Anyone could have saw the blow coming. What the world didn’t expect was how much Alex Jones would have to pay for weaponizing misinformation and heaping misery on the Sandy Hook families as they grieved for their lost loved ones.
Jones was held liable for defaming the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary nearly a year ago, in November 2021, when Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis issued a default sentence against the world’s most notorious shock jock and conspiracy theorist. In reality, most knew Jones had crossed a line after he suggested that the 2012 massacre of 20 children, six educators and the attacker’s mother was a “government operation” during a speech on an Infowars broadcast in April 2013. the first of many times he repeated the lie. Yesterday, the Connecticut jury decided it would cost him everything.
Texas decisions against Jones and the Connecticut courts lead to $1.014 billion in damages to the families of Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent who responded to the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school shooting — with attorney fees to be paid in a month. . Jones quickly learns what “free speech” costs, which has allowed him to warp reality into a web of lies — and it’s a staggering amount. But there could also be lessons for the platforms that have enabled Jones’ rise for years — and potential ramifications for them, too.
“In any case, this is a huge jury prize in a defamation case,” said Lyrissa Lidsky, an American constitutional law scholar at the University of Florida Law School. “It seems to reflect the jury’s outrage at Jones’ behavior to profit from lies about murdered children.”
The verdict also sends a message to anyone considering deliberately using disinformation to disrupt people’s lives for financial gain: think twice — or risk being hit with equally large damages. “A message needs to be sent here to people like him that this is just not acceptable in a civilized society,” said Stephen D. Solomon, a journalism professor at New York University and the founder of the online news and educational site First Amendment. watch.
The jury that decided Jones’ financial sentence certainly seemed to have taken to heart the words of Christopher Mattei, a lawyer representing the Sandy Hook families in Connecticut. “It’s your job to make sure he understands the magnitude of the wreckage he’s created,” Mattei said in his closing argument, “because you know damn well he doesn’t understand.”
This decision could mark the end of a decade of users spreading misinformation on social media with little consequence as platforms were reluctant to step in and censor them.
It took more than five years for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple and Spotify to ban Jones for spreading wild conspiracy theories to his multimillion-dollar audience. One report at the time described social media passivity as “a timeline of hesitation.” By the time platforms sprang into action, Jones had already built Infowars into an alternative media powerhouse, and his army of followers was willing to follow him around social media platforms. Court documents that came to light during a concurrent lawsuit in Texas showed that at his peak in 2018, Jones was making $800,000 a day from his Infowars supporters, and at one point paid himself $6 million a year. That money, of course, was based on untruths and made possible by social media platforms that turn a blind eye because it gave them their most prized metric: attention. Jones, in particular, targeted the families of the Sandy Hook victims, claiming without any evidence or credibility that their children were crisis actors and that the losses were not real. Jones turned his mass audience against them in ongoing campaigns of intimidation that denied their children’s existence, even as they tried to mourn their losses.
