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Where does the 1st come into this? Rather, how does the amount of a judgment make it more or less relevant?
I don't think anyone's claim to emotional trauma should be sufficient to ruin someone's career, which should have 1st Amendment protections. How much responsibility does Alex Jones have over how his listeners respond to one of his conspiracy theories? What if 911 victims and survivors felt traumatized, should they also get a share of his income? You put some guy on the stand who he alleges was traumatized despite no laws having been broken and the jury will eat it up.
That's the sticking point. Defamation laws are on the books, and Jones' conduct was squarely in their domain. If the families of 9/11 victims could point to the same sort of damages, emotional or otherwise, caused by Infowars targeting them specifically--then yes, they should probably get to sue him.
I'm asking why the 1st amendment should protect careers from private individuals' civil suits.
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Isn't this the "no right to yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre" exception? "I'm telling you, my audience, that those alleged dead kids never existed" "I'm gonna prove Alex is right by grabbing my shovel and digging up that empty grave" - there is a definite connection there. Jones may claim that he never explicitly said the graves were empty or asked, encouraged, or hinted his audience should go digging up graves, but Y would not have happened without X.
I don't think that's a thing any-more....
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Those are really good arguments that Jones should have made in court.
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They'd have to go to the effort to actually make out a defamation claim. I don't think you have any familiarity with the specificity and depravity of Jones' years-long campaign against these individuals if you think 9/11 trutherism is an apt comparison.
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The Supreme Court has decided that false claims that cause harm to other people are not protected by the First Amendment. Sure, sometimes it's hard to discern whether or not a claim is true, and it's fair to say courts should avoid intervening in those cases. But in this case, the claims were egregious, obvious lies that caused people to have to flee their homes multiple times for their own personal safety. What would be the public benefit in protecting such speech?
The public benefit is that having people like Alex Jones active in media space makes it harder for the government (or private entities for that matter) to state fake tragedies. I can sleep easy knowing that Sandy Hook was real, because if there was good evidence it was fake Alex Jones would have found it.
This is an interesting argument. But what I wonder is can there be "professional conspiracy theorists" in the ilk of Alex Jones who would perform due diligence in finding potential fake tragedies if they didn't have to publish these egregiously false reports. In this case, Alex Jones did some level of research on the topic (how much real research I have no idea), but then reported obviously false claims and really did do massive harm to the victims of an already grieving family.
In an attempt to have the cake of your argument and eat it too. Alex (or others of his kind) would need to do this verification research, but not publish unless they find real evidence. But my understanding is that these Alex-like people get most of their income by being loud and boisterous, so idk if they could substantiate good evidence without parading around the falsities like Alex did in this case.
And moreover, I'm curious if you (or anyone else here) can think of an example where a conspiracy theorist in this modern internet age has actually uncovered a real faked tragedy before. Cause if Alex and his ilk are 0/n on cases. It doesn't really prove their track record, and the cost of their proceeding wouldn't be worth the peace of mind that your outlining here.
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If he'd gone after 9/11 cops the way he went after Sandy Hook families he'd be dead by now. He chose his victims wisely.
Did some notable 9/11 truthers get murdered? Is this alluding to something specific?
9/11 truthers tend to (but don't always) avoid saying something as antagonistic as 'hey nyc cops, your buddies didn't die in 9/11, they were crisis actors, you're an actor' etc. I would expect someone as high profile as Jones doing it to get Dorner'd.
Am I once again missing something here? What do you mean by getting "Dorner'd"? Perhaps he was wrongfully fired, but my recollection was he then went on a killing spree and committed suicide. How is that analogous to getting assassinated for conspiracy theories?
Dorner believed he was in that movie the negotiatior, or maybe serpico - either way he wrote a manifesto accusing the la police department of rampant corruption, and then targeted police in his attacks, so dornering is shooting cops because you believe a crazy conspiracy based on mostly crazy (but some decent) evidence.
Right, but his original comment implied that Alex Jones would have died for questioning 9/11 cops when in the Dorner situation he didn't die for questioning cops but for going on a killing spree. So yea, I guess if Alex Jones decided to question 9/11 and then go on a killing spree he would have something to worry about, but I feel like the "killing spree" is the integral part of that much more than the "questioning 9/11"
Ah ha, after I wrote that post I thought something seemed off, but I couldn't put my finger on it - I mixed up the hunter and hunted. Maybe he calls being dornered getting shot by the cops for being a crazy conspiracy theorist?
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Same as with Gawker, the concern is using massive judgements to financially ruin someone such that they are effectively silenced by being unable to afford to publish.
The important difference is that Gawker was punished for saying true things about powerful people that they wanted to keep secret (the real crime was outing Peter Thiel as gay, the pretext was invading Hulk Hogan's privacy by publishing a sex tape) whereas Alex Jones is being punished for telling lies about ordinary people who happened to become newsworthy because they were involved in a tragedy.
Whatever you think about the wisdom of giving human governments this power, God convicts Alex Jones and acquits Gawker.
No, Gawker was a gossip rag, and they thought they could get away with it because they were well-connected in the media scene. They published the sex tape because why the fuck not, let's have our sophisticated and jaded audience laugh at the likes of an idiot lower-class guy like Hogan who is a celebrity for the exact kind of people we despise.
They believed they had power, so that they could twit the likes of Thiel, and then they found out that no, they didn't have power. They were no loss and they brought it upon themselves - ironically, with the same kind of stubborn disregard that Jones exhibited by not shutting up after the various lawsuits against him.
"Ha ha, I am a witty upper middle-class urbanite working in an atmosphere of cynical deprecation, so I can joke about four year olds and sex - oops, what do you mean ordinary people think someone who does that is a shit head?"
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If I take and publish an upskirt photo of AOC, would you classify that as "saying true things about powerful people"?
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