There's way too much nasty dross in this thread. No, the topic does not make that ok. As you'll see when you review the guidelines, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
This is probably the correct decision. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash, and in the case of a bankruptcy, cash completely trumps any notion of "giving up debt." Especially when the debt being settled is astronomically large and you are giving up a very small portion of it ($7 million out of $1.5 billion). The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar.
Additionally, the auction here was run farcically, and basically seemed designed to create an outcome where the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty behavior? Just in order to get cash to compensate them at pennies on the dollar for his previous round of nasty behavior?
I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether.
Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
Selling to a business involved with the individual that lost in court.. It seems like a Fraudulent Conveyance to my non lawyer self (but I could be wrong)
Letting Jones buy back his 'bankrupt' assets using money he fraudulently hid goes against the spirit of the law, even in the purchasing phase.
This guy should be living in his parents basement and barred from publishing on any significant media platforms. He's proven willing to exploit victims for personal gain to the tune of the millions of dollars.
Why should Jones be stopped from hiding assets from bankruptcy?
Or why should he be prohibited from profiting from exploitation of crime victims via broadcast platforms?
Regardless of whether victims get paid money, they were harmed emotionally by Jones's outsourced harassment. They don't need money. They need justice in the form of peace from harassment. And Jones seems set on exploiting them and the courts for his own enrichment.
They go to the creditors including his primary sponsor. This is not a bad outcome it's the only correct legal outcome.
What you are saying is we should allow a creditor (of many) to sell an asset to whoever they choose at a lower market rate because it's the right political move in this one case. Why wouldn't those rules be applied in other cases.. you can sell any asset for a dollar to yourself and the bankrupt person will still be on the hook for the total debt minus a dollar. Letting a single creditor value assets below marketrate and direct a sale to someone they wanted would be a completely unfair process.
This isn’t about politics, it’s about justice. The only reason politics is even in the equation is because Jones has made his living as a political blatherskite.
One group of creditors said they were willing to abandon some of their claims, which means other creditors would have gotten a larger share of the smaller bid, effectively making these other creditors better off.
The proceeds of the sale will not come close to the value of the judgement - and Jones has acted extremely dishonestly through the process and repeatedly tried to move value from his company to his parents and other affiliate companies. I don't believe it's a fraudulent conveyance but there's a lot of awful happening here.
They have a debt judgement not economic power. They can sell that debit judgement to a company who collects. They can take the money from the result of the court process and try to buy infowars after this is all over.
They don't have a judgement of ownership in infowars they have a debt and the court is forcing Alex to sell all assets to cover the debt. Then the rest is written off and he gets a black mark on his credit report.
There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.
Besides others are in line as well.
And killing the infowars brand means little in the short/long run. The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
> They don't have a judgement of ownership in infowars they have a debt and the court is forcing Alex to sell all assets to cover the debt.
It's a chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy estate already owns the infowars assets.
> There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.
Specifically, the reason is protecting minority and junior creditors (including the debtor when assets are in excess of debts). If nobody offered up enough cash to pay off the debts in full and there is only one creditor who would rather have the business than the best cash offer, I don't think there'd be any reason for the courts to object. The big issue is, again, minority creditors getting less than their "fair share" of the assets, along with over-compensating senior claims with junior ones outstanding.
Neither are at issue here - The Onion's offer paid more cash to the minority creditors, the majority creditor opted into the deal, and the assets are clearly worth less than the debts.
"Cash to minority creditors" doesn't matter. "Cash to the estate" is all that matters. The Onion's offer carried $1.75 million in cash to the creditors. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered $3.5 million in cash.
Onions offer was 1.75 million in cash and one party forgiving the estate enough money for the minority creditors to be better off. Which mathematically requires the offer to be worth more than 3.5 million in cash to his estate.
> So they put it up for an auction to get the real value.
Except Onion’s bid minimized Alex Jones debt and was the preferred outcome by his creditors. Offering more cash isn’t the same as making a larger bid here.
It was the preferred outcome by the majority of his creditors, not by all his creditors (note that preferred != economically best). If the creditors were unanimous in their preferences, there would be no issue before the court.
No the judge stated he believes it could be sold at a higher price not that the deal wasn’t structured properly.
There’s been confusion on the math. Because one party was forgoing a portion of their share everyone else not just the other victims would be better off financially.
ps: Economic maximization alone isn’t relevant here. The underlying economic value matters when individuals aren’t voluntarily participating in a transaction. If I destroy your car then I owe you based on the cars worth, but if you trade in your car moderately under blue book perhaps you’re just in a hurry.
I think the word "preferred" has been a bit overloaded in this discussion. There is a sense of economic advantage that you may be using, and this deal in that sense is "preferred" for everyone. There is the other sense of stated preferences, and this deal is clearly not in the stated preferences of one of the parties (hence the appeal to a court).
I think if the creditors unanimously wanted this to happen, it probably would not have been reversed over the idea that there could have been a higher value. The fact that this issue was raised to a court indicates that at least one creditor did not prefer it.
The article mentions Alex Jones was objecting to the transfer rather than creditors. Having a new round of bidding, especially with increased publicity is a reasonable thing to do.
I’m simply agreeing with independent 3rd parties who state that The Onion’s bid was larger and better for the creditors. Alex Jones clearly doesn’t want his life’s worked turned into such an obvious mockery, but while he’d love to sell these business to his parents for 1 dollar but the courts are acting to maximize the transaction’s value. Thus he can only object in terms of monetary value not his personal preferences.
Does the business that offered to buy InfoWars also not get shafted by the sale to The Onion?
By one creditor agreeing to forgo their debt only if The Onion buys it, that single creditor puts any other potential buyer at a disadvantage. It seems the highest bidder, regardless of whether that is another Alex Jones entity, has a fair counterargument such that this type of sweetheart deal is not fair to interested purchasers.
In what way is that different from any other larger bid? The math is identical to them borrowing ~5 million and then getting it back immediately afterwards.
In both cases the other creditors end up with more money and Alex Jones ends up with less dept. It feels unfair because you’re judging the debt as uncollectible, but they would be receiving more cash from other winners so they aren’t just sacrificing hypothetical money.
I’m sure if a large enough offer was made they would happily walk away with everything they would be entitled to, but losing some cash for a final fuck to someone who profited from their suffering and actively attacked them seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
It is both unfair to Alex Jones and any third party bidding on the asset. If some entity was willing to pay more for InfoWars than the debt AJ owes his creditors, he would be able to keep the extra.
If A owes B and C money and has to sell some asset to satisify the claim, the only fair way to value the asset is to sell it in the open market, an auction.
If D will pay $5 for it and E will pay $500 for it, it would be unfair to both A and E if B waves his hands and say he forgoes his claim so long as D gets to buy the item.
I understand that InfoWars is likely being sold at auction because no buyer was willing to purchase it for a price that would satisify the debt before bankruptcy, but there is a nomzero chance that some buyer shows up and is willing to pay more for it than someone else specifically to keep it out of that particular buyers hands. Strange. Farfetched. Buy possible. And it wouldn't be fair to allow preference by those owed the debt as it defeats the fair market price process.
It’s normal for entities owed money to be able to use that debt in these kinds of auctions. They still need to cover whatever fraction of debt is owed to 3rd parties with actual cash. This is a backstop as auctions often result in far lower values for assets than a longer sales process can provide.
It also results in debtors getting out of more debt.
> I understand that InfoWars is likely being sold at auction because no buyer was willing to purchase it for a price that would satisify the debt before bankruptcy, but there is a nomzero chance that some buyer shows up and is willing to pay more for it than someone else specifically to keep it out of that particular buyers hands. Strange. Farfetched. Buy possible. And it wouldn't be fair to allow preference by those owed the debt as it defeats the fair market price process.
