It’s difficult not to indulge in a little schadenfreude over the US $45 million in punitive damages recently awarded against Alex Jones, chief conspiracy monger of fake-news site Infowars. However, a cap on damages in Texas law means that Jones will be required to pay only 10 per cent of that figure, on top of $4.5 million to the plaintiffs, the parents of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting whom Jones called ‘crisis actors’ in a US government false-flag operation. During the trial, Jones himself admitted that Sandy Hook was ‘100% real’, and even acknowledged that to claim otherwise was irresponsible and harmful, in the process revealing his business model to be essentially the same as the infamous Macedonian fake-news farms that profited from politicised click-bait during the 2016 US election campaign.
In 2018, several large advertisers pulled their ads, most major platforms banned Jones’s channels, and Paypal stopped processing his payments for promulgating hate speech. It didn’t affect Jones’s earnings – from 2013, when he reportedly made US $10 million, Jones had begun to pivot from advertising and subscriptions to merchandising, launching a range of Infowars-branded alternative medicines and dietary supplements. But the switch to snake oil has also run up against Federal Trade Commission vigilance over misleading claims about their potential to treat Covid-19.
Defamation and consumer law have thus provided Americans with some protection against the unscrupulous promulgation of misinformation. Aside from this, there is only the will or otherwise of digital platforms to meet community expectations.
In Australia, too, we have the protection of defamation and consumer law (including the ACCC’s just- announced focus on scams on social media). We also have DIGI’s disinformation code, currently under review. Outcome 2 of the code commits signatories to disrupting advertising and monetisation incentives for propagating disinformation, such as by implementing brand safety and verification tools or restricting advertising to fake-news sites. But the code’s signatories are limited to the major social media platforms and search engines – unlike the EU code which boasts a wide range of signatories including advertising bodies. Indeed, the European Commission has called for new players from the online information ecosystem to join, including e-payment services, e-commerce platforms, and crowd-funding/donation systems.
This is too late to stop Alex Jones, but it might help stop the next snake oil salesman from damaging democracy in the pursuit of self-enrichment.
This article was featured in our Newsletter of 19 August – you can read it in full here.
Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow