The offer would have seen the families temporarily forgo immediate cash in return for future ad revenue.

Bankruptcy is not a punishment, neither is having to pay damages.

His business wasn't about the exercise of first amendment rights, it was about selling supplements and whatnot.

It's a pretty large punishment.

He recklessly caused a lot of pain to families that already suffered a horrific tragedy, and profited from the attention by being (almost literally) a snake-oil salesman. He deserves a large punishment.

Yeah I'm not denying that, he clearly caused harm. But he's definitely being punished for it.

Is this some kind of joke I'm not getting?

Prison and fines are punishments, having to pay damages is not. When you can't afford to pay your debts, bankruptcy is not a punishment, it's a process to clear out the debts so both debtor and creditors can move on.

Punishment regulates the relation between a person and the state and is a part of criminal law, paying damages is part of civil law.

what kind of punishment do you think he deserves?

I’d agree re bankruptcy but can you discern between your use of damages (which you say is not a punishment) and fines (which you say are a punishment?

One is payed to the state, the other to another person, as in one regulates the relation to the state, the other the relation to another person.

What's your view on statutory damages for copyright infringement? "Wilful infringement" has statutory damages up to $150k per work. This is similar. Like this it's a punishment imposed by the state, through the medium of inflated damages.

No, I do not consider damages in copyright infringement a punishment. Whether damages are measured correctly or not in some case or other is beside the point I was making.

I’m confused what you define a punishment as then.

This is correct. People should split intent and outcome. So for example: you going to prison is a punishment. Your wife leaving you because of it, is not part of the punishment, that is an outcome, but it is not an outcome that is intended. The same here. There are damaged to be payed to the victims of alex' Jones heinous lies that have provably made the lives of people that were already victims so much worse. The judges entitled them to restitution for the damages done and because Jones didn't turn up for court and had contempt for the court by ignoring direct orders they probably punished him by making the sum very high. However. Going bankrupt was not the aim of the punishment. It just asks a high sum. He might have been able to pay it, which would have been fine. However. Jones didnt stop being an unethical human (pretty objectively, as long as you don't believe his lies) and tried to slither out of his duty to pay.

> Jones didn't turn up for court and had contempt for the court by ignoring direct orders they probably punished him by making the sum very high.

Just fyi he did, the court kept claiming he had to produce documents / analytics he said he didn’t have. There’s no evidence the documents ever existed, but judge disagreed, so they issued a default judgement (ie no trial).

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055864452/alex-jones-found-l...

They then had a jury trial to determine damages were in the billions (lol)

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/07/nx-s1-4996347/alex-jones-liqu...

And lost in all this is what jones actually did… which in my judgement is not even liable and we wouldn’t even know because a trial was never held —

https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/here-exactly-what-al...

Which, sure I think is nuts. But I don’t see anything in there besides his opinion and trying to support his bat shit crazy opinion. So what, he thinks it was a fake event. As far as I can tell from this (and perhaps I’m missing something), he didn’t do anything to anyone. If we start penalizing calling people a liar, we’re going to end up in a much worse place where all we have are liars

>the court kept claiming he had to produce documents / analytics he said he didn’t have

Which his lawyer then mistakenly sent to the Plaintiff's lawyer, so, they did have them.

Just FYI, the plaintiffs lawyers (not necessarily the court) was requesting financial documents that FSS LLC are required by law to have. They had two years to comply and did not.

Also FYI 'a trial was never held' is a common talking point used by Alex Jones on his program. He and his lawyers are responsible for there not being a trial. Their conduct guaranteed that there was no trial. It's a farce for him to complain about something that he is responsible for.

The Sandy Hook families have literally been awarded punitive damages.

Their point is literally punishment. That is why punitive damages exist in civil law. It's what the word punitive means.

Something can be punishing without being a punishment.

The intent is explicitly and specifically to punish someone and be a punishment.

Compensatory damages are awarded in an attempt to compensate the plaintiff for the damage they received due to the actions of the defendant. Punitive damages are awarded to the plaintiff on top of the compensatory damages and their exact purpose is to punish the defendant for their actions.

They are two different types of damages and the exact purpose of punitive damages is to be a punishment. It's their raison d'etre. They were created to provide further levers to punish people.

You cause a lot of damage, you get a lot of punishment.

It's not a punishment, it's a debt. If you steal a sandwich and eat it you'll be fined, that's a punishment and a transaction with the state, and you'll also pay the owner damages, which is not a transaction with the state.

