NEW YORK –
A Connecticut jury’s ruling this week ordering Alex Jones to pay $965 million to the parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims he slandered was heartening for people upset by the misinformation.
Just don’t expect it to make conspiracy theories go away.
The appetite for such nonsense and the narrowness of the trials against Jones, who falsely claimed the 2012 elementary school shootings were a hoax and the grieving parents were actors, virtually ensure a ready supply, experts say.
“It’s easy to revel in the punishment of Alex Jones,” said Rebecca Adelman, a communication professor at the University of Maryland. “But there is a certain myopia in that celebration.”
There is a deep tradition of conspiracy theories throughout the history of the United States, from people who do not believe the official explanation for the assassination of John F. Kennedy to various accusations of cover-ups of extraterrestrial visits and baseless accusations of election rigging. 2020 presidential elections. With the Salem witch trials in 1692, they even predated the formation of the country.
What is different today? The Internet allows such stories to spread quickly and widely, and helps adherents find like-minded communities. That, in turn, can push those false theories into mainstream politics. Now, the willingness to skillfully spread false narratives online has spread to governments, and the technology to manipulate photos and videos allows providers to make disinformation more believable.
In today’s media world, Jones discovered that you can make a lot of money, and quickly, by creating a community willing to believe lies, no matter how outlandish.
In a Texas libel trial last month, a forensic economist testified that Jones’s Infowars operation generated $53.2 million in annual revenue between 2015 and 2018. He supplemented his media business by selling products like survival gear. His company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy in July.
For some, disinformation is the price the United States pays for the right to freedom of expression. And in a society that has popularized the term “alternative facts,” one person’s effort to curb misinformation is another person’s attempt to squash the truth.
Will the Connecticut ruling have a chilling effect on those willing to spread disinformation? “It doesn’t seem like it’s even cooling it down,” said Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor. Jones, he noted, reacted in real time on Infowars on the day of the verdict.
“This will not affect the flow of stories full of bad faith and extreme opinion,” said Howard Polskin, who publishes The Righting, a newsletter that monitors content on right-wing websites. He says fake stories about the 2020 election and COVID-19 vaccines remain particularly popular.
“It seems to me that people who traffic this information for profit may see this as the cost of doing business,” Adelman said. “If there’s an audience for it, someone is going to meet the demand if there’s money to be made.”
Certainly, people who believe that Jones and others like him are voices of truth repressed by society will not be deterred by the jury’s verdict, he said. In fact, the opposite is likely to be true.
The plaintiffs awarded damages in the Sandy Hook case were all private citizens, an important distinction when considering its impact beyond this case, said Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s”. “
The case is reminiscent of Seth Rich, a young Democratic Party aide killed in a robbery in Washington in 2016, he said. Rich’s name was included posthumously in political conspiracy theories, and his parents later sued and settled with Fox News Channel.
The message, in other words: beware of dragging private citizens into outlandish theories.
“Spreading conspiracy theories about the Biden administration will not get Fox News Channel sued,” Hemmer said. “It’s not going to get Tucker Carlson sued.”
Tracing the history of outlandish theories sprouting and thriving in the shady corners of the web is also difficult. Much of it is anonymous. It is not yet clear who is responsible for what is spread on QAnon or who makes money from it, says Fenster.
If he were a lawyer, he said, “Who would I go after?”
Despite any pessimism about what the nearly $1 billion Sandy Hook lawsuit might ultimately mean for disinformation, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication says it still sends an important message.
“What this says is that we can’t just make up truths to fit our own ideological predilections,” said John Jackson. “There’s a hard and fast ground to the facts that we can’t stray too far from as storytellers.”
Consider the lawsuit filed against Fox News Channel by Dominion Voting Systems, a company that makes voting systems. He claims that Fox knowingly spread false stories about Dominion as part of former President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been taken from him. Dominion has sought a staggering $1.6 billion from Fox, and the case has gone to court. declaration phase.
Fox has vigorously defended himself. He says that instead of spreading falsehoods, he was reporting on newsworthy claims made by the President of the United States.
A loss at trial, or a significant settlement, could impose a real financial hardship on Fox, Hemmer said. As it goes, however, there has been no indication that any of his commentators are taking jabs, particularly as it pertains to the Biden administration.
Distrust of mainstream news sources also fuels many conservatives’ taste for theories that fit their worldview, and a vulnerability to misinformation.
“I don’t think there’s any incentive to move toward well-founded reporting or to move in the direction of news and information rather than comment,” Hemmer said. “That’s what they want. They want wild conspiracy theories.”
Even if the landslide verdict in Connecticut this week, coupled with the $49 million judgment against him in August by the Texas court, gags or downplays Jones, Adelman says others are likely to replace him: “It would be a mistake misconstrue this as the death knell of misinformation.”
——
David Bauder is the media writer for The Associated Press.