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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.
Jones spent years scapegoating these families. Claiming they lied, that their children were fine. He combed over footage of grieving parents pointing out “acting.” This was broadcast to an enormous and enthusiastic audience, some of whom proceeded to threaten these Deep State shills.
It was a clear case of “communicating to a third party false statements about a person that result in damage to that person's reputation,” or defamation. Whether or not you think the corresponding legal penalties are appropriate, he has no defense.
If people were pissing on the grave of my murdered son, threatening to dig up an “empty” coffin, I think I’d have objections to the guy selling that narrative.
This makes me wonder if any Holocaust deniers ever been sued for this. Much less ordered to pay a billion dollars? This isn't a snarky rhetorical question--it seems like it would fit a very similar set of criteria to what you are describing here and I don't know the answer. The Holocaust was certainly worse than Sandy Hook, so I would think Jones's punishment would be less.
It would only be "a very similar set of criteria" if the Holocaust denier
was not anonymous
named specific victims and claimed they were lying
had enough reach that those victims received threats from other people
had enough reach that these victims knew about those particular instances of Holocaust denial
Has that ever happened? idk
But the threats don't have to have anything to do with the reach. Everything Alex Jones said about Sandy Hook came long after it was mainstream in conspiracy theory circles. The idea that those involved were actors didn't catch on because of Jones. It caught on because of that one Robbie Parker video from the day after the shooting where he comes across as suspicious, which has been incessently posted on /pol/ since it came out and supplemented with various additional coincidences. 4plebs doesn't go all the way back to the shooting but you can see the discussion back in December 2013:
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/text/robbie%20parker/order/asc/page/1/
Meanwhile Alex Jones was claiming that the shooting happened but was a false-flag orchestated by the government. If we go by this Media Matters page he didn't start parroting the "actors" thing until 2014. It's hard to judge since obviously I obviously don't watch him myself but it doesn't even look like he talked about it much, the grassroots conspiracy-theorist interest was much greater. But nonetheless the legal system blames him for other conspiracy theorists because they share the same beliefs, without proving that he caused those beliefs.
I'm not sure how relevant that is. Whether those claims had been made before or not, Jones was still making those claims, and he brought them to vast new audiences that would not have been reached if they had just circulated among 4chan anons (a group that is harder to bring to court for defamation for reasons that should be obvious).
Did he? How many people watch Alex Jones but aren't familiar enough with the conspiracy-theory community to have encountered an extremely popular conspiracy theory? And of course the grassroots conspiracy theorists had a lot more detail and arguments too, unlike Alex Jones vaguely referencing the claims that were already widespread. For that matter the first page of that 4plebs search in 2013 has a screenshot of Robbie Parker's former phone number, certainly not something Alex Jones shared and from before he even started referencing "actors". We hardly need Alex Jones to explain why he got harassing phone calls. Even if there's a significant audience of casual conspiracy-theorists who watch Alex Jones but aren't in contact with the rest of the conspiracy theory community, it seems like those would be the least likely to act on that information.
From what I can tell the modern conspiracy-theorist community is fundamentally very grassroots, a distributed effort to accumulate the sort of seemingly-convincing evidence and arguments described in The Pyramid and the Garden. Not that non-conspiracy-theorists are immune to this, most of them will accept similarly bad evidence under other circumstances, they're usually just using heuristics like "reject things called conspiracy theories by mainstream sources" which fail as soon as something true is called a conspiracy theory or a false conspiracy theory is treated seriously by the mainstream. E.g. I remember people on 4chan sometimes thinking posts they didn't like were "bots" even when this was technologically very implausible, and then years later I saw the habit of accusing opposing posters of being "Russian bots" on sites like Twitter and Reddit go mainstream. (Complete with popular ideas like "You can tell they're Russian bots because their usernames end with 8 numbers on Twitter" - of course the actual reason is because that's Twitter's format for suggested usernames.) Anyway, maybe the conspiracy-theorist community used to be more centralized but nowadays very few conspiracy theories originate or are even popularized by some identifiable leader, they're just networks of people who combine the same mistakes in reasoning most people make with a distrust of official sources.
Right. But it doesn't seem like you should get to legally treat the guy who happens to be the most prominent conspiracy-theorist as a scapegoat just because there's nobody else to sue. Defamation law doesn't have a mechanism to crack down on communities of people with mistaken ideas, and rightly so.
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