I know this is a distinction relevant elsewhere in this thread, but I don’t think it affects the point I made.

Only in the most legalistic sense.

How so? Is the difference between having to repay Lisa when you've caused her harm and having to pay the state because you did something criminal that hard for you to understand that you actually consider it a matter of "legalistic" quibbling?

Would you accept a jurisdiction where, instead of going to prison, you could just pay someone a bunch of money after you've raped or performed some other obviously criminal act against them?

When the assessed damages are way out of proportion, that's in the realm of "making an example", i.e. punishment.

Who are you quoting?

None of what I've written in this thread is about the correctness in how damages are measured, I don't see the relevance of your comment. To me it seems like you're confusing suffering with punishment. Debt is commonly painful, but it's not a punishment.

The purpose of paying damages is to substitute someone else for harm you've caused. This is altogether another purpose than punishments. Paying damages is a reparation, punishment is based in another set of principles.

Actually generally for emotional damage you don't. In the US you're perfectly free to insult someone and hurt their feelings without being liable to pay them damages.

That hugely depends on the circumstances.

No it really doesn't. There are no legal consequences for insulting someone, unless you actually defame them. Nearly all defamation cases are dismissed by the court immediately for not rising to the very high level of facts required for defamation.

The interesting precedent here is if you lie about the dead (who until this fiction, had no protection from defamation), you have defamed any living person who says the opposite and factual information about them.

But we all know the precedent set in this case was a lie. Otherwise anyone who said the kids were really killed would have standing, since Jones thought they were "crisis actors."

We all know this was really used as a back door way to pay the parents for dishonoring the dead. Basically "meh we can't extract justice from the murderer, best we can do is get a lot of money from someone with mutual hate."

Edit: s/precedent/historical precedent/ . I did not mean to imply as assumed below this precedent is legally binding.

Interesting analysis... one potential wrinkle: There is no precedent being set here. This is just the expected outcome within the framework set by past precedent... Nothing novel or new happened wrt the law or anything else. It's just a bog standard case of a trashy asshole riling up his idiotic followers for money, and taking it well beyond the long established line of acceptable.

Yes, defamation. Many such cases are dismissed; this one was not and resulted in large punitive damages being awarded.

Less relevant to this case, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress can also both be against the law in the United States.

Not all consequences are punishments.

Default judgments are a punishment.

Your right to sell things derives from the first amendment.

No, but "commercial speech" does, though the protection is weaker than it is for political speech.

Commerce is constitutionally regulated in another way, by article I of the US constitution having a commerce clause allowing regulation, which, for example, is the basis of drug prohibition.

> This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights.

> There would be nothing stopping Jones from starting again with new equipment and a new domain name.

so... it doesn't constrain his speech at all. I don't see how that is "dangerously close" to taking away his 1A rights

> This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights.

It’s fascinating (and worrying) how the people who cry the loudest about the first amendment are the ones who least understand it. The right to free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything without consequences. If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.

I’m reminded of the Twitter engineer who said “Twitter wants to censor bullying and harassment, and the idea of free speech is that you can bully and harass people”. No dude, not it’s not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

> The right to free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything without consequences. If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.

Right, and how do you obtain that "proof of deliberateness"? Or measure that non-physical harm in a way that doesn't give power to people who just don't like what you're saying (possibly the truth)?

Most people in favour of free speech already know about libel and defamation, you're just trying to muddy the waters here.

You obtain it through a court, exactly had happened here. Jones as a deliberate lair, who has ruined the lives of dozens of people who had already had the most terrible thing happen to them -- the murder of a child.

Wow go read the stories of the parents who dealt with this and think about who you are defending

Whether their stories about what they dealt with are true or not, they have incredible incentive to make sure they present such dealings as worth a billion dollars. You can't put a price on human life, but if you could surely those children are worth a billion and more, so they just took the money from Jones (the nearest lying person they hated) instead of the broke murderer.

Bernhard Gaetz famously said (accurately) the victims family never got a dime from him after the lawsuit. It's quite likely similar will be said from Jones, although they can take the scraps of Infowars which is worth very little without their star loon. They are grasping at straws while being yanked around by attorneys, while the brutal truth is the real enemy that murdered their children is in a grave and they will never be able to truly dish out justice to him while they flail around looking for it elsewhere.

I think Jones hurt them more than the murderer.

People do have their children murdered, and it's terrible, but they often go on with their lives.

