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Notes -
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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