5 ms·

Sandy Hook Families Seek $2.75T from Alex Jones

knaekhoved 4y ago
dekhn 4y ago
If so, that's quite stupid. That's more money that the richest person in the world has, and it's incommensurate with the impact of Jones's behavior. It serves nobody- not even the families whose children were killed.
- sollewitt 4y ago
  Right: nobody, not even billionaires, can afford to do this ever again. Seems like a win condition to me.
  - phantom_of_cato 4y ago
    - gnu8 4y ago
      Should the amount of wealth someone can hoard be essentially unbounded, allowing them to become impervious to any civil consequences for their actions?
      - phantom_of_cato 4y ago
        That has nothing to do with the ridiculous argument made above.
        dang 4y ago
        As you know, using HN primarily for ideological battle is not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for. Since you're clearly doing this with this account, I've banned it. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        phantom_of_cato 4y ago
        [dead]
  - cykros 4y ago
    Except that's not what civil court is for. It's for obtaining redress for damages suffered. $10 million, or even $100 million, and I'd say these victims must have suffered a lot...but very well, maybe they did. $1 billion? This is an abuse of the court system, and is the sort of money large corporations get fined when they do something really bad. Facebook famously got hit for $5 billion over Cambridge Analytica in 2019. OJ Simpson, on the other hand, paid $70 million when a person actually died. Even with inflation, getting to $1 billion is stretching things well past the breaking point.
- lettergram 4y ago
  I mean… if anyone watched the trial this whole thing is a joke. He may have done something bad, but the trial was Soviet level. I followed the trial and this is the way the “trial” went: 1. Plaintiffs / Judge claimed he had evidence (marketing material on sandy hook - claimed he never had marketing material) 2. Jones said he didn’t 3. discovery didn’t prove the evidence ever existed 4. Judge then said “guilty by default, because he must have destroyed the evidence” 5. Jury trial commences for damages - judge tells Jones he can’t claim not to have evidence, can’t claim innocence, and a whole list of other stuff 6. Jury trial talks about a bunch of unrelated stuff that other people said. 7. A few times you see a clip where Jones mention “sandy hook is a psyop” or “this parent laughing before fake crying is a crisis actor” (paraphrasing obviously). But never mentions people by name, nor outside what is presented on the news (CNN for instance) If anyone knows about defamation. (1) defaulting never happens (2) you have to name the person and have to claim an explicit in the defamation that you know to be false, with the purpose of causing damage. It was real interesting to watch, but I imagine it’ll be overturned
  - cykros 4y ago
    This is the first of these takes I've heard; seems most of us are just taking third hand hearsay on this one. I've always found Jones entertaining, though more interesting back in the 9/11 Truth and Bilderberg group days than anything recently as he seems to have gone a bit loopier than ever. I wasn't even terribly opposed to a hefty fine for defamation if he did what he's accused to have done, though the idea of it being a billion dollars is a bit absurd (Facebook, for reference, got hit with a large fine of $5 billion a couple years back). I'll have to get to doing some digging, because if it's as you say, this is even more of a travesty than it seemed. As for this new total, well, this makes the Napster lawsuits against children of yore seem sane by comparison, and much of the same logic seems to have been used for how the figure was calculated. And the idea that we're actually talking about the events the trial is supposedly about rather than Jones' entire history of being a thorn in the side of some powerful people is clearly a lie. If anything, I have to wonder how anyone doesn't see this as suggesting that maybe he was onto a thing or two they'd previously written off that he's being publicly made an example of for exposing.
  - 4y ago
- thomascgalvin 4y ago
  - BuckRogers 4y ago
- polotics 4y ago
  I respectfully disagree. As a father I am amazed Alex Jones is still walking free, still walking, not still.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Him being jailed, and given an impossibly large fine, are two distinct things entirely.
prepend 4y ago
> They reached the sum by multiplying the state law’s $5,000 per-violation fine by the 550 million social media exposures Jones’s audience received on his Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts in the three years following a school shooting that claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six educators in 2012. Is this defamation calculation valid? Is the calculation based on the number of people who listen or read? If so, they would need to see how many actually viewed as not every follower sees every post by people they follow. Maybe one of the nice upsides is that these social media firms are forced to reveal the source to how they display posts.
- chrismcb 4y ago
  I would assume the per violation has nothing to do with his many people witnessed it.
  - hnbear 4y ago
    From the article: --- They reached the trillion-dollar sum by multiplying the state law’s up-to $5,000 per-violation fine by the 550 million social media exposures Jones’s audience received on his Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts in the three years following a school shooting that claimed the lives --- So if you argue that each post to each person is an instance of aa violation as it's an attempted sale of his products, then they multiply out that way. It's the lawyers role to advocate for a particular reading of the law. You could argue it other ways too, eg. every actual sale, or every post is a single instance of an attempted sale (but in aggregate, rather than per individual). But, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm interpreting the law as written in that except from the Bloomberg article, not the statute, so, don't put much legal weight on the above.
    - cykros 4y ago
      This is a bit like if you stood in the town square, yelled out "Bob's a pedophile, and btw, buy my book" and Bob charged you for each individual person who happened to be in earshot. But, you know, it happened on the big bad internet, so let's just throw all precedent out and act like it's different. Anyway, we get the point: 9/11 really was an inside job after all.
tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
One can seek $X dollars, but collecting is another story. He'll probably declare bankruptcy at some point, if he hasn't already.
- lettergram 4y ago
  He already declared bankruptcy, they said during the trial — their goal is that he never can work again
  - rvz 4y ago
    - lettergram 4y ago
  - tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
    I don't follow conspiracy theorists or mainstream corporate news. The problem with eye-for-an-eye is it creates a blind martyr and a blind world. It's curious how hurt feelings translates into compensation. If so, there's an endless line out the door to claim their golden ticket. Freedom of speech in an open society, no matter how reprehensible the speaker, means freedom of listening and turning the channel. Or become like China with top-down censorship and prior restraint. You don't have to agree or be on the side of some conspiracy jackass to recognize that going after him makes him more (in)famous. Ignoring him would been the best move. Freedom of speech means taking the shit with the sugar. I blame greedy lawyers for capitalizing on traumatized people, a frivolous court system that doesn't toss this, and lazy communication majors for exploiting the situation and propping up AJ.
chatterhead 4y ago
modzu 4y ago
theres no problem too big or too small that enough lawyers cant fix
mynameishere 4y ago
- lettergram 4y ago
  It's been crazy to watch how fast these flags are coming lol IMO the more crazy the amount the more likely this gets overturned. It's probably counter-productive to the plantiffs stated objective to ask for trillions lol. Regardless, Jones or the businesses don't have to pay until all the appeals are done. So increasing the odds of appeal helps no one. Fun Fact, 2.75T is approximately the GDP of France.