A blind auction happened and if someone had offered even 1% of Alex Jones debt for info wars they would have won. The specific deal setup by the Onion provided 1.7 million dollars to satisfy other creditors, but the Texas families are owed 49 million. So even if the Connecticut families agreed to accept nothing any deal handing more than 1.7 million to the Texas families would have won.
Further, while it seems impossible for Alex Jones to ever get out of this debt, the Onion deal got him closest to that possibility.
> And killing the infowars brand means little in the short/long run. The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
This is absolutely true. Other media people that lost their job or channel, handle on various platforms, typically refresh to the same number of followers within a year or two.
> Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.
> Bankruptcy can be used to wipe out debts and legal judgments, but not if they result from "willful or malicious injury" caused by the debtor, according to a decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas.
Bankruptcies have all sorts of exceptions like this for fraud, student loans, child support, unpaid taxes, etc.
Alex Jones told the court that Alex Jones was just a character he played, so that character should now belong to the bankruptcy estate and be sold off. If Alex Jones were to play Alex Jones on TV ever again, that would be a copyright violation against whoever owns the Alex Jones character.
It does seem likely to be true, although apparently, based on its bid, his affiliated company sees $3.5 million worth of extra value in keeping the Infowars brand and structure as opposed to going that route.
>It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
you'd be surprised how many fall off from a migration. It's no different network effect from anything else. The hardcore will follow, the passive will fall off. Even a cult following like this isn't immune to this (simply more resilient).
We've had them for a long time; basically the only time we've tried to reduce their power was the Great Depression and post-WWII era, but since the 70s we've been letting them off the leash.
They've mostly kept a low profile since the Great Depression though. And plenty would be oligarchs were taxed out of the upper class by the WW2 tax brackets.
The families that lost their wealth in the Civil War and the families who had to pay a little more tax because of the New Deal and the people still mad about LBJ era civil rights legislation have all banded together.
> Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
Nope. Under the rejected deal, other creditors would have seen a larger payout, because aggrieved families are actual two separate groups. One with a claim near a billion dollars, and other with a claim of only a few million (I think, it may be less).
As a result the aggrieved families with the larger claim were set to basically hoover up all the cash from the bankruptcy, and the deal with the Onion was to create a better deal for the other families by having the larger claim reduced to allow a fair split of the total cash raised.
I don't know everything but I visited Valdez once and the locals told me Exxon wrote the 1.5 billion off of their taxable income so ended up not being punished.
But the logic seems a bit flawed... when you spend 2.1 billion in funding and then write it off on taxes, you are not saving 2.1 billion, you are saving YourTaxRate% of 2.1 billion, right?
The environment is lucky that it was Exxon who made the mistake of hiring an incompetent and overworked crew (per NTSB); they had more resources to deal with the consequences of an (allegedly?) drunk captain than smaller firms. I had a PhD relative working at Exxon whose work was halted and spent a year or two of his life working on the mess; not sure if that was part of the 2.1 billion or in addition to it. Certainly there was non-financial opportunity cost not even measured.
Like "Fire safety codes written in blood", the international requirement for oil tankers to have double hulls ensued.
> I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether.
It seems like there's an easy way for them to do that though: Just bid on it themselves and dispose of it however they want. They can bid arbitrarily high because they're the ones who get the money, if they want to dismantle the company or sell it to The Onion more than they want the money from what would otherwise be the highest bidder.
They were if you count the amount they claimed to be putting in from their award:
“The total value of The Onion’s bid was $7 million, including $1.75 million in cash put up by Global Tetrahedron, with the rest coming from the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, who essentially opted to put a portion of their potential earnings from a defamation judgment against Mr. Jones toward The Onion’s bid.”
Their bid was essentially "something that economically feels like $100k more than the next highest bidder to people who aren't us" which is a clever contractual construction but not an auction bid.
Did you read the article? Jones was arguing that the families shouldn't be able to do that but the article doesn't say anything about whether he won that argument and the only reason it specifies for why the judge rejected the sale is this:
> Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.
Which implies they might just be able to redo the auction without secret bids and get the same result.
> Once the price is known, several parties tend to walk away.
This is why you disclose the current winning bid, which will be <minimum bid increment> over the second highest current bid. If that's already more than you're willing to pay then you weren't going to win anyway. If it isn't, you can put in your bid and then the previous winning bidder has to outbid you again. Which they might do, but you don't know that and until the bid is above what you're willing to pay you don't lose anything by placing bids which as far as you know might actually win.
>Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty behavior? Just in order to get cash to compensate them at pennies on the dollar for his previous round of nasty behavior?
This is regrettable, but I don't think the court system offers a remedy sufficient for the grief Jones caused. This is why the court awarded what is frankly an absurd sum... truly, what is the point of awarding numbers that large? They're never paid out.
There this a strict defamation case, where the plaintiff's reputations were actually damaged in a way that harmed their income/worth, then we'd likely have seen a more rational award. Whatever it was that Jones did to these people, it's not the same tort as defamation. In that, he calls them embezzlers or pedos or something, they lose their jobs... and we can put a number to the damage he inflicted. Instead, he claimed they were actors, they never had any children, and this was some sort of hoax. Had crazy people coming out of the woodwork to harass them and stalk them. But the only sort of court order that could remediate that would be one that muzzles Jones from saying this shit... prior restraint. Something the Constitution wouldn't allow for.
I actually wonder if what he did shouldn't be characterized as a crime instead of a tort. Were he prosecuted and imprisoned (or even just put on probation), then the government would have the authority/leverage to (temporarily) prohibit this speech. Even then, he'd be made a martyr by his fans and it would continue as soon as the sentence was served.
There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process. The objective of a bankruptcy court is not to institute some arbitrary meta-ethical standard. It is to deliver maximum cash to the creditors in a fair manner.
>Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
Based on discussions I've heard on this subject, a subset of the families was pledging money they didn't have in the non-competitive bidding. This is highly questionable. They may never receive the money they claim for the purchase. So by buying a real asset on the promise of money they aren't going to get, it is taking money away from other people who are rightfully owed money. If they wanted to do it the right way they could try to borrow the money from someone, but nobody in their right mind thinks Alex Jones has this money or ever did. The size of the judgement was calculated to lead to exactly this conclusion. As you said, the judgement was orders of magnitude more than the value of his company. So you should be satisfied with that. It is not necessary for the funniest possible outcome to manifest in order for justice to be served. Alex Jones will not go away because he has rights just like anyone else, and the legal process must conclude eventually.
> There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process. The objective of a bankruptcy court is not to institute some arbitrary meta-ethical standard. It is to deliver maximum cash to the creditors in a fair manner.
I say cash loosely speaking. You at least cannot pledge income from debt that is presently being negotiated down or cancelled. That kind of thing isn't "value" because it's imaginary.
Debt can absolutely be sold for whatever it is worth. In this case, the Jones' debt owned by the Sandy Hook families is fairly valuable to Jones' other debtors because it means they get a bigger slice of the bankruptcy estate. Thus the Sandy Hook families can offer enough of their Jones' debt in the sale to make it more valuable. (Edit: more complicated than how I explained it because both sets of debtors include Sandy Hook families)
This isn't any more "imaginary" than money itself.
If you're talking to me or reading my comment then you should care what I mean. Otherwise you're wasting your time.
Obviously "loosely speaking" is not a legal term but I'm sure there is one that means the same. I mean you need real money to buy things, not bad paper. Bankruptcy does not exist to deliver good feels to people, it exists to settle financial matters as objectively as possible.
One reason to have an actual auction is because the liquidation might more than cover the debt and leave the bankrupt person with excess cash. But that only happens if real cash is generated in a competitive liquidation process. The reasons why this backroom dealing stinks are plentiful...
But because the largest creditor has a claim that is so much larger, the minority creditors will actually get less cash with the vitamin company offer.
The deal was structured so that the minority creditors would get more cash than from any other offer.
