Jones turned his mass audience against them in perpetual campaigns of harassment that denied their children’s existence, even as they tried to grieve their losses. Jones put a particular focus on the families of Sandy Hook victims, claiming without any evidence or credibility that their children were crisis actors and the losses were not real. That cash was-of course-built on falsehoods and enabled by social media platforms that turned a blind eye because it brought them their most prized metric: attention. Court documents surfaced in a concurrent trial in Texas showed that at his peak in 2018, Jones was making $800,000 a day from his Infowars acolytes, and at one point he paid himself $6 million a year.
One report at the time covered social media’s inaction as “a timeline of vacillation.” By the time platforms acted, Jones had already built Infowars into an alternative media powerhouse, and his army of adherents was prepared to follow him to fringe social media platforms. It took more than five years for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple, and Spotify to ban Jones for spreading wild conspiracy theories to his audience of millions. But there may also be lessons for the platforms that for years enabled Jones’ rise-and potential consequences for them too. Jones is rapidly learning the cost of “free speech” that allowed him to warp reality in a web of lies-and it’s a staggering sum. Yesterday, the Connecticut jury decided it would cost him everything.ĭecisions against Jones in Texas and Connecticut courts add up to $1.014 billion in damages to the families of Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent who responded to the shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut-with attorney fees to be added to that total in a month. It would be the first of many times he repeated the lie. In reality, most knew Jones had crossed a line after he floated the idea that the 2012 mass murder of 20 children, six educators, and the attacker’s mother was a “government operation” while speaking on an Infowars broadcast in April 2013. Jones was found liable for defaming the parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary almost a year ago, in November 2021, when Connecticut judge Barbara Bellis issued a default judgment against the world’s most notorious shock jock and conspiracy theorist. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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