Far-right talk show host Alex Jones, along with his website, Infowars, were booted off all major Internet and social media platforms back in 2018. In October of 2022, Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to the families of victims in the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting for falsely claiming the whole tragic episode was a government hoax.
Far-right conspiracy theorists claim Jones’ right to free speech has been violated time and time again. But Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman explains why Jones gave up his right to free speech long ago, when his hateful rhetoric crossed the line into defamation.
This isn’t about censorship. This isn’t about free speech. This is about, first of all, we have something called defamation. And when you can prove defamation in a court of law, it’s by definition not about free speech.
And beyond that, there should be consequences commensurate with the bad act. Now, it’s always the case with civil suits and jury verdicts that people can get involved in this sort of like, “is the verdict fair? Is it too high? Is it too low?”
Well, how do you compare what the families of the Sandy Hook victims should get to the woman who had the hot coffee spilled on her from McDonald’s and all these different things? It is extraordinarily fraught to do that as an outsider both because there are jurisdictional differences between states when it comes to defamation suits and awards. There are factual differences.
The law is different where a defamation versus a negligent incident like a slippery walkway or hot coffee. These are all completely different things. And so while, from our point of view, we could say, well, what would be tougher for me, getting burned with coffee or having Alex Jones lie about Sandy Hook? Well, I don’t know, it feels this way or that way. It’s very fraught. That’s not really the way we should be approaching it.
The way that this should be approached is: Alex Jones has a platform on which he can say whatever he wants. Sometimes, what you say can be incorrect and sometimes, depending on the context of the incorrect things that you say, it can be defamatory. And by its nature, states put a cap on what can be awarded.
What Alex Jones did is such a misuse of a public platform that the punishment should be very serious financially and that’s what juries have so far found. What will be collected remains to be seen.
Will this end Infowars? Remains to be seen. But this is not an issue of free speech. And it’s not an issue of censorship.
