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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I'm not sure how relevant that is. Whether those claims had been made before or not, Jones was still making those claims, and he brought them to vast new audiences that would not have been reached if they had just circulated among 4chan anons (a group that is harder to bring to court for defamation for reasons that should be obvious).

brought them to vast new audiences

Did he? How many people watch Alex Jones but aren't familiar enough with the conspiracy-theory community to have encountered an extremely popular conspiracy theory? And of course the grassroots conspiracy theorists had a lot more detail and arguments too, unlike Alex Jones vaguely referencing the claims that were already widespread. For that matter the first page of that 4plebs search in 2013 has a screenshot of Robbie Parker's former phone number, certainly not something Alex Jones shared and from before he even started referencing "actors". We hardly need Alex Jones to explain why he got harassing phone calls. Even if there's a significant audience of casual conspiracy-theorists who watch Alex Jones but aren't in contact with the rest of the conspiracy theory community, it seems like those would be the least likely to act on that information.

From what I can tell the modern conspiracy-theorist community is fundamentally very grassroots, a distributed effort to accumulate the sort of seemingly-convincing evidence and arguments described in The Pyramid and the Garden. Not that non-conspiracy-theorists are immune to this, most of them will accept similarly bad evidence under other circumstances, they're usually just using heuristics like "reject things called conspiracy theories by mainstream sources" which fail as soon as something true is called a conspiracy theory or a false conspiracy theory is treated seriously by the mainstream. E.g. I remember people on 4chan sometimes thinking posts they didn't like were "bots" even when this was technologically very implausible, and then years later I saw the habit of accusing opposing posters of being "Russian bots" on sites like Twitter and Reddit go mainstream. (Complete with popular ideas like "You can tell they're Russian bots because their usernames end with 8 numbers on Twitter" - of course the actual reason is because that's Twitter's format for suggested usernames.) Anyway, maybe the conspiracy-theorist community used to be more centralized but nowadays very few conspiracy theories originate or are even popularized by some identifiable leader, they're just networks of people who combine the same mistakes in reasoning most people make with a distrust of official sources.

a group that is harder to bring to court for defamation for reasons that should be obvious

Right. But it doesn't seem like you should get to legally treat the guy who happens to be the most prominent conspiracy-theorist as a scapegoat just because there's nobody else to sue. Defamation law doesn't have a mechanism to crack down on communities of people with mistaken ideas, and rightly so.