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Alex Jones just lost a lawsuit for defamation for claiming that Sandy Hook was a hoax and the reward was $965bil (after a previous $50mil verdict so its over a billion) for defamation and emotional damages. Jones is a kook, and his claim was both false, and outrageous; but I'm not 100 percent sure he even should have lost. Esp for the emotional damage part. I don't think people should be entitled to damages because they feel hurt by what you say. As far as the defamation part if he claimed particular people created the hoax then I can understand a loss of a defamation lawsuit, but if its just a general comment along the lines of "I think it's a hoax" I don't think he should face any legal penalty for it. And a billion dollars for spouting off some nonsense seems ridiculous to me.
I suspect that he will appeal (I understand he tried to appeal the previous case all the way up to the Supreme Court, who refused to accept the case), and that the case won't be overturned on appeal, but perhaps the damages will be reduced.
There was also some talk about harassment and death threats against people suing Jones. If it can be proven that Jones was behind it I suppose that could be ground for a lawsuit (and perhaps even criminal charges depending on the details), but that would be a separate issue than defamation or emotional distress over the original comment.
I hate these huge judgements. Justice can still be served without having to destroy someone's career which otherwise should be protected by the 1st amendment. Did these survivors and victims really experience $1 billion worth of trauma? At what point does justice cross into thirst for revenge? I hope Alex Jones fights this successfully to get it reduced to something that will not totally ruin him, not even because I agree with him, but this has a chilling effect on anyone whose career involves speech.
I wish there were some way to remove enough from large defenders to make their bad decisions hurt, but not give a windfall to victims far in excess of even the most generous view of the harms.
McDonalds really should lose a significant multiple of their annual coffee profits for keeping their coffee too hot to drink for years to reduce waste, but that doesn't mean that it's right for the burn victims and their attorneys to get several years worth of coffee profits, either.
But that's the mechanism to get people to invest time and effort in these lawsuits. For individual cases, giving the lawyers a shot at a huge payoff is what enables them to fight big companies with lots of resources to spend on defense. And in class action cases, especially those where most of the class members end up with $20 gift cards or a year of credit monitoring, most of the money goes from the defendant to the people who did all of the work putting together the case.
I don't mind a reward even a share of the punitive damages. I just wish it were smaller. I think punitive damages should be sized to harm defendants who deserve getting a huge judgement, I just don't like all of it going to plaintiffs whose harms are far smaller.
So when Weyland-Yutani kills a crew through extreme gross negligence l'd like them to eat a billion dollar fine. But I want the crews estates and attorneys to get damages and costs plus something more like 50 or 100 million enough to provide a good return on the suit but not all of the fine amount, then I want the rest of the money to disappear.
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I do not think Gibson bakery suffered $36 million worth of damages. The NPV of their entire future line of business to the end of time could not possibly be that. But I am glad the jury made sure to stick it in Oberlin's eye.
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I think the financial incentives here are actually the problem. Alex Jones probably wouldn't bother to say the horrible things he does if he couldn't make money off of it. This sort of court case helps to neutralize that perverse incentive a bit, even though it doesn't go nearly far enough to stop that bad business completely.
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He can't really fight. The US Supreme Court already turned him down without comment in the Texas case, and the Connecticut Supreme Court has shot down all his motions pretty quickly. If he actually wants to appeal he'd need to post an appeal bond, and the amount of the bond is likely to be very large so he won't be able to post it. (also, I'm not sure default judgements are appealable in CT.). If he were allowed to appeal the appeal would go nowhere, as there's nothing to base it on as there was no trial in the first place. So the next step is collecting the judgement, which will put him in bankruptcy court, where the usual bankruptcy protections (e.g. homestead exemption) will mysteriously be mostly inapplicable to him.
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Justice is the formalized, civilized version of the impulse for revenge. Jones goes to court instead of being paraded around the streets of Hartford on a rail.
Well, justice is also about coordinating social denunciation, reducing the ability of a criminal to continue his crimes, deterring future crimes by others, providing reparation to victims of crimes, giving criminals an opportunity for expiation so society will reaccept them, giving criminals an opportunity for reform so they can reintegrate with society ... in theory, anyway; I've tried to sort the list above by decreasing order of likelihood / increasing order of hopelessness.
But yeah, formalizing revenge is huge. Let a victim's family or friends take revenge and they're almost certain to go too far, and even if they don't you can bet the perpetrator's family will think they did, and that means it's time for counter-revenge, and maybe this is comedic if you're looking at the Hatfields and McCoys from a century and a half remove but it's horrifying if you're looking at them (or the Crips and the Bloods, whatever) in the moment. If the State takes revenge you get a nice Schelling point for "this is done now" plus a decent incentive not to take further revenge or counter-revenge even if you disagree.
And revenge is the instinctive drive to accomplish those present in all primates at least.
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Where does the 1st come into this? Rather, how does the amount of a judgment make it more or less relevant?