The only creditor that would get less cash from this offer is the sandy hook families and they are fine with that.
A very important point. The Onion was going to give $100,000 more to the other creditors than any other bid. That sounds like the better deal. I can't imagine being owed money and having the judge tell me that I'm being forced to get less money in the interest of fairness.
How is it the correct decision that Alex Jones has a judgment against him for more money than he claims to have, but also Alex Jones has enough money to enter a bid to satisfy the judgement? It’s a farce.
My comment has nothing to do with moral righteousness, merely legal correctness.
However, the idea that the InfoWars brand is worth less than $10 million is a bit silly to me given its reach among crazy (and highly manipulable) people, and the low size of both bids (and the fact that only people intimately involved in bankruptcy procedures knew when and how to put in bids) suggests that the auction process was probably not run correctly.
If all parties were happy with a bid, why does it need to be run "fairly"? This isn't house auction offereing up an artifact, this is a man guilty in the court of law going bankrupt and divvying off his assets. If the people in charge of said divvying and the ones owed money are happy, who really cares?
That's confusing. We know from the reporting that some parties were happy with the bid. I guess, you mean "not all parties were happy..."?
(Please note: this is not a case of ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) ≣ ¬∀x ∈ X P(x). ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) means "for all x not-P", while ¬∀x ∈ X P(x) reads "there exists no x that P", i.e. there is no party that is happy with the bid, which is either a false statement or not the intended meaning. This is actually a common, but not well-known mistake, so I'm pointing it out.)
No but honestly who has any use for the Infowars brand besides Alex Jones and the Onion? What would anyone do with it to get a return on their investment?
I don't really know, but Elon Musk has been known to buy media companies that don't give him a good ROI, and he was making noise about putting a bid together on this one.
>The other creditors are far better off getting more cash
The other creditors get more cash from The Onion's offer. It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer remuneration to minority creditors.
> It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer
That is the most farcical bit. When you strip away all the legalese, the offer was literally formulated as "next best offer + $". That is not a valid sealed-bid offer.
The Onion didn't have the cash. It was basically an IOU from one of the families, which is like saying "the very same guy going bankrupt is going to pay us money to buy this business from him" and that makes zero sense. There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.
Correct, it was given up by the majority creditors in exchange for non-monetary considerations (specifically, the moral victory of having The Onion own Infowars).
> It was basically an IOU from one of the families
This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason.
> There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.
This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
>This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason.
You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly.
>This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
> You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset.
You actually can, so long as it's the best offer for the other creditors. So long as you can come up with sufficient cash for the minority creditors you're entitled to dispose of the asset in any way you see fit. The Pennsylvania families came up with the cash (via The Onion's cash offer and structuring the payout).
You are absolutely correct. Matt Levine wrote about this topic in his newsletter the other day. Well worth subscribing if corporate/legal shenanigans interest you.
My point is going over your head. Pledging money that you will never receive to get over the finish line is not the best offer. You could not consider such debt in any other purchase. Going back to that example, if the guy owed $2B pledged to buy the asset for $500M and the other one didn't even know about the auction, or instead pledged $501M, then the one who was owed less would be stealing from the one who was owed more. The fact that neither of them has any actual money is another very troublesome point on its own, as is the fact that the bidding was completely private. There might have been someone willing to pay 10x the winning bid for InfoWars in actual cash and been out of the loop.
Put it in any other context. Do you think a bank would issue a loan whose repayment was contingent on income from an individual who was seeking relief in bankruptcy? Obviously they would not. The court has an obligation to not accept fugazi money to buy real assets.
My understanding is that the other (minor) creditors would get more cash in the Onion offer because the Sandy hook reps weren’t going to take their huge cut in the event their preferred bid was accepted. That means in any other deal, the other creditors would be strictly worse off. The families would be financially worse off but they were the ones driving the decision, so they clearly felt holistically better off.
I don’t see how they shouldn’t be able to take less money themselves as long as the other creditors also got more money.
> Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
This is incorrect - trustees have an obligation to maximize the benefit to debtors. You'll see common examples of non-monetary benefit when it comes to wills - a cabinet that may be valued at 150$ but has immense sentimental value may be given to inheritors even if there is a 200k bid on it if that is what the beneficiaries all agree to.
You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
>This is incorrect - trustees have an obligation to maximize the benefit to debtors. You'll see common examples of non-monetary benefit when it comes to wills - a cabinet that may be valued at 150$ but has immense sentimental value may be given to inheritors even if there is a 200k bid on it if that is what the beneficiaries all agree to.
Probate court is different from bankruptcy court. You can only do something nonstandard if all creditors agree. Some of these creditors are almost certainly banks that are owed money by AJ.
>You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
There are very few sentimental factors in bankruptcy. The few that do apply (such as protections of property with little value) exist to benefit the debtor and not the creditors.
Even if they all did agree, which I don't believe, someone might want to buy the business for a fair price using real cash. That counts for more than fantasy debt that is going away anyway. These processes exist for legitimate reasons no matter how you feel about it.
Said someone had the opportunity to participate in the auction - only two participants chose to do so. The auction was clearly announced and while there was a rule change midway through (which is what this whole kerfuffle is about) both participants agreed to the rule change.
> If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash
No, that's not the _only_ fair way. Suppose the $2B creditor bids $200M in cash and also agrees to forfeit their share of the proceeds from the sale. Then the $1B creditor would receive the entire $200M, which is more than the $167M they would have received from a $500M cash sale. The bid is effectively equivalent to $600M.
Isn't that what happened in the InfoWars case? The bankruptcy judge agreed that the structure of the Onion's bid was valid; he just said the auction would have continued for more rounds.
>>You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly.
Except what if all the creditors prefer that outcome to the "more cash" outcome? If the way it would get divvied up is $499m to you and $1m to me, vs $350m to you and $50m to me (but you get some other benefit that you prefer), why shouldn't that be accepted?
If literally every creditor agreed, maybe so. But I don't think that is the case even among the subset of creditors that is the families. If there are banks involved I'm sure they aren't interested in getting less money.
The two groups of families are the only two creditors. The Connecticut families are owed ~$1bil, the Texas families are owed ~$50mil. Nobody else is getting any money.
The bid that was accepted would give the Texas families more than they would have gotten from the other bid, because the Connecticut families were willing to give it to them, because they valued stripping Jones of his platform higher than the cash.
The only people worse off are the people who submitted the losing bid (Alex Jones' cronies). The creditors, and the estate, were not. And they're the ones the bankruptcy Trustee has the highest duty to.
It is impossible to infer this simply from the size of the debt. Debts have seniority ordering which dictates who gets paid first, just like liquidation preferences in startups.
Sorry, I was imprecise (and not meaning that it was due to the size of the debt alone).
There are 3 sets of creditors that have potential claims in these proceedings, based on what I can find. The two groups of plaintiffs from the different trials (Connecticut families and Texas families, although there's at least one FBI agent that's part of one of those cases too) and American Express - Jones owes them ~$150k in credit card debt. AmEx is not pushing for this money, for obvious reasons (they wouldn't get it, and it would look bad).
No one in this case is disputing that the money is going to end up with the Sandy Hook families. It's entirely the other bidder in the auction that took this back to the judge.
> Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash
Wait, isn't Alex Jone's essentially bankrupted by the ruling for the Sandy Hook parents? If he has that much cash to offer wouldn't that have been given to the parents who won the suit?
It is. IIRC he started shuffling assets only after the legal consequences got real. But the legal system is moving slowly. And the victims may get tired of chasing his assets
It's certainly mafia type of behavior. Now Jones has learned the lesson that as long as he doesn't directly own anything, he is effectively defamation proof. It's almost like an inverse RICO case, he does all the crime whole holding none of the money vs a mob boss rolling in dough while never directly committing the crimes.