If so, that's quite stupid. That's more money that the richest person in the world has, and it's incommensurate with the impact of Jones's behavior. It serves nobody- not even the families whose children were killed.

sollewitt 4y ago
Right: nobody, not even billionaires, can afford to do this ever again. Seems like a win condition to me.
- phantom_of_cato 4y ago
  - gnu8 4y ago
    Should the amount of wealth someone can hoard be essentially unbounded, allowing them to become impervious to any civil consequences for their actions?
    - phantom_of_cato 4y ago
      That has nothing to do with the ridiculous argument made above.
      - dang 4y ago
        As you know, using HN primarily for ideological battle is not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for. Since you're clearly doing this with this account, I've banned it. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        phantom_of_cato 4y ago
        [dead]
- cykros 4y ago
  Except that's not what civil court is for. It's for obtaining redress for damages suffered. $10 million, or even $100 million, and I'd say these victims must have suffered a lot...but very well, maybe they did. $1 billion? This is an abuse of the court system, and is the sort of money large corporations get fined when they do something really bad. Facebook famously got hit for $5 billion over Cambridge Analytica in 2019. OJ Simpson, on the other hand, paid $70 million when a person actually died. Even with inflation, getting to $1 billion is stretching things well past the breaking point.
lettergram 4y ago
I mean… if anyone watched the trial this whole thing is a joke. He may have done something bad, but the trial was Soviet level. I followed the trial and this is the way the “trial” went: 1. Plaintiffs / Judge claimed he had evidence (marketing material on sandy hook - claimed he never had marketing material) 2. Jones said he didn’t 3. discovery didn’t prove the evidence ever existed 4. Judge then said “guilty by default, because he must have destroyed the evidence” 5. Jury trial commences for damages - judge tells Jones he can’t claim not to have evidence, can’t claim innocence, and a whole list of other stuff 6. Jury trial talks about a bunch of unrelated stuff that other people said. 7. A few times you see a clip where Jones mention “sandy hook is a psyop” or “this parent laughing before fake crying is a crisis actor” (paraphrasing obviously). But never mentions people by name, nor outside what is presented on the news (CNN for instance) If anyone knows about defamation. (1) defaulting never happens (2) you have to name the person and have to claim an explicit in the defamation that you know to be false, with the purpose of causing damage. It was real interesting to watch, but I imagine it’ll be overturned
- cykros 4y ago
  This is the first of these takes I've heard; seems most of us are just taking third hand hearsay on this one. I've always found Jones entertaining, though more interesting back in the 9/11 Truth and Bilderberg group days than anything recently as he seems to have gone a bit loopier than ever. I wasn't even terribly opposed to a hefty fine for defamation if he did what he's accused to have done, though the idea of it being a billion dollars is a bit absurd (Facebook, for reference, got hit with a large fine of $5 billion a couple years back). I'll have to get to doing some digging, because if it's as you say, this is even more of a travesty than it seemed. As for this new total, well, this makes the Napster lawsuits against children of yore seem sane by comparison, and much of the same logic seems to have been used for how the figure was calculated. And the idea that we're actually talking about the events the trial is supposedly about rather than Jones' entire history of being a thorn in the side of some powerful people is clearly a lie. If anything, I have to wonder how anyone doesn't see this as suggesting that maybe he was onto a thing or two they'd previously written off that he's being publicly made an example of for exposing.
- 4y ago
thomascgalvin 4y ago
- BuckRogers 4y ago
polotics 4y ago
I respectfully disagree. As a father I am amazed Alex Jones is still walking free, still walking, not still.
- dekhn 4y ago
  Him being jailed, and given an impossibly large fine, are two distinct things entirely.

