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Please can someone correct my opinion on this because I'm sure I'm missing something. I find it crazy that in the US you can't take an opinion on something wit

by kypro 6mo ago

Please can someone correct my opinion on this because I'm sure I'm missing something. I find it crazy that in the US you can't take an opinion on something without risking being bankrupted because that thing you said is later proven untrue and that it hurt someone's feelings – feeling which in the US have a monetary value of billions apparently. I agree that the media should be evidence based and it's bad when the media is presenting things which are clearly false, but I also think that sometimes the evidence is misleading and speculation can be useful to get to the truth. Surely cases like this show that it's simply far too dangerous to report on something in the US which might both upset people and could later proven to be false? We have a similar issue in the UK where even when it's widely understood that someone is abusing kids, if they're famous our media basically can't say anything because they'll risk being sued. While our law is well intentioned, it seems that it really just suppresses the free exchange of information which has repeatedly led to harms against children. The speculation while often harmful is sometimes useful. I just feel like there's a middle ground here. Maybe you can sue, but perhaps your feelings are only worth a few hundred thousand pounds? I get the US is much richer than the UK but being sued for billions for being wrong and hurting peoples feelings just seems insane. And I agree Jones was completely wrong to have said what he said. Why am I wrong on this? I hate holding this opinion and would like it changed.

bena 6mo ago
An opinion would be something like "I think it's good that those kids were shot". You could say that all day and people would not like you, but no one could do anything about it. What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation. Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".
- kypro 6mo ago
  > What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation. > Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion". I agree. I'm disagreeing purely on whether $1 billion is a reasonable fine for deliberately lying. Not on whether he is guilty.
  - traderj0e 6mo ago
    Honestly, I'm not sure about the $1B number, but it needed to at the very least be the amount he made from slandering them on InfoWars, otherwise he'd still have profited off it. That would probably bankrupt him either way.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 6mo ago
    What do you feel would be an appropriate punishment? You've done a lot of whinging about how you feel the $1B is too much but that you do feel Alex Jones should be punished. Try staking out a position on what you think should happen instead of this continual "yes but not that" mess.
linkregister 6mo ago
Yes, your understanding is not aligned with the facts of the case. This was not close to an unfair abridgement of Mr. Jones's rights. Timeline: 1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event. 2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos. 3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government. 4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes. 5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop. 6. The parents sued. 7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests. 8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the plaintiffs moved for a default judgement. The court accepted. 9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment. 10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings. The award hearing was exceptionally dramatic and theatrical. The defense was repeatedly caught in lies and accidentally sent evidence to the plaintiff's lawyer, revealing Mr. Jones's perjury.
- bena 6mo ago
  Let's not ignore the fact that Jones's lawyers also completely messed up the discovery process by providing the prosecution with everything, including correspondence they had with Jones essentially admitting everything. The prosecution even told them that they had completely fucked up and did they intend to send everything, and the defense said "Yes". Then when these messages were brought up in court, the defense tried to say that they couldn't be allowed because they were private correspondence between them and their client. To which the prosecution supplied their conversation with the defense showing that tried to make them aware and gave them a chance to correct their error. It was a monumental fuck up.
- kypro 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - 6mo ago
BryantD 6mo ago
The key element you’re missing is that the lawsuit accused Alex Jones of knowing that he was lying. I.e., it’s not that he was speculating — it’s that he knew he wasn’t telling the truth. To quote Jones: “We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts of different people. I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.” That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it. Why so large? A few reasons. First, this was for 26 families, so a substantial number of people. Second, we’re not just talking emotional damages — we’re talking harassment that these folks received as a result of Jones’ lies. Third, a big chunk of the damages were punitive. Alex Jones has a history of lying to expand his audience, recklessly ignoring the effects of those lies. A judge decided that the verdict needed to be big enough to discourage Jones from continuing to lie. (Arguably that didn’t work.)
- kypro 6mo ago
  > That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it. I think the deliberate maliciousness of it should bare more punishment, but I still think $1B is extremely unreasonable. It's also absurd to me that a judge should have the right to make up an arbitrarily big number as a means to inflect a secondary punishment. $1 million is discouragement, $1 billion is an attempt to destroy the business and his life. While I have no sympathy for Jones, I still find this problematic if what you're saying is true.
  - BryantD 6mo ago
    Judges don't have that ability. They have the ability to determine punitive damages within guidelines (many states have caps, for example), and if the defendant feels the damages are unreasonable they have every right to appeal to a higher court. Eventually the Supreme Court may make an unappealable decision, but the appeals process has to stop somewhere. And at some point society needs a way to tell people who ignore lesser consequences that they don't get to participate in that society any more. In this case I think Alex Jones crossed enough malicious lines to deserve it; he's in bad shape because he's the kind of person who accuses school shooting survivors of fraud even though he knew he wasn't true! He had every chance in the world to back off and apologize, but he didn't. He tried to avoid facing judgement by hiding behind bankruptcy. He is a very bad human being. Now, is that always the case for this kind of judgement? Nope, sometimes the system fails. Some people would say Gawker is an example of that failure. I am not totally sure about that one, but even if it is... I'm reluctant to toss out an entire system unless it's a systemic problem. And Alex Jones experiencing consequences for lying for profit does not seem, to me, to be evidence of a systemic problem.
booleandilemma 6mo ago
I think with Alex Jones in particular it's that people knew he had money, and so they wanted a piece of it. If you're a nobody and you say false things no one cares really. Look at all the randos on X spouting nonsense without repercussions. It didn't help that these people in power don't like him. It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money. People in power will use it as an excuse to take your money away, unless you're allied with them, of course.
- lolc 6mo ago
  The victims went after a slanderer who systematically profited from his lies. Don't see why we should compare him to randos on Twitter.
- traderj0e 6mo ago
  The randos on Twitter didn't cause actual harm to the people they were slandering. You can't make a case for libel against them.
- cosmicgadget 6mo ago
  Sorry, you're saying the parents of kids killed at Sandy Hook were just using Jones as a payday?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- sjsdaiuasgdia 6mo ago
  > It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money. Correction: As someone who has developed themselves as a media personality, it's dangerous to say false things, particularly if the saying of false things is explicitly intended to enrich themselves further as a media personality, and they're aware of the falseness of what they're saying. When you add in the rest of the details the outcome starts to make a lot of sense!
traderj0e 6mo ago
Depp v. Heard is another famous US libel case, but more controversial. They ruled that Heard made false claims (not just speculation) that harmed Depp's career, and she intended for it to hurt his reputation. Alex Jones met similar criteria except much worse. True though, you could be held liable if you used what you thought was real evidence to ruin someone's reputation, only to find out that it's false. I think it's on you to be careful of that.
- shagie 6mo ago
  The tik-tok psychic defamation case would likely be better comparison (which is on par with Depp v. Heard). She defamed an innocent college professor about committing murder based on tarot card readings and continued to do so after the actual murder was convicted and receiving cease and desist letters. Local newspaper - https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/northwest/idaho/article315378808.html https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/northwest/idaho/article3... Legal Bytes (actual lawyer commentary) https://youtu.be/80h2048o7Fc https://youtu.be/80h2048o7Fc
cosmicgadget 6mo ago
> and that it hurt someone's feelings This is the part where it becomes impossible to have an honest discussion.
account42 6mo ago
Agreed. And these punishments also seem completely arbitrary when many media corporations get away with outright lies all the time.