You're not going after a "President". You are going after a law breaker. He can be President all day long in jail.
The reality is that we've codified that Presidents are largely unable to be investigated and or held to account by the legal system. There was no carve outs in the constitution at any point for anybody in government. This is a new, and probably fatal invention.
> The reality is that we've codified that Presidents are largely unable to be investigated and or held to account by the legal system.
They can be investigated and held to account by Congress. That's what impeachment is. That's the whole point of having impeachment in the constitution.
If Congress fails to exercise its constitutional duty, then the problem lies with the specific representatives that place party above country.
It feels really gross that he was acquitted in the second impeachment partly because he argued that criminal court was the appropriate venue for the issue, and then turned around and argued in criminal court that he was immune for not having been convicted in the impeachment.
I apologize for not getting back to you earlier on this (if you see it at all!)
We've seen it fail over and over. They won't investigate their own seriously, and even when they find the grossest violations of law, they cover it up.
The idea that there will be justice by the voters is laughable.
In practice, he cannot perform many of the duties of the office effectively - or perhaps at all - from jail.
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it says he should be President (given the outcome of the process we had). The laws that say he should be in jail are subordinate to the Constitution and so rightly lose out in the minimum way practicable - a delay in sentencing.
...
I do have problems with some of what I've written here, but it seems like a sensible position that could be held unreservedly by someone who disagrees with me on a few questions of fact that do have a subjective component.
Well supposedly federal govt can't intervene in state cases but the conviction against trump is at the state level, so why isn't he being sentenced? Because power isn't about rules.
As others said above, the president has certain immunities to prevent constitutional crises. But that's only for the president, and it's not part of his pardoning powers (which wouldn't work here anyway).
So why isn't he going to jail for felony falsification of business records (forget the classified records case, he's not meant to be immune from that but here we are)
My point is that power is not about what the law says, it's about what people can get away with through their relations with other people.
His conviction wasn't overturned, they are just delaying his sentencing because he's now going to be the president again. He's not doing it by any power of the federal gov't.
Exactly, there's no rule (certainly no federal rule) that says a guy can't go to jail just because he was elected president. So why isn't he? Because he has power that is not assigned to him by any law. He is a bully with a cult of personality that makes people fear him and/or act as his sycophants.
There's no fraud conviction, there can't be a pardon. There's not even fraud charges, so what would the pardon be for... I find your rebuttal confusing.
Likely different legal entities. Johnson & Johnson tried to get out of the talc powder settlement by creating a different legal entity to contain responsibility and damages. A court ruled that invalid but this type of corporate entity manipulation happens all the time. With the vitamin company, it might be that Jones is not majority owner of it but the other owners are sympathetic to him. Giving Jones' ownership stake to the Infowars creditors wouldn't change anything if Jones is not the controlling owner. This is all supposition on my part and perhaps he is the controlling owner but the court for some reason decided not to include it in his bankruptcy assets. It's a weird world when we allow artificial people to exist in the form of corporations.
It is 100% not. It makes fewer creditors whole. Simple as that. It's worse for all creditors involved, as per the creditors. Any suggestion that this is "correct" or better is out of ignorance or deceit.
> The other creditors are far better off getting more cash
The nature of the original deal guaranteed the other creditors got more money than they would from the other offer by $100,000 more. Suggesting that they were getting less is ignorant.
> the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
Nothing in the order says the accounting of the bid value was wrong it was mostly the form of the auction taking place as a single sealed bid round that the judge seems to quibble with. Counting debt as part of the bid is also not that unusual or weird, banks will bid their outstanding debt on foreclosure auctions all the time to get control of the house and sell it normally.
To bankrupt someone who exploited the families of a horrific crime to enrich himself. Not a pretend bankruptcy after most of the real assets have been shuffled off the board ahead of sentencing.
Alex Jones shuffles assets moments before a legal proceeding (or perhaps during it), goes bankrupt, and his shuffled assets can buy the assets he "lost". I don't have enough legal knowledge to call it fraud, but it sure sounds like what I'd call as a layman "pure bullshit".
>How exactly is Alex Jones supposed to pay $1 billion dollars to anyone?
That sounds like the job of a bankruptcy court now, doesn't it?
Pure bullshit #2: all creditors and debtors agreed on something and suddenly Jones himself says "no not that way!" Why does the debtor get to decide where and how he sells the assets he no longer owns?
>What is the purpose of this entire spectacle?
in case you forgot, a "major news network" tried to play off a tragic school shooting that isn't even 15 years old as a hoax. The family sued and he lost a defamation case over it. In the US (it's REALLY hard to claim defamation in the US, so you really screw up if you lose here).
On top of all of that all, Jones did all his darndest to drag out and overall disrespect the legal system though a mix of shuffling assets, missing court dates, and so many other pieces of foul play that would get any normal citizen charged with perjury (he may have been charged that). That is surely why his ruling costs ran so high.
So the purpose of this entire spectacle runs on 2 major points:
1. don't try to play off a modern, highly televised and recorded event in modern history as a "hoax", especially on a topic as serious as school shootings
2. Don't be a legal asshole and piss off judges in a court case.
That latter one shouldn't even need to be said, but between this and the Gawker trial we clearly have a lot of children who treat the judicial system like it's some casual date on Tinder. Judges don't like being ghosted.
> cash completely trumps any notion of "giving up debt."
Not true. The entire point of bankruptcy proceedings is to resolve debt to the creditors.
And in fact, that wasn't the issue that the Judge took here. The judge didn't like the amount, not the creditors bid.
> The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar.
The other creditors signed off on the deal which is why the Trustee took the bid. Alex Jones would have $3.5 million dollars less debt than if he took the FAUC bid. Which is exactly what the Trustee should prioritize, cutting back on Jone's debt.
I read the details of the auction out of interest. I think it is valid, and in the best interests of the creditors as it currently stands. Interested to see how others have read into it that they offered "more". It was a blind auction and the result is clearly in the best interests of the creditors to take the onion deal.
>Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash
Yes, but shouldn't that already be due to the victims?
This is worse for the victims, because rather than getting that money, and future revenue, they just get that money.
And this all ignores the harm to the victims, of giving Jones control of Infowars again.
They aren't ever going to see all of this $1.5B. I doubt most even want all that money, what they probably want is for Jones not to be able to keep his mouth piece.
No, Legal Eagle covered the sale, and the agreement giving it to the Onion maximized the proceeds to both of the Sandy Hook groups that have won judgement against Alex Jones. With the sale to Alex Jones's set of straw buyers, that wasn't true.
Will hold judgement until I read the judge’s opinion, but this bit:
“‘It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,’ Judge Lopez said.”
is nonsense from an auction theoretical perspective.
First-price sealed-bid auctions are a vetted auction system [1]—almost all real estate and corporate mergers, for example, are sold like this, as are government tenders [2].
(They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.)
The bankruptcy estate is selling the asset. Not Alex Jones. The creditors should be deciding who buys their stuff. Not a judge. (The judge is there to coördinate the creditors, not substitute his judgement for theirs.)
> They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.
I've always been curious -- do you know why?
It's certainly not for lack of familiarity, considering that paying the second-highest bid is basically how eBay works.
And eBay doesn't reveal people's maximum bids either. And so between that and the prevalence of last-second sniping, it essentially operates as sealed for all practical purposes.
The "winning" offer was formulated such that its cash value depended upon the next best offer. I.e., when you strip away the complexity it was of the form "next best offer + $". That this bid "won" indicates the "auction" was not a sealed-bid auction of the kind you are thinking of.
Wait no none of this is right, it doesn't make it an unsealed auction just because one or more of the bids has terms and conditions. This is how every real-estate transaction is conducted.
What makes it fine in the end is that once you collect all the bids and resolve the legal paperwork you can assign values to the individual bids and compare them which is how people who sell their homes choose what offer to go
with. And home sellers do consider intangibles and go
with lower-cash offers all the time.
