The price of lies

Two months ago, we covered the nearly US$50 million in damages awarded against misinformation monger Alex Jones for defaming the families of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting victims in the US. Jones’s comeuppance continues – yesterday a Connecticut jury awarded an astonishing $965 million in damages to the families of eight Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent who responded to the massacre.

The US defamation law, just like Australia’s, is still struggling to deal with the reach of social media, and the Jones cases are playing a role in defining the direction of the US law. An interesting element in the Connecticut jury’s deliberations over damages was raised by plaintiff lawyer Chris Mattei, who suggested a ‘baseline’ figure of $550 million would account for the reach of Jones’s ‘lie machine’. This amounts to roughly one dollar for each social media impression that Jones’s Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts accumulated in the six years following the shooting.

Still, defamation actions have their limits as a tool to address monetised misinformation. But in this case, judge Barbara Bellis ruled Jones liable not only for defamation, but also for violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act by using lies to hawk merchandise to his followers. The plaintiffs had brought an action under this law in addition to their defamation claim.

Despite the extraordinary outcome, the Jones saga will not end here. As the verdict was announced, Jones was doubling down, calling on his followers to hand over their cash to save Infowars, whose parent company Free Speech Systems’ bankruptcy claim has been challenged by the Sandy Hook families. Jones still faces a third defamation suit over Sandy Hook, brought by parent Lenny Pozner, who has already won a defamation case against James Fetzer, Holocaust denier, 9/11 truther and professor emeritus of philosophy at University of Minnesota. Fetzer authored the book Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, which Jones used to build his conspiracy narratives. Curiously, amongst Fetzer’s academic publications is a paper called ‘Information: Does it have to be true?’

Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow

 

This featured in our newsletter of 14 October. Read it in full here.

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