by kypro 6mo ago

bena 6mo ago

An opinion would be something like "I think it's good that those kids were shot". You could say that all day and people would not like you, but no one could do anything about it. What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation. Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion".

kypro 6mo ago
> What Alex Jones did was deny reality. He suggested that the victims did not exist. He suggested the event did not happen and the grieving parents were government-hired actors. He riled up his listeners and effectively sent them after people. He did this in spite of knowing what he was saying on his show was not true. That was a large part of things, that Alex Jones was aware he was spreading misinformation. > Let's not pretend Alex Jones was doing was voicing a "difference of opinion". I agree. I'm disagreeing purely on whether $1 billion is a reasonable fine for deliberately lying. Not on whether he is guilty.
- traderj0e 6mo ago
  Honestly, I'm not sure about the $1B number, but it needed to at the very least be the amount he made from slandering them on InfoWars, otherwise he'd still have profited off it. That would probably bankrupt him either way.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 6mo ago
  What do you feel would be an appropriate punishment? You've done a lot of whinging about how you feel the $1B is too much but that you do feel Alex Jones should be punished. Try staking out a position on what you think should happen instead of this continual "yes but not that" mess.

linkregister 6mo ago

Yes, your understanding is not aligned with the facts of the case. This was not close to an unfair abridgement of Mr. Jones's rights. Timeline: 1. Alex Jones hosts guests on his show questioning if a mass school shooting was a falsified event. 2. The controversy drove a massive increase in traffic to his videos. 3. This encouraged Mr. Jones to host additional guests who made direct claims that parents of the slain children were actors hired by the US government. 4. Those parents received intense harassment and death threats. Many had to move away from their homes. 5. The parents sent many requests to the Infowars show asking Mr. Jones to stop claiming they were actors; Infowars did not stop. 6. The parents sued. 7. Infowars failed to comply with standard evidence discovery requests. 8. After many attempts by the court to achieve compliance, the plaintiffs moved for a default judgement. The court accepted. 9. At the award hearing, plaintiffs provided evidence that Mr. Jones moved assets out of Infowars to a company owned by his parents specifically to evade paying the judgment. 10. The jury at the award hearing awarded the plaintiffs about $1B in damages. Rationale was to discourage Mr. Jones from continuing to libel family members impacted by mass shootings. The award hearing was exceptionally dramatic and theatrical. The defense was repeatedly caught in lies and accidentally sent evidence to the plaintiff's lawyer, revealing Mr. Jones's perjury.

