For some reason, I had thought that there were certain lawsuits that wouldn't even be entertained by the court, regardless of whether the defendant chose to actually defend themselves. If that is the case, I think this should have been one of those. If that's not the case, I still don't see how a fine of $1b, or even $100k, could ever be considered reasonable in this situation.
On the defamation part, someone else responded similar so I'll copy and paste my response here:
> I'm not a lawyer so I could be wrong, but aren't those cases only held up and prosecuted when the victim(s) suffered real financial damages? E.g. lost their job, company went under, etc. I have yet to see what tangible damages Alex Jones caused the parents of the Sandy Hook incident. Emotional damages to be sure, but I don't believe fining someone because they hurt another's feelings is a good precedent to set.
Then expect people to drip-feed them basic legal education.
I guess doing some basic research on libel, defamation, punitive damages, and IDK.., the case at hand?, isn't contentious enough. Hard to get into an argument with Wikipedia.
Parent was not claiming you need to be an expert on something to talk about it. parent is claiming you should do at least a bare minimum of research (i.e. read the lawsuit) before making claims about what the lawsuit contains.
You also initially made the claim "[Alex Jones] was just fined approximately $1 billion USD for no more than speaking" which is also (as far as the courts are now concerned) demonstrably false. He was fined $1 billion for encouraging and paying for the harassment of multiple individuals in addition to speaking and other offenses assumed to be true as he did not defend himself through the courts. I mean what information lead you to make this point? This is the problem that the Parent is talking about, any sort of cursory reading of the case would show you why Alex Jones is in trouble.
A lot of the legal documents can be found here [1] but I already know you aren't going to both yourself with the specifics of the case.
The short version is, if somebody sues you, you need to go through the legal motions otherwise you lose by default and then their side is considered factual when determining damages regardless of if it actually was. My personal opinion is that he knew he'd lose under Texas's defamation law and so decided the optics looked better not to fight.
[1]: https://infowarslawsuit.com/