I don't really understand what all the legal kerfuffle is about. Is the court really going to force the families into a sale they don't want when the sale is for their benefit however they choose to define it?
Like other commenters, you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works.
> you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works
Literally started by saying I'm holding judgement until reading the opinion.
My point is simply that if the reason the judge raised for re-starting the process is solely around the bids being sealed, they're wrong in a provable way.
Oh, it's not that at all. The problem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid. In any case, a judge does make the decisions in a bankruptcy court when the parties disagree about things. In this case, the creditors are not in agreement that this was okay.
A sealed-bid auction is a bit non-standard in a bankruptcy, but there should be no problem if all the bids get revealed post-facto. I wouldn't be surprised if this was mentioned in the opinion because it doesn't help you say that the auction was fair in light of everything else (if you're going to do non-standard stiff, do it in a very clean-looking way).
> roblem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid
Which would make sense. That's not what the article quotes as the judge's reason (nor what you've said).
The quote in the article criticises sealed bids. That's mind-blowingly wrong to the point of having substance on appeal. It's so wrong I expressed scepticism it's actually the case, scepticism based on experience evaluating bankruptcy claims.
Yeah, the article is incorrect about that (like I said, sealed bids are very unusual in bankruptcy auctions, but the actual opinion cites the other stuff), and when I said that the auction procedure was farcical, I did not mean that the underlying algorithm of the auction was wrong, but that the procedures run by the auctioneer were awful.
Are there practically any other creditors? I would think the creditor owed $1.5B would cause all other creditors to become irrelevant rounding errors as a fraction of a percent. So if the families were to bid $X, then they'd be paying it right back into their other pocket. Seems like just a technicality or theatrics to require them to temporarily come up with cash just to give it right back to themselves. But lawyers love arguing technicalities.
All debt is not equal in seniority (seniority != amount), and yes, there are other creditors. Many people have credit cards, get bank loans, and have a mortgage, and I assume he has also borrowed money from several other sources. Those are creditors.
The next thing to do is think about the order these people get to take money in. Debt isn't one pool, it's a set of multiple priority queues. Asset-backed lines of credit typically have a senior claim to that asset but a junior claim to the general pool of money - Alex Jones, if forced to sell a hypothetical car with a hypothetical $1000 loan, will be paying back that loan in its entirety (if covered by the sale of the car) before the proceeds of that sale go to the $1.5 billion debt. Your general accounts are similarly ordered.
Yes, the set of Sandy Hook parents who won $1.5B would normally get essentially everything, but the Onion agreement had the minority creditors get a lot more money.
> Especially when the debt being settled is astronomically large and you are giving up a very small portion of it ($7 million out of $1.5 billion). The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar.
The whole purpose of the deal was to give everyone, except the largest creditor, more cash. Sure the other deal offered 2x more cash, but the largest creditor is so disproportionately large compared to all the other creditors, they would have basically taken all the cash and left little to nothing for the other creditors. The rejected deal involved the largest creditor voluntarily giving up part of their claim, resulting in a much larger (I.e. something like 10x larger) payout for other creditors, despite the lower dollar value on the entire deal.
So yeah, the other creditors are far better off getting more cash. But to do that InfoWars would need to sell for many multiples more than highest bid seen so far.
So Alex Jones gets to cheat his way out of consequences yet again by transferring his assets to a new company and shopping for a sympathetic judge, just like the last several times?
> Additionally, the auction here was run farcically, and basically seemed designed to create an outcome where the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
You have been lied to.
As I see it, the situation couldn't be any simpler: the oligarchs will take what they want, justice be damned. It was a done deal as soon as Musk entered the scene.
There's a deep irony in your post that you say it's the correct decision when it's Alex Jones attempting to strongarm his Infowars rights back after losing them in court because he failed to pay his outstanding debts.
Like you do see the obvious corruption here, right?
Am I missing something or does this NYT article not actually say what the judge based his decision on? That would be an important piece of information to have when deciding whether the decision was good or not.
This is the legal pretext, which appears about 2/3 of the way through the article:
> Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.
I don't run auctions but something tells me there's a lot of research behind them that goes into optimizing for this precise thing. It's wild that the judge is disregarding the expertise of the person who was appointed by another judge to run the auction without asserting that the person is not qualified to run it.
It's not only a question of qualifications, they're complaining about a quantity which is not measurable. The auction concluded with a certain maximum bid. Now prove to me there could have been a higher bid. You can't! We measured all the bids, and this one was the highest! EDIT: I'm sorry your honor but the halting problem is undecidable?
The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
What's even more crazy about this ruling is he's told the trustee to come up with an alternative solution, that doesn't involve a new auction... But like no other guidance. That leaves the Trustee in a weird situation where the judge has said "I don't like what you did, fix it somehow, but not in a way that uses a new auction".
Frankly, this judge has just been pretty bad at their job. More than a few rulings have been just weird ramblings from the judge with unclear instructions to the trustee and the other parties.
And all this mainly appears to be because the judge doesn't like the amount that Infowars was sold for.
Out of curiosity, does anyone in this thread who is commenting on the quality of this judge or the sanity of his ruling practice bankruptcy law? I don’t, and I’m having a hard time evaluating these claims.
So he's been doing bankruptcy for five years, which should be enough time for him to understand the intricacies of the statutes and case law. Sometimes you see judges put in specialty courts with no experience in that domain and make some absurd rulings.
if it is indeed true that this judge was appointed by Trump (I haven't looked into it), it is reasonable to believe that it probably wasn't based on merit or understanding of law. This is because he has a long history of promoting/installing people that he believes (whether or not it turns out to be the case) will obey him above all else.
> This is because he has a long history of promoting/installing people that he believes (whether or not it turns out to be the case) will obey him above all else.
Is there any evidence of this besides some angry tweets? If this was widely accepted as fact, I don't think the constitutionalists on the right would have supported his re-election, as that doesn't align with separation of powers.
Best evidence would probably the current cabinet picks. Plenty of un and underqualified people are slated for very high positions. Furthermore, the primary thrust of Project 2025 was to install people loyal to trump above all else. The authors of 2025 are on the Trump cabinet.
I can give more details if you like, but I think that's a bit OT from the current discussion for AJ's bankruptcy.
Also, I don't agree with the assessment that Lopez is unqualified or was nefariously picked.
I don't think the trump admin really cared one way or another about a bankruptcy judge.
FWIW, Lopez has the credentials for the job. [1] He was a bankruptcy lawyer and teacher for years before being appointed as a judge.
I say this as someone not a fan of his rulings. I think the "he was a Trump appointee" critiques are misplaced. He's simply isn't good as a judge which, arguably, is a pretty different skillset from being a lawyer.
> The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
This is actualy quite common with judges. Or so i heard from Popehat who is a practicing lawyer. What is going on is that the judge is feeling that one side is making a stronger argument, in their opinion, and they then tend to give more procedural leeway to the other side. In order to be, or appear to be unbiased. Then commentators or sometimes even the plantifs interpret it as the judge signaling that the judge is agreeing with them.
Supposedly this is common enough that lawyers get worried if the judge is too “nice” with their side.
So quite often judges make their decisions based on "feels" and then go out of their way to be nice to the other party so they don't appear biased. You can imagine the poor self representing party that has a strong case but is automatically disliked by the judge for not playing the game properly and basically has no chance.
I think you misunderstood. It is not based on "feel" and the greater procedural leeway they provide the party with the perceived or actual weaker argument is not for appearance sake alone. A judge wants both parties to make their best case and if one party fails to do so, they try to help them along to achieve it.
You might be surprised to discover that federal judges are extremely not shy about bringing up threats to their safety that involve litigants before them.
Wasn't there some famous case in NY where a business man had to be sanctioned ~10 times before he stopped trying to get death threats against the judges family?