prepend 4y ago

> They reached the sum by multiplying the state law’s $5,000 per-violation fine by the 550 million social media exposures Jones’s audience received on his Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts in the three years following a school shooting that claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six educators in 2012. Is this defamation calculation valid? Is the calculation based on the number of people who listen or read? If so, they would need to see how many actually viewed as not every follower sees every post by people they follow. Maybe one of the nice upsides is that these social media firms are forced to reveal the source to how they display posts.

chrismcb 4y ago
I would assume the per violation has nothing to do with his many people witnessed it.
- hnbear 4y ago
  From the article: --- They reached the trillion-dollar sum by multiplying the state law’s up-to $5,000 per-violation fine by the 550 million social media exposures Jones’s audience received on his Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts in the three years following a school shooting that claimed the lives --- So if you argue that each post to each person is an instance of aa violation as it's an attempted sale of his products, then they multiply out that way. It's the lawyers role to advocate for a particular reading of the law. You could argue it other ways too, eg. every actual sale, or every post is a single instance of an attempted sale (but in aggregate, rather than per individual). But, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm interpreting the law as written in that except from the Bloomberg article, not the statute, so, don't put much legal weight on the above.
  - cykros 4y ago
    This is a bit like if you stood in the town square, yelled out "Bob's a pedophile, and btw, buy my book" and Bob charged you for each individual person who happened to be in earshot. But, you know, it happened on the big bad internet, so let's just throw all precedent out and act like it's different. Anyway, we get the point: 9/11 really was an inside job after all.

tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago

One can seek $X dollars, but collecting is another story. He'll probably declare bankruptcy at some point, if he hasn't already.

lettergram 4y ago
He already declared bankruptcy, they said during the trial — their goal is that he never can work again
- rvz 4y ago
  - lettergram 4y ago
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
  I don't follow conspiracy theorists or mainstream corporate news. The problem with eye-for-an-eye is it creates a blind martyr and a blind world. It's curious how hurt feelings translates into compensation. If so, there's an endless line out the door to claim their golden ticket. Freedom of speech in an open society, no matter how reprehensible the speaker, means freedom of listening and turning the channel. Or become like China with top-down censorship and prior restraint. You don't have to agree or be on the side of some conspiracy jackass to recognize that going after him makes him more (in)famous. Ignoring him would been the best move. Freedom of speech means taking the shit with the sugar. I blame greedy lawyers for capitalizing on traumatized people, a frivolous court system that doesn't toss this, and lazy communication majors for exploiting the situation and propping up AJ.

chatterhead 4y ago

modzu 4y ago

theres no problem too big or too small that enough lawyers cant fix

mynameishere 4y ago

lettergram 4y ago
It's been crazy to watch how fast these flags are coming lol IMO the more crazy the amount the more likely this gets overturned. It's probably counter-productive to the plantiffs stated objective to ask for trillions lol. Regardless, Jones or the businesses don't have to pay until all the appeals are done. So increasing the odds of appeal helps no one. Fun Fact, 2.75T is approximately the GDP of France.