, it is worth highlighting their own strong connections to an organization very similar in intent/spirit to InfoWars. I provided no direct link to any personal accounts, did not doxx OP, and will defer to dang on this one.
The irony is that the user would likely complain loudly about you posting this and ask moderators to remove the post. That's how far their defence of free speech goes.
It is incredibly hard in the US legal system to make a defamation claim stick. Relative to other nations (in particular the UK, which the US shaped some of its law in direct reaction to around 1776), there are several defenses to defamation.
The fact that in spite of all those assume-no-malice protections for a defendant this lawsuit still found him guilty says a lot about this case specifically, and very little about the risks of merely "saying the wrong thing" (at least under a US legal framework).
> The fact that in spite of all those assume-no-malice protections for a defendant this lawsuit still found him guilty says a lot about this case specifically, and very little about the risks of merely "saying the wrong thing" (at least under a US legal framework).
Weirdly, it actually doesn't. The court awarded the plaintiff's default judgement on the claims of defamation because Jones refused to hand over a bunch of evidence during discovery. Given the particulars of the case, he'd probably have lost anyway, and in some ways it's even worse that he felt it more important to hide his financials from the court and plaintiffs than to actually attempt to defend himself.
I guess this still does make your point even stronger though: the reason we're here, despite the malice protections, is that Jones didn't even try to defend himself.
Yes, in a world of hyperbole you may be correct. In this case, you're taking a very nuanced situation to an extreme and throwing out ALL of the important details in the process. I trust you are an intelligent person and you're able to see this case for what it is, not for what potential "GOTCHA" counter arguments you can filter through it.
> No this is not good news. Say the wrong words and get financially destroyed for ever is a feature of failed societies: dictatorships, and totalitarian counties.
Oh please, Jones is no way a victim. Your idea of a successful society is one that richly rewards wilful dishonesty - not the kind intended to amuse or entertain, like fiction or the tall tales shared by Art Bell, but by deliberately ruining other people's lives.
The "say words, get X punishment" complaint is one of the purest forms of bad-faith hypocrisy I've seen become popular, across my whole life. The simple reason it is hypocritical is that the complaint is predicated at once on the two mutually exclusive ideas that words are critically important (since "X" is frequently some kind of censorship, or at least a discouragement) and also that words are meaningless and have no real effects.
This isn't "saying the wrong words". This is a man who profited to the tune of (according to his financial audit) $818k PER DAY over the course of a decade by spreading lies about parents who had the misfortune of having their elementary-school-aged kids shot up by a highly disturbed individual.
Imagine your child being murdered, and then a guy comes along and starts making a profit on the idea that you are a crisis actor and your child never existed, and he doesn't stop even when the crazy people who listen to him start to stalk you.
Most people would probably say that this sort of behavior should not be only not be tolerated by a civil society, but that there should be penalties for it. You, on the other hand, have decided that being sued for libel is a totalitarian death wish.
Name a democratic country that does not have laws or torts against perjury and defamation.
"Free speech" has never been limitless. Fraud, libel, filing a false report, uttering threats, copyright infringement -- all grounds for a lawsuit if not a prison term in any respectable country.
> Say the wrong words and get financially destroyed
I would argue that a failed society is one that protects an individual at the cost of the group. You only see one individual held accountable for his words and actions, but you don't make any attempt to recognize the families and how their lives have been affected by Alex Jones' negligent and irresponsible words.
Where are we going with this line of thought Protecting minorities within a larger group of people is the ideal state according to thought leaders. In your world kicking out a black man of his home because property values are lowering for everyone else is acceptable. Sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the many
Sometimes? Often. The individual must be protected from the many, and this is why so many are working to get rid of protections for individuals of all sorts — the many like to get together to prey on individuals or on a few standing alone.
The difference between your theory ("say the wrong words") and practice (weaponizing the Sandy Hook massacre to industrially harness victim-blaming for maximum profit) is why having a fair trial by jury protects us from dictatorship and totalitarianism.
You may have a point about failed societies, that ship has sailed.