bena 6mo ago
Let's not ignore the fact that Jones's lawyers also completely messed up the discovery process by providing the prosecution with everything, including correspondence they had with Jones essentially admitting everything. The prosecution even told them that they had completely fucked up and did they intend to send everything, and the defense said "Yes". Then when these messages were brought up in court, the defense tried to say that they couldn't be allowed because they were private correspondence between them and their client. To which the prosecution supplied their conversation with the defense showing that tried to make them aware and gave them a chance to correct their error. It was a monumental fuck up.
kypro 6mo ago
[flagged]
- 6mo ago

BryantD 6mo ago

The key element you’re missing is that the lawsuit accused Alex Jones of knowing that he was lying. I.e., it’s not that he was speculating — it’s that he knew he wasn’t telling the truth. To quote Jones: “We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts of different people. I’ve looked at it and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it.” That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it. Why so large? A few reasons. First, this was for 26 families, so a substantial number of people. Second, we’re not just talking emotional damages — we’re talking harassment that these folks received as a result of Jones’ lies. Third, a big chunk of the damages were punitive. Alex Jones has a history of lying to expand his audience, recklessly ignoring the effects of those lies. A judge decided that the verdict needed to be big enough to discourage Jones from continuing to lie. (Arguably that didn’t work.)

kypro 6mo ago
> That isn’t even phrased as a “what if” — it’s asserting that Sandy Hook was staged. It’s framed as a truth, not a possibility, and the jury found that Alex Jones knew it wasn’t true when he was saying it. I think the deliberate maliciousness of it should bare more punishment, but I still think $1B is extremely unreasonable. It's also absurd to me that a judge should have the right to make up an arbitrarily big number as a means to inflect a secondary punishment. $1 million is discouragement, $1 billion is an attempt to destroy the business and his life. While I have no sympathy for Jones, I still find this problematic if what you're saying is true.
- BryantD 6mo ago
  Judges don't have that ability. They have the ability to determine punitive damages within guidelines (many states have caps, for example), and if the defendant feels the damages are unreasonable they have every right to appeal to a higher court. Eventually the Supreme Court may make an unappealable decision, but the appeals process has to stop somewhere. And at some point society needs a way to tell people who ignore lesser consequences that they don't get to participate in that society any more. In this case I think Alex Jones crossed enough malicious lines to deserve it; he's in bad shape because he's the kind of person who accuses school shooting survivors of fraud even though he knew he wasn't true! He had every chance in the world to back off and apologize, but he didn't. He tried to avoid facing judgement by hiding behind bankruptcy. He is a very bad human being. Now, is that always the case for this kind of judgement? Nope, sometimes the system fails. Some people would say Gawker is an example of that failure. I am not totally sure about that one, but even if it is... I'm reluctant to toss out an entire system unless it's a systemic problem. And Alex Jones experiencing consequences for lying for profit does not seem, to me, to be evidence of a systemic problem.

booleandilemma 6mo ago

I think with Alex Jones in particular it's that people knew he had money, and so they wanted a piece of it. If you're a nobody and you say false things no one cares really. Look at all the randos on X spouting nonsense without repercussions. It didn't help that these people in power don't like him. It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money. People in power will use it as an excuse to take your money away, unless you're allied with them, of course.

lolc 6mo ago
The victims went after a slanderer who systematically profited from his lies. Don't see why we should compare him to randos on Twitter.
traderj0e 6mo ago
The randos on Twitter didn't cause actual harm to the people they were slandering. You can't make a case for libel against them.
cosmicgadget 6mo ago
Sorry, you're saying the parents of kids killed at Sandy Hook were just using Jones as a payday?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
sjsdaiuasgdia 6mo ago
> It's dangerous to say false things and have a lot of money. Correction: As someone who has developed themselves as a media personality, it's dangerous to say false things, particularly if the saying of false things is explicitly intended to enrich themselves further as a media personality, and they're aware of the falseness of what they're saying. When you add in the rest of the details the outcome starts to make a lot of sense!

traderj0e 6mo ago

Depp v. Heard is another famous US libel case, but more controversial. They ruled that Heard made false claims (not just speculation) that harmed Depp's career, and she intended for it to hurt his reputation. Alex Jones met similar criteria except much worse. True though, you could be held liable if you used what you thought was real evidence to ruin someone's reputation, only to find out that it's false. I think it's on you to be careful of that.

shagie 6mo ago
The tik-tok psychic defamation case would likely be better comparison (which is on par with Depp v. Heard). She defamed an innocent college professor about committing murder based on tarot card readings and continued to do so after the actual murder was convicted and receiving cease and desist letters. Local newspaper - https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/northwest/idaho/article315378808.html https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/northwest/idaho/article3... Legal Bytes (actual lawyer commentary) https://youtu.be/80h2048o7Fc https://youtu.be/80h2048o7Fc

cosmicgadget 6mo ago

> and that it hurt someone's feelings This is the part where it becomes impossible to have an honest discussion.

account42 6mo ago

Agreed. And these punishments also seem completely arbitrary when many media corporations get away with outright lies all the time.