Because of Jones, these parents were harrassed for years, forced to move home and go into hiding. Yes, it wasn't Jones doing the harrassing directly, but he was the one accussing them of being actors for years.

I don't at all agree with what Jones said. I find it disgusting. But you should take a look at some of the videos of the parents. There is one, where the dad is laughing and smiling and suddenly goes up to the microphone and switches to sad dad mode.

Now being a thinking, somewhat empathetic human being I understand people handle grief differently. I don't think he was an actor. But I understand why he might be viewed that way. It seems insane to me that somehow it was lawfared that Jone's real interpretation that it looked like acting to him (it looked like acting to me, but I know it wasn't and those kids really were killed) and somehow it is his fault that he is liable for harrassment others do under the flag of agreeing with Jones' take. That has an incredibly chilling effect on speech.

Jones did lose the civil case but it was a weird one, in the right venue, at the right time, in the worst possible light, and with pretty bad representation both of himself and spotty counsel. It's not something to look at to rest your hat on for how these things will continue to be interpreted in the future.

I do not find it credible to jump from one person showing a happy emotion at a stressful time, which happens in the real world all the time, to “this whole thing was the biggest setup of all time, a dozen children are fake, there are no bodies buried in the ground, but no one will admit it out of the hundreds who must have been involved”, and then to continue that, with no concrete evidence, for years and years (Jones will say he mentioned this once or twice. That is a clear lie with obvious evidence against it, we have the tapes proving it).

Again, if he’d said this once, or even a couple of times, we wouldn’t be here now. If jones could have provided any reasonable evidence to back up his claims, we wouldn’t be here now.

No I don't find it credible. I do find it credible that Jones would latch on to it out of reasons devoid of personal malice, and that even if he thought it wasn't true he would still be incapable of anything other than obsessing the anti-viewpoint presented by the government, if you know anything about the guy.

It is important people like Jones exist, even if what they spout almost all the time is vicious lies that nutjobs cite to harass people. Someone needs to bear the banner of the conspiracy angle, and drum up whatever evidence they can find.

> exactly had happened here

It actually wasn't. The case was decided on a default in discovery and no facts were ever tried. Then the separate penalty trial was started immediately afterwards. The judgement is being appealed, but in Texas, you can collect anyways. If the appeal is successful, then the claimants may have to pay any difference back, or reduce the total amount they can expect to receive from escrow.

I really don't think people appreciate the precedents involved here. Including that one of the claimants is was an active FBI agent at the time and was suing over claims involving his job performance which has never been done before.

> Jones as a deliberate lair

Well, it could be that he actually believes what he says, if so, what exactly should happen then? This was never heard by a jury or judged on those merits.

I feel like if this is your position, you should make it clear you’re not talking about the first amendment here, which is subject to interpretation by US courts. I’m not sure how you would do this succinctly though. Maybe “Unamerican Free Speech”?

> Right, and how do you obtain that "proof of deliberateness"? Or measure that non-physical harm in a way that doesn't give power to people who just don't like what you're saying (possibly the truth)?

If only there were a system of formal rules and a process where evidence is presented by highly trained and experienced experts, presided over by an impartial arbiter, with deliberation, established precedent, a system of appeals, and if only that system had been used here.

There’s a long history of law and court cases that have set the rules for making this determination. Do you think this is the first such case in history, that no one has thought of this before? These sorts of laws go back thousands of years in general and hundreds of years specifically in the US. You are not some super genius who just realized it’s hard to figure out if people are intentionally lying. That part of the case is long over with here.

>If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.

The first amendment absolutely gives you the right to lie, and the right to profit from that lying if you're not explicitly committing fraud or defaming anyone. You may disagree with it, but that's what the law is.

Well I hate to break it to you but profiting by lying is the definition of fraud. In general if someone is impacted by your actions you are open to legal ramifications.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fraud

That's incredibly pedantic. What Alex Jones engaged in was nothing remotely like "fraud". The poster you're replying to is correct, the first amendment does protect "liars".

Have you really never heard of perjury or fraud before?

You don't have a right to lie.

Both of these concepts are specifically defined in law, whereas “lie” is not. You are made of marshmallows! Sue me.

> You are made of marshmallows!

This is defamation, which is also against the law. However, the damages here are incredibly minor, and thus not worth punishing. Most people probably don't believe you.

However, if I made a lie about you that caused you to lose your employment and become unhireable, is that also protected speech?