I don't really doubt that judges would bring something up to litigants but I do really doubt the bar would actually do something.
The Onion should be investigated for making a false bid for which they never had the money for.
>Jones' attorney Ben Broocks told Lopez at a hearing on Monday that the Onion only put up half as much cash as the $3.5 million offer from First American United Companies but boosted its bid with "smoke and mirrors" calculations.
Yes and Lopez rejected that as an issue. He also accepted the logic of why the Trustee picked the onion.
What Lopez did not like was the dollar amount and how the auction was ran, that's it.
Lopez kept the Trustee on board, though, because he doesn't believe the Trustee did anything wrong (Strangely since the Trustee organized the auction).
It wasn't a false bid, it was a bid that would have relieved Jones of more debt than the bid FAUC put up. Which was accepted by his creditors.
Judge Lopez was appointed by Trump, so I'd assume that he's acting under instructions. Why would Trump have appointed a judge who wouldn't do favors for him?
I believe the implication isn’t that he’d be fired. Rather that doing the bidding of the far right (as instructed) was the deal he made to get the job. I look at it as payment for services rendered.
There are absolutely social, political, and economic consequences. Those in the political class don’t exist in a separate bubble from each other. There are natural consequences for breaking from the party line, especially on the right, which demands complete fealty.
Natural consequences might be that the judge and their family no longer get to go to the yacht extravagant social gatherings, their kids may no longer have an in at their preferred university, or they may have even have the propaganda machine turned against them - potentially endangering them.
There are so many potential consequences that it’s not even worth trying to mention them all. These are all real threats that keep people in these types of positions aligned with the original intent for putting them there.
Real or hypothetical? Still don't see any evidence. FYI it is this kind of posting that goes nowhere, that helped re-elect Trump. People are tired of it and the gaslighting. Hope this helps.
I think maybe you’re running afoul of the same thing you’re accusing me of, which is being too vague. There are plenty of examples such as the lavish gifts given to SCOTUS justices with the expectation that they’ll behave the “right” way. Are you saying these things will still happen if the justice starts behaving counter to the party?
What I’m describing is not some abstract concept, it’s part of human society and I have no doubt you’ve experienced it yourself.
As I understand it, bankruptcy judges are not appointed by the president but rather by the relevant Court of Appeals. And they do not serve for life (because they aren’t Article III judges).
Shouldn't all of the mechanics of the auction been agreed upon explicitly or at least implicitly with past precedent of bankruptcy auctions? How did the lawyers go ahead of an auction that even had a chance of being thrown out by the judge?
This is something that was brought up in the hearings.
For starters, one issue here is the Judge is just, frankly, bad at giving instructions. He left how the auction should be ran up to the Trustee who ultimately used an auction company which handles these sorts of liquation auctions. He didn't give clear instructions on what he wanted.
FAUC (alex jones's new company) did not raise any issues with the auction until after they found out that they lost. They had multiple communications with the auction house and the trustee right up until the winners were announced. It was only after they lost that they started throwing a stink about how the auction was ran.
Frankly, it's a bad faith argument by FAUC that's just sour grapes over losing. They were always going to challenge the results on a loss, but it does look bad for them that they didn't do that until after the loss.
Lopezes problem with the auction was mainly that he felt like the amounts were too low. He didn't really explain why he felt that and has left everything really ambiguous (not a good judge IMO). He has left the managing of infowars under the care of the Trustee and has basically given them a "fix it" order with really no clear guidelines on how they are supposed to do that (other than don't do another auction).
Appealable, yes, pretty much all orders are appealable.
Everyone has 2 weeks to file an appeal to this ruling and the Judge has given 30 days for the Trustee to figure out how to fix things.
We'll see what happens.
In any event, yes, likely we are going to see this dragged out like crazy. What's wild is IDK what happens when all the infowars funds dry up if this is stuck in litigation. Bankruptcies aren't usually drawn out like this (and it's somewhat designed to be very streamlined).
> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
Not necessarily. In many sealed-bid auctions, bidders hope to win with a lower bid (often much lower) than they would if they were bidding against others in the same room. This is especially true if you have no idea whether anyone else is bidding on the item at all. I have placed very low bids on items in sealed-bid auctions for things I had no immediate need for, but would happily pay for if the cost was very low (and I have won many such items, sometimes because no one else even bid on them).
> I have placed very low bids on items in sealed-bid auctions for things I had no immediate need for, but would happily pay for if the cost was very low
Would you think it would have gone differently in an English Open Cry situation?
You're confused. It's the Vickrey auction which is second-price. English auctions are first-price. First-price sealed-bid auctions are different from Vickrey auctions.
Given how the NYT is describing the entire court case (only a level above shit slinging from Twitter), it sounds like this is less about any rationale and more dragging of the feet to get any kind of "win" out of this whole kerfluffle.
The judge basically says as much in the end:
>“You’ve got to scratch and claw and get everything you can for everyone else,” he said.
Which is a truly bizarre statement for a judge to make given the nature of this entire case. Then again, "good faith errors" certainly shows the bias of this judge here.
Parent commenter's description of the difference between an ascending bid auction and a second price auction (or Vickrey auction) is very confused. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for an introduction to auctions and proofs of the optimality of different auctions for different goals (e.g. the second price auction is proven to maximize social surplus): https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
This is almost entirely wrong in all respects. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for a good introduction to auction design. https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
From the article: "Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret. “It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added."
Wait, couldn’t this same argument be made in reverse? If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer, which suggest sealed bids are most appropriate to maximize the value. Auctions can’t be fairly judged in hindsight, generally speaking.
If the bids are secret and the highest bidder pays what they bid then bidders have the incentive to try to bid strategically, i.e. less than what they'd be willing to pay as long as they think that's more than anyone else would be willing to pay. Plus, if there is someone who thinks it's worth way more than anyone else, they could just place a modest bid and then if they lose buy it from the winner for $1 more than what the winner values it at anyway.
The way you can avoid this with secret bids is to specify that the highest bidder will pay $1 more than the second highest bidder no matter how high they bid. Then everyone has the incentive to actually specify the maximum they'd be willing to pay, because if the next highest bid is lower than that they still actually do want to buy it, but they lose nothing by bidding higher because they only pay a dollar more than the next highest bidder no matter what, and then you maximize bids.
But by that point you don't benefit from keeping the high bid a secret anymore, because of human psychology. Someone bids $100, is the current high bidder and thinks they're getting to buy it, then someone outbids them and loss aversion kicks in so they make a higher bid, even though the first bid was supposed to be their max.
Does it? If it's public knowledge that Alice would pay $200 and Bob would pay $100 then Alice wouldn't actually bid $200, she'd bid $101 and still win, the same result as that type of auction. If nobody knows what Alice would bid except Alice then it's even worse, because Bob thinks he could win at $60 and would rather pay $60 than $100 and Alice correctly predicts that Bob is going to do that and then wins by bidding $75. And if Bob bids $80 then Alice can still buy it from Bob for $110 but the estate is still getting $80 instead of $101.
The spirit is that a person owes families he defamed billions of dollars and that person doesn't like who they need to sell their assets to to make that money. I don't even know how and why the details of how this money is recouped is important. If I go bankrupt and need to sell my house, I sure can't stop it from being sold to Hitler or something absurd like that.
Well they are the creditors, so they put their credit up against the value of the thing. It's no different than what a bank does when it bids on a house it put up for auction after a mortgagee default. Here the only difference is that the bidding was blind, which the judge took issue with.
I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the technicalities of the ruling. Go away
Its a classic maximisation problem something the overblown ai skating community should understand nothing to do with feelings or secret agreements because of that. Should be allowed to buy back goes own stuff minus debt no, but go fix the system if you don't like that...
Because they'd be paying a dollar more than the second highest bid, not the amount of the highest bid. Frankly, I'm not sure how that could not be more clear.