I don't think anyone's claim to emotional trauma should be sufficient to ruin someone's career, which should have 1st Amendment protections. How much responsibility does Alex Jones have over how his listeners respond to one of his conspiracy theories? What if 911 victims and survivors felt traumatized, should they also get a share of his income? You put some guy on the stand who he alleges was traumatized despite no laws having been broken and the jury will eat it up.
That's the sticking point. Defamation laws are on the books, and Jones' conduct was squarely in their domain. If the families of 9/11 victims could point to the same sort of damages, emotional or otherwise, caused by Infowars targeting them specifically--then yes, they should probably get to sue him.
I'm asking why the 1st amendment should protect careers from private individuals' civil suits.
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Isn't this the "no right to yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre" exception? "I'm telling you, my audience, that those alleged dead kids never existed" "I'm gonna prove Alex is right by grabbing my shovel and digging up that empty grave" - there is a definite connection there. Jones may claim that he never explicitly said the graves were empty or asked, encouraged, or hinted his audience should go digging up graves, but Y would not have happened without X.
I don't think that's a thing any-more....
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Those are really good arguments that Jones should have made in court.
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They'd have to go to the effort to actually make out a defamation claim. I don't think you have any familiarity with the specificity and depravity of Jones' years-long campaign against these individuals if you think 9/11 trutherism is an apt comparison.
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The Supreme Court has decided that false claims that cause harm to other people are not protected by the First Amendment. Sure, sometimes it's hard to discern whether or not a claim is true, and it's fair to say courts should avoid intervening in those cases. But in this case, the claims were egregious, obvious lies that caused people to have to flee their homes multiple times for their own personal safety. What would be the public benefit in protecting such speech?
The public benefit is that having people like Alex Jones active in media space makes it harder for the government (or private entities for that matter) to state fake tragedies. I can sleep easy knowing that Sandy Hook was real, because if there was good evidence it was fake Alex Jones would have found it.
This is an interesting argument. But what I wonder is can there be "professional conspiracy theorists" in the ilk of Alex Jones who would perform due diligence in finding potential fake tragedies if they didn't have to publish these egregiously false reports. In this case, Alex Jones did some level of research on the topic (how much real research I have no idea), but then reported obviously false claims and really did do massive harm to the victims of an already grieving family.
In an attempt to have the cake of your argument and eat it too. Alex (or others of his kind) would need to do this verification research, but not publish unless they find real evidence. But my understanding is that these Alex-like people get most of their income by being loud and boisterous, so idk if they could substantiate good evidence without parading around the falsities like Alex did in this case.
And moreover, I'm curious if you (or anyone else here) can think of an example where a conspiracy theorist in this modern internet age has actually uncovered a real faked tragedy before. Cause if Alex and his ilk are 0/n on cases. It doesn't really prove their track record, and the cost of their proceeding wouldn't be worth the peace of mind that your outlining here.
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If he'd gone after 9/11 cops the way he went after Sandy Hook families he'd be dead by now. He chose his victims wisely.
Did some notable 9/11 truthers get murdered? Is this alluding to something specific?
9/11 truthers tend to (but don't always) avoid saying something as antagonistic as 'hey nyc cops, your buddies didn't die in 9/11, they were crisis actors, you're an actor' etc. I would expect someone as high profile as Jones doing it to get Dorner'd.
Am I once again missing something here? What do you mean by getting "Dorner'd"? Perhaps he was wrongfully fired, but my recollection was he then went on a killing spree and committed suicide. How is that analogous to getting assassinated for conspiracy theories?
Dorner believed he was in that movie the negotiatior, or maybe serpico - either way he wrote a manifesto accusing the la police department of rampant corruption, and then targeted police in his attacks, so dornering is shooting cops because you believe a crazy conspiracy based on mostly crazy (but some decent) evidence.
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Same as with Gawker, the concern is using massive judgements to financially ruin someone such that they are effectively silenced by being unable to afford to publish.
The important difference is that Gawker was punished for saying true things about powerful people that they wanted to keep secret (the real crime was outing Peter Thiel as gay, the pretext was invading Hulk Hogan's privacy by publishing a sex tape) whereas Alex Jones is being punished for telling lies about ordinary people who happened to become newsworthy because they were involved in a tragedy.
Whatever you think about the wisdom of giving human governments this power, God convicts Alex Jones and acquits Gawker.
No, Gawker was a gossip rag, and they thought they could get away with it because they were well-connected in the media scene. They published the sex tape because why the fuck not, let's have our sophisticated and jaded audience laugh at the likes of an idiot lower-class guy like Hogan who is a celebrity for the exact kind of people we despise.
They believed they had power, so that they could twit the likes of Thiel, and then they found out that no, they didn't have power. They were no loss and they brought it upon themselves - ironically, with the same kind of stubborn disregard that Jones exhibited by not shutting up after the various lawsuits against him.
"Ha ha, I am a witty upper middle-class urbanite working in an atmosphere of cynical deprecation, so I can joke about four year olds and sex - oops, what do you mean ordinary people think someone who does that is a shit head?"
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If I take and publish an upskirt photo of AOC, would you classify that as "saying true things about powerful people"?
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