You don't have a right to harm others with lies. You don't have a right to lie.

There is no evidence that being made of marshmallows is damaging to one’s reputation, and thus this would not necessarily be classified as defamatory. The law requires proven damage. The details are tricky.

> The law requires proven damage

I'm aware. That's why I mentioned it. There's no remediation if there's no damages.

If I'm made of marshmallows I'm not human and not eligible for health insurance. If my insurer believes your claim which is a reckless disregard for the truth and I'm denied coverage, you're liable. If my wife leaves me because she didn't want to marry a marshmallow and causes massive legal damages and emotional harms you're liable for defamation.

It's like you're arguing you have the right to punch. Like, sure, swing your arms wherever. But your right to swing your arms ends at the tip of my nose.

You don't have a right to lie about me.

You seem to have the concepts logically inverted. Mistruth is necessary for defamation but not sufficient. You are quite certainly allowed to lie, generally. You are even allowed to lie about me, and there is no exemption to the recognition of God-granted freedoms for it in the US.

However, there are very specific exceptions. You are not allowed to lie under oath. You are not allowed to defraud. You are not allowed to defame. Those states are each defined separate and apart from “lying,” which is freely permissible.

You really should read up on these things before you make statements like this.

Defamation is basically lying about someone to damage their reputation. So I don't think that the first amendment gives you the right to lie?

Also, doctors and lawyers are subjected to discipline by their respective guild. So even if it's your right to say bullshit, you might lose your job and license.

Arguably, there's no to little consequence of being a nobody and lying about something like autism and vaccine. It's probably isn't worth the effort to sue folks. That said, misinformation is clearly harmful and we shouldn't let people lie unchecked.

Yeah, that self-policing guild discipline by doctors and lawyers has really worked out well, hasn't it?

The media is routinely used for psyops to bully people into certain policies for profit using known lies with no accountability, either all media companies should be held accountable for this or none should.

I am totally fine with holding all media accountable.

If the Judaical system enforces content regulation selectively, that is objectively worse than pure free speech since it encourages propaganda AND suppresses dissent of that propaganda. Also no one cares what you're ok with, go report some facebook posts if you want to feel like an idea authority.

Most people who have this opinion going in tend to change it when the learn the particulars of the case. Jones absolutely knew he was lying, he did it deliberately, the lies caused incredible real world harm, he knew they were causing harm and he kept doing it because that’s his business model and that’s how he gets rich.

And the death threats those people have been living with for decades because of Jones? That's just acceptable and normal to you?

The amount of whataboutism and history rewriting going on in these comments is impressive

You're stretching it. In the US the government can't arrest for causing offense to someone specifically because of the 1st amendment...You can get sued for libel (very high bar and it's notoriously difficult in the US) but you're not going to be rounded up and put into a corrections facility for being offensive.

This is the perfect illustration of the first amendment in the US vs the UK. In the UK a violent Maoist (red guard-like) police mob went after teenager for causing offense: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12399911/Revealed-M...

> for being offensive.

The Sandy Hook parents received death threats for years because of him. That’s not “being offensive”, it’s tormenting people and putting their lives in peril.

https://archive.ph/20221013141353/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

The left wing seems to want free speech for me but not for thee.

If this trial went all the way through it seems only proper to sue MSNBC and CNN for several billion. We can directly tie the assassination attempts on a former sitting president to their violent rhetoric. They have literally used terms such as “kill”. Twitch streamers should similarly be bankrupted for even more violent rhetoric.

Fact of the matter is I am unaware of any case Jones called for this behavior. If you say something and a crowd interprets it differently that is covered by the first amendment. This isn’t a “fire in a theater” situation this is trying to use a relatively unliked character to get your foot in the door for widespread censorship.

It’s good for everyone that this didn’t go through. If you want to persecute someone go directly to the people making the threats and make an example of them. This is already illegal. Jones case was yet another left wing lawfare battle in a long war to establish completely censorship of wrongthink under the banner of “fact checkers” and “misinformation”.

The sandy hook promise people are professional lawfare soldiers. They’ve also found an end around to killing the 2nd amendment - suing gun companies into the ground. Much like BLM we aren’t allowed to ask any questions about it.

Dude you are uninformed! Jones profited off the sandy hook families, elevated people like halzig, and accused the parents of being crisis actors which directly led to harassment. Jones is the one with the platform spreading these lies and that is why he got sued.

