We sipped Alex Jones’ tears in this space back in August, holding a glass under the right-wing conspiracy theorist’s face as he cried broke after being hit with massive punitive damages in a civil lawsuit. If you’re still thirsty, no worries. Jones has plenty more to cry about now after a jury yesterday hit him with a $1 billion judgment in favor of the survivors of the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, who Jones has used his InfoWars platform to torment for years.
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The judgments don’t mean that InfoWars is dead, though; as of now, Jones is using it to raise money to help pay for his defense and the judgments against him. At the least, it means he’ll spend a long time—the rest of his life, maybe?—in debt to the people whose dead children and spouses and relatives Jones mocked and lied about. The problem for us is that once we’re done sipping his tears and relishing his comeuppance, we’re left to deal with the legacy of Jones’ digital fearmongering empire. As much as he’s a prolific spreader of repulsive lies and misinformation and a pitchman for questionable products, Jones was also a digital pioneer of sorts. InfoWars started on terrestrial radio and online in 1999, making Jones one of the few early digital hosts of the era to still be online. But his amplification of hate, not the fact that he distributes it online was his greatest innovation.
Jones, maybe more than any early internet broadcaster, showed how easy hate speech and conspiracy theories could be go viral and be monetized online. InfoWars isn’t like any other blog that spreads rumors about celebrities; it has brands that pay Jones millions to access the audience that tunes in to hear him blow his gasket every day about Covid-19 vaccines, Sandy Hook, Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and so-forth. An NPR report on his earlier Sandy Hook lawsuit back in August said evidence was revealed in court showing Jones raked in as much as $800,000 a day in ad revenue. With that kind of business model, it’s no wonder he has emulators from the ‘free-thinking’ Joe Rogan (who got in his own trouble over antivax content last year) to racist Nick Fuentes, last seen doing a praise dance over Kanye West’s recent anti-Semitic comments.
Alex Jones might never pocket another dollar from InfoWars. He might spend the rest of his life litigating appeals to prevent himself from living out his days destitute. But the rest of us will still have to deal with what he gave birth to for a long time to come.
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