By DAVID BAUDER, AP Media Author
NEW YORK (AP) — A Connecticut jury’s ruling this week ordering Alex Jones to pay $965 million to folks of Sandy Hook shooting victims he maligned was heartening for people disgusted by the muck of disinformation.
Just don’t expect it to make conspiracy theories go away.
The appetite for such hokum and narrowness of the judgments against Jones, who falsely claimed that the 2012 elementary school shootings were a hoax and that grieving parents were actors, virtually ensure a ready supply, experts say.
“It is simple to experience Alex Jones being punished,” said Rebecca Adelman, a communications professor on the University of Maryland. “But there is a certain shortsightedness in that celebration.”
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There is a deep tradition of conspiracy theories across American history, from people not believing the official explanation of John F. Kennedy’s assassination to numerous accusations of extraterrestrial-visit coverups to unfounded allegations of the 2020 presidential election being rigged. With the Salem witch trials in 1692, they even predated the country’s formation.
What’s different today? The web allows such stories to spread rapidly and widely — and helps adherents find communities of the likeminded. That in turn can push such unfaithful theories into mainstream politics. Now the desire to spread false narratives skillfully online has spread to governments, and the technology to doctor photos and videos enables purveyors to make disinformation more believable.
In today’s media world, Jones found that there is a variety of money to be made — and quickly — in making a community willing to consider lies, regardless of how outlandish.
In a Texas defamation trial last month, a forensic economist testified that Jones’ Infowars operation made $53.2 million in annual revenue between 2015 and 2018. He has supplemented his media business by selling products like survivalist gear. His company Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy in July.
To some, disinformation is the worth America pays for the precise to free speech. And in a society that popularized the term “alternative facts,” one person’s effort to curb disinformation is one other person’s try and squash the reality.
Will the Connecticut ruling have a chilling effect on those willing to spread disinformation? “It doesn’t even appear to be chilling him,” said Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor. Jones, he noted, reacted in real time on Infowars on the day of the decision.
“It will not impact the flow of stories which can be crammed with bad faith and extreme opinion,” said Howard Polskin, who publishes The Righting, a newsletter that monitors the content of right-wing web sites. He says false stories in regards to the 2020 election and COVID-19 vaccines remain particularly popular.
“It seems to me that the individuals who peddle this information for profit may look upon this as the fee of doing business,” Adelman said. “If there’s an audience for it, someone goes to satisfy the demand if there’s money to be made.”
Actually, the individuals who consider that Jones and people like him are voices of truth being suppressed by society aren’t going to be deterred by the jury verdict, she said. In actual fact, the other is more likely to be true.
The plaintiffs awarded damages within the Sandy Hook case were all private residents, a vital distinction in considering its impact beyond this case, said Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor and writer of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics within the Nineteen Nineties.”
The case is paying homage to Seth Wealthy, a young Democratic Party aide killed in a Washington robbery in 2016, she said. Wealthy’s name was dragged — posthumously — into political conspiracy theories, and his parents later sued and reached a settlement with Fox News Channel.
The message, in other words: Be wary of dragging private residents into outlandish theories.
“Spreading conspiracy theories in regards to the Biden administration isn’t going to get Fox News Channel sued,” Hemmer said. “It isn’t going to get Tucker Carlson sued.”
Tracing the history of outlandish theories that sprout and thrive in the online’s murky corners can be difficult. Much of it’s anonymous. It’s still not clear who’s answerable for what’s spread on QAnon or who makes money off it, Fenster says.
If he was a lawyer, he said, “Who would I am going after?”
Despite any pessimism about what the nearly $1 billion Sandy Hook judgment might ultimately mean for disinformation, the dean of the Annenberg School of Communication on the University of Pennsylvania says it still sends a vital message.
“What this says is we won’t just make up truths to suit our own ideological predilections,” John Jackson said. “There may be a tough and fast ground to facts that we won’t stray too removed from as storytellers.”
Consider the lawsuit filed against Fox News Channel by Dominion Voting Systems, an organization that makes election systems. It claims Fox knowingly spread false stories about Dominion as a part of former President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been taken from him. Dominion has sought a staggering $1.6 billion from Fox, and the case has moved through the deposition phase.
Fox has defended itself vigorously. It says that somewhat than spreading falsehoods, it was reporting on newsworthy claims being made by the president of the US.
A loss in a trial, or a major settlement, could impose an actual financial hardship on Fox, Hemmer said. Yet because it progresses, there’s been no indication that any of its commentators are pulling punches, particularly regarding the Biden administration.
Distrust of mainstream news sources also fuels the taste amongst many conservatives for theories that fit their world view — and a vulnerability to disinformation.
“I do not think there’s any incentive to maneuver toward well-grounded reporting or to maneuver within the direction of stories and knowledge as a substitute of commenting,” Hemmer said. “That is what they need. They need the wild conspiracy theories.”
Even when the crushing verdict in Connecticut this week — coupled with the $49 million judgement against him in August by the Texas court — muzzles or minimizes Jones, Adelman says others are more likely to take over for him: “It could be unsuitable to misinterpret this because the death knell of disinformation.”
David Bauder is the media author for The Associated Press. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dbauder
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