Also he certainly may have won the defamation cases against him. Too bad he totally made a joke of the process which led to the default judgement. Maybe he thought providing the discovery info was worse?

Listen to his depositions yourself if you don't believe me. Jones is a sociopath.

FFS, nobody is stopping him from speaking! He's being held accountable for his own words. You have it completely backwards: this is Free Speech in action.

If someone started a rumour that “the_optimist on HN sleeps with seventeen goats every Thursday” and you started getting calls of people saying “you’re a pervert for sleeping with seventeen goats”, it would be quite obvious what motivated the call, would it not?

Before calling something impossible, consider the bare minimum effort to skim the linked article, or read any article on this subject. It is in fact quite trivial and provable.

Your hypothetical is neither trivial nor provable.

How does one identify the “first mover”? How does one identify the integrity of the “calls”? What if the calls are a single caller represented separately? What if the calls are falsely represented by motive?

What if I, in fact, have today received 400 calls on the matter you have stated? Am I eligible to sue you?

How can you prove that the person sending a death threat was specifically motivated by a specific, broad act of speech? This is an impossible, unenforceable premise. It has no basis in law either in theory or practice.

Example lines of inquiry: How does one identify the “first mover”? How does one identify the integrity of the “calls”? What if the calls are a single caller represented separately? What if the calls are falsely represented by motive?

> are the ones who least understand it.

It's horrifying to me that when people don't like a defendant they're willing to justify almost any reduction of that person's rights in an effort to see them "punished."

> you can and should be punished.

This is a civil case. Why should he be "punished?" Shouldn't he just have to pay a settlement? Why is a billion dollars a reasonable penalty for his actions? Why must he necessarily sell his platform when the platform will make the most money staying in Jones' control? Why is it important to the victims in this case to ensure that a specific owner controls these assets?

> I’m reminded of the Twitter engineer who said

Okay, does that have any bearing on this particular case, or it's details?

> This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights.

They'll never be able to stop him from creating "The Alex Jones Off the Deep End Show" where he thrills listeners with zany tales of conspiracies that can only be held at bay with these brand new supplements. He just has to forfeit Infowars and its assets.

They can, however, take all his profits from the new show until he's square.

Probably not all profits but yeah, substantial garnishing.

> They'll never be able to stop him from creating "The Alex Jones Off the Deep End Show" where he thrills listeners with zany tales of conspiracies that can only be held at bay with these brand new supplements

So you're unable to think about this problem without putting your bias at the forefront?

> He just has to forfeit Infowars and its assets.

Actually, with this ruling, he does not. Roger Stone's group will get a legitimate change to purchase it to keep it under Jones' control. If you think that's a miscarriage of justice, as the OP does, can you explain why?

Why is forfeiture of his platform a necessity in your eyes?

> So you're unable to think about this problem without putting your bias at the forefront?

He is a conspiracy theorist, this is his thing. And he sells supplements on his show. Those are facts, right? I suppose my bias only shows with the characterization of "zany tales"? But IMO it's not even a stretch, this guy seems really quite off base.

> Why is forfeiture of his platform a necessity in your eyes?

I mean, it's not. But he has assets and liabilities, right? Right now his liabilities vastly outweigh his assets. So it's unjust to deny his creditors access to his assets. He can keep his house and a car, I guess. Or whatever is normal/typical assets to be preserved in bankruptcy. But his interest in Infowars is not an inalienable right.

He has free speech, freer speech than any generation before him. He could broadcast a new show from his personal cell phone and it would be dynamite production value compared to AM radio shows that have been used in decades past (and still used today). He can even resume saying things about Sandy Hook victims that he walked back during the trial. He just risks new liabilities if he does that.

> Those are facts, right?

Does his typical content or advertisers have a bearing on the particulars of this case?

> But his interest in Infowars is not an inalienable right.

Neither is The Onion's or the victims. Whoever has the most cash gets the asset. So, if his partners have the most cash, why do you or the OP have a problem with him retaining the asset?

The asset is changing hands due to bankruptcy not due to any specific ruling. You seem to believe that there is a direct ruling which dictates he must sell the asset. You see the problem with this thinking?

> freer speech than any generation before him.

Does that have any bearing on the case? Are you saying what is happening is okay because he enjoys his rights more than previous generations? Where do you get this legal theory from?

> He can even resume saying things about Sandy Hook victims

You again show that your thinking is dominated by bias and you are unwilling or unable to detach from it.

There’s a saying for this: if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.