So a bid of $200 in a Vickrey auction that results in a $101 sale price doesn't imply that you could have otherwise gotten $200, because in a different type of auction the bidder wouldn't have bid that much.
> If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer [..]
Isn't that what you want to happen?
All the auctions I've ever participated have repeated this very process until none of the buyers are prepared to raise their bid, at which point it appears the seller has got the highest price anyone will offer.
In theory, a Second-price sealed-bid auction will produce the same price as an Open ascending-bid auction. Every bidder will offer the true value of the item to them, and the item will go to the highest bidder at the second-highest price.
But some people might think, due to human nature, that one auction or the other gets higher prices. Maybe an open bid auction gets lower bids, because interested people start lower knowing they can bid again, then back out when they see there's a lot of competition. Maybe sealed-bid auctions work better for large organisations, as getting board approval and CFO sign-off on a multi-million-dollar expenditure takes a few days. Or maybe an open bid auction gets bidders het up and excited because they're in second place and surely no matter what you've bid, you'd always bid 5% more to win - right?
None of which is backed by theory, but if it feels true to the judge - who's to say?
IMHO the main value of buying infowars, to The Onion, was the publicity and headlines. Those are harvested now. If the auction was repeated I can't imagine The Onion upping their bid.
The article suggests that this is is a first price sealed bid auction instead of a second price sealed bid auction. Skipping over the more complex nature of the Onion bid, the linked articles states "The total value of The Onion’s bid was $7 million" and "First United American Companies had a higher bid, offering $3.5 million in cash".
In some parts of the world, they auction houses in this exact manner. You show up, post a very large amount of money to prove you're serious, then everyone bids in person like an art auction.
Here in Canada, when the market is hot there are lots of auctions withe multiple buyers competing for a house. In my market (Southern Ontario), it is almost always a sealed bid situation, and winning buyers often outbid their rivals by tens of thousands of dollars.
The agents around here are fond of a process engineered to maximize the bids: If there are multiple bids that are all reasonable, they will tell the lowballs to go home, while telling those remaining how many bids are in, and offering everyone a chance to "sweeten up" before a final decision is made.
I personally would never buy a home through such a process, which tells you that I absolutely would love to sell my home in exactly this fashion should the market be hot whenever that happens.
Now that being said, I cannot say for certain whether the frenzy of shouting bids while staring your opponents in the eye will produce more money or the sealed bids will produce more money.
They could do an open run-off round of bids until they have two potential buyers, and then switch to secret ballot to get each party's highest bid I suppose?
NYT reporting has been trash for at least 10 years. Anyway Matt Levine, who has as good an opinion on this kind of thing as any columnist, sees it as mostly a technicality, and believes Onion can just submit their bid again. Of course, Elon also now has an outside interest, and can outbid anyone via proxy or otherwise.
> That strikes me as mostly wrong? One, it is not really impossible to value the families’ claims; they have won judgments in court. Two, “whatever the Connecticut Families decide to do with distributions” obviously adds to the value of The Onion’s bid, if what they do with the distributions is give them to other creditors. Three, it is not so much “a text book example of collusion” as it is a pretty standard case of the biggest creditor of a bankruptcy estate using its debt to subsidize its bid for the assets. It’s pretty normal stuff.
>
> I don’t know? Global Tetrahedron’s bid was “$100,000 more than anyone else will pay,” so it’s not clear how much an auction would have helped. I suppose now they can have another auction and Global Tetrahedron can just bid $100,000 — or $1 — more than whatever FUAC bids, including the families’ waiver, and win the auction again.
I must ask - does Mr Jones really sound like that - as if loud throat is getting hammered while functioning perfectly fine and loud and fast and at the same time pressing hard voice breaks, or is it some kind of voice modulation?
Also, @RealAlexJones says "EXCLUSIVE: Alex Jones Responds Live On Air" → is this about two separate Alex Jones, or the same Mr Jones is talking about himself in the 3rd person?
We are deeply disappointed in today's decision, but The Onion will continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured.
We will also continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks. It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case.
We appreciate that the court repeatedly recognized The Onion acted in good faith, but are disappointed that everyone was sent back to the drawing board with no winner, and no clear path forward for any bidder.
And for all of those as upset about this as we are, please know we will continue to seek moments of hope. We are undeterred in our mission to make a funnier world.
I am just some guy who doesn't actually know much about this. This being the internet, though:
If I understand, it's pretty routine in real estate foreclosures for a creditor to win the auction simply by bidding the outstanding value of the debt. Thus not needing to actually come up with much or any cash. This gains the ability to use or resell the property however you want.
Bankruptcy runs by different rules than foreclosures (which is why people about to be foreclosed on often file bankruptcy). Specifically, junior creditors are protected, and everyone gets a proportionate share of the proceeds.
In a foreclosure, the senior lienholder usually gets the property and the junior lienholders either get nothing or get what’s left over after the senior creditor gets whatever they were owed.
I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
> I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal…
The reason is because there were two civil judgements against Alex Jones to satisfy with the second judgement being about 27x larger than the first. As a result, it is mathematically impossible to run an auction that triggers an outcome large enough to satisfy both judgements proportionally and positively. Many members of the second judgement decided to forego any winnings from this auction so as to satisfy the first judgement positively on the condition they would earn a share of ad revenue from the intellectual property in the future. Their primary motivation was not ad revenue or any other form of income, but instead ensuring the concerned intellectual property rests with an owner not friendly to Alex Jones.
That is the reason the Onion won the auction despite offering the lower of two bids, because the larger bid did not positively satisfy the parties to the first judgement.
> I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
The creditors with smaller claims hate the guts of the creditors with bigger claims, and likely wouldn't sell for any amount of money. Also, I am not sure whose claims have been decided to be senior to other claims (seniority of claims has little to do with monetary amount). Not all types of debt are equal.
Correct, although a foreclosure of a property will be affected if the owner of said property undergoes bankruptcy. (For private individuals, such as Mr Jones, some or all of their primary residential property is exempt from bankruptcy, and the foreclosure itself will be stayed until the bankruptcy is adjudicated, and, generally speaking, foreclosure will be stopped if they resume making mortgage payments, regardless of prior delinquencies.)
A bankruptcy trustee was involved during the whole process (3rd party neutral). While the goal of increasing money to creditors here may work due to the free publicity, it harms the creditors interests who already agreed to the settlement. So you have a third party neutral trustee and the creditors who were harmed agreeing.
With that said bankruptcy judges do reject plans quite often and this is a high profile case.
For an entire week, I thought this was an Onion parody headline, and didn't realize the Onion _actually_ tried to buy Info Wars.
We're living in such an entertaining era.
Life imitates art.
It shocking to me too. I can't understand how people are 'both sides-ing' this or just supporting him under some free speech argument. Free speech has limits and a court found Jones went too far and that cost him his business.
People have been arguing the same bogus free speech point in the UK recently because people have been arrested for saying things that are anti-immigration and offensive online.
People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue. If you go around tweeting hateful things about the Royal family and the courts find you guilty, don't be surprised if that costs you your freedom. It's pretty simple.
Alex is legally free to saying whatever he wants, but he had the wrong views on Sandy Hook and his wrong views hurt the families affected, therefore he deserves to lose his business.
> because people have been arrested for saying things that are anti-immigration and offensive online.
What does immigration have to do with this? Nobody has a right to immigrate. Pointing out that there have been a massive influx of immigrants in the UK by any reasonable standard, that the majority of the UK population supports limiting/restricting immigration to at least some extent, that the UK does not have the resources to support the current rate of immigration, that the number of rapes in the UK has quintupled over the past 12 years, and that the rape increase coincides with the increase in immigration are all (1) factually true (2) non-hateful and (3) covered by free speech.
> People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue
That's literally the definition of "free speech". "Free speech" does not have clauses for "hateful" or "truthiness".
Additionally, any normal person who thinks about the problem for more than a few seconds can easily see that even if free speech did have those clauses, deciding whether things are "true" or "hateful" in general is completely impossible - it's not that hard to understand. It's also certainly not something you'd want the government deciding.
The arguments made by free speech advocates are not "bogus" - what's bogus is ignorant statements of yours that get the definition of "free speech" wrong and ignore basic knowledge about reality.
It's really Alex Jones was alleged to pay people to harass Sandy Hook families at all hours of the day. He then proceeded to lie in court and after it become known refused to continue to participate and had a default judgement entered against him.
If I were to follow you around 24/7 for weeks shouting into a microphone is that not illegal?
To be clear I haven't seen a single comment that could be charitably characterized as "supporting Alex Jones". I see a lot of comments that are pointing out that the judgment against him seems unreasonable given the damage he did to these families.
"View it for what it is: a deliberate attack on free speech. This is essentially legislating from the bench. They can't ban him from speaking but they can make it very VERY expensive to do so, and warn anyone else at the same time."
The people pointing out that the judgment is 'unreasonable' are either intentionally lying or extremely ignorant.
The context is that the judge awarded a default judgment because Alex Jones literally refused to participate in the legal system. He committed overt perjury (and was outright caught on this) and proceeded to just stop complying entirely.
If any of us received a court summons and refused to show up or defend ourselves the court isn't going to shrug and say the case goes away. In a system of law you can't just ignore the law and expect the judge to take pity on you.
Torts are not just about damage, they're also about deterrence. Jones repeatedly demonstrated in the court battle that no deterrence would work on him.
His entire business is built on this kind of defamation -- how much proceeds of this kind of business should he be allowed to keep?
Free speech means protecting speech of people you disagree with.
So what if he claims Sandy Hook was an FBI psy-op. Don't agree with him? Then just walk the other way. The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.
>The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.
The vitriol is because the spread of the "theory" led directly to the harassment of Sandy Hook victims by people who believed they were "crisis actors."
Most people possessed of common decency and a moral core would find that objectionable.
Intentionally lying to sell ads at the expense of innocent people being targeted and harassed over years is probably not covered by free speech rights in the US.
And if you want to turn this into an argument about the necessary evils of a society practicing free speech, I'll just say that even if it were "covered", I'm not interested in that "right" existing in that form. Though I'm pretty sure willful lies that result in actual, predictable harm is not protected speech.
Don't even know what your last sentences are about. Are you suggesting a conspiracy of some sort?
It's Hacker News. I hate to say it, but this is all the website is known for at this point. Bring it up in passing conversation with the in-crowd and you'll get laughed out of the room for using "Orange Site" and fraternizing with drug-addled Elon worshipers and "soloprenuers" that beg for recognition for their dogshit SaaS product. The score has been known for years, the political leaning of Hacker News is basically the same as the "curious individuals" that inform themselves via JRE and random X accounts from Russia.
The people using Hacker News are regularly a stone's throw away from the sort of people that use 4chan. Except Hacker News has usernames and karma so it tends to create cults of personality around people that say what people want to hear.
The thing is, this (admittedly common) opinion is as facile as the opinions of progressives who act as though all of reddit is /r/TheDonald. Overall, both are actually very left-leaning websites (in reddit's case, almost overwhelmingly so), they just tolerate the existence of pockets of very right-leaning individuals - because of lofty ideals of "free speech". However, even then, you'll usually see legitimate social conservatism get downvoted pretty heavily, and even fiscal conservatism will garner rapid disagree in most cases.
(That said, to a lot of those people, it doesn't matter if the "majority" are left leaning. And for some of those (e.g. trans people), they're even somewhat justified in that stance, since it doesn't make a difference if the harassment they get from being brought to the attention of "orange site" users comes from the majority or the minority)
Eh? I always figured hackernews was full of silicon valley types who listen to peter thiel podcasts on their way home in their stickshift subaru (or FSD tesla).
Consciously or unconsciously, people begin with an unshakable feeling of “my tribe good,” then reverse engineer a justification for whatever issue is being politicized. Even if it involves defending a repugnant conman and slanderer like Jones.
It just goes to show that far too many people have no fundamental values, only political affiliations.
When the right wing Govt was elected in my country suddenly right wing nutjobs appeared out of the woodwork on country/cities subreddits (seen quite sometimes here on hn as well) overnight as if they were just always there and were just dormant waiting for a time to show up in the right climate. No, they were not immediate new inserts from some IT Cell at all. They were always there.
I do not find anything shocking about Jones support in this post. A great social mistake has been thinking that people supporting nefarious stuff or shady, disgusting, and pathetic people do not know any better - but they do. Thing is - that is exactly what they want!
> He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing *parents whose children were murdered.* He's scum of the earth.
> attacking *people* with bald face lies and using the generated outrage to sell snake oil.
You made a specific claim, were refuted because that specific claim is clearly false, and now you've made a general claim while presenting it as if it's the same as the specific claim. This is not intellectually honest.
The poster suggested that Jones actions on Sandy Hook were an outlier. One 'bad' action. They were not. He built his business on Sandy Hook and similar actions, and that's clearly what my original post intended and I stand by it.
I think it's intellectually dishonest to suggest Jones faced consequences because of one bad action. I have stronger words for it honestly but I'm trying to stick to the rules of this forum.
This whole thread only shows me it's time for me to leave HN. You're welcome to it.
You claimed: "He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered."
This is false, as he obviously didn't build his operation solely on his claims about Sandy Hook as you claimed. The other comment pointed this out, so you changed what you were saying without admitting what you said was inaccurate. Now you are bizarrely claiming that you didn't say what you said, even though everyone can read what you wrote. Alex Jones was sued because of what he said about Sandy Hook, he was not sued for these other actions which were not relevant to the case. Whatever you think about Jones, it doesn't do anyone any good to portray the Sandy Hook case as being about other things.
I meant that he built the business out of attaching sandy hook parents and similar actions. I think that's the obvious reading for anyone who knows anything about Jones.
I sure could have been clearer. But what exactly are you saying? That he didn't build his business this way? Or are you just trying to attack the words I used.
What are you hoping to accomplish by parsing my words technically?
>> Whatever you think about Jones, it doesn't do anyone any good to portray the Sandy Hook case as being about other things.
What do you mean? My whole point is that Sandy Hook is not different from what Jones did every single day, and you don't seem willing to disagree with me. You just seem to want to parse my words.
Why? What exactly is your point here? Why are you arguing this specific turn of phrase? Unless you think that Alex Jones is a voice you want to hear and protect. Why don't you just say that?
You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.
This is a common claim, but it only ever seems to be made by people with a strong ideological commitment who are mad that the opposing commitment isn't banned on the site. In other words, the complaint is that we don't moderate HN based on ideology. Since to do that would contradict HN's reason for existing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), I'm not inclined to start.
The irony is that people with the opposing ideological passion—the ones you refer to as techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists—make exactly the same complaint that you do, just with the ideological bit flipped. They think that HN is (let me see...) full of uber sensitive, far left ideologues [1], not only socialists but delusional anti-socials [2], full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark [3]. Virtually every leftist post is upvoted [4], anything that can be remotely considered right wing is automatically flagged and/or downvoted [5], and only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, because I have destroyed this site! [6]
It's not really ironic, because these perceptions are only opposed to each other on the surface—just one bit is flipped, as I said. The underlying mechanisms have to be the same.
This is a very late reply, but I think it's quite revealing that you seem to be implying that having an ideological stance is (a) optional, and (b) value-neutral. Why yes, people who are opposed politically don't think the other is right, and hope for their views to be promoted at the cost of the other's. That's as trite an observation as I can think of. It's like pointing out that every political ideology supports some violence but disavows violence from others; it's the political analysis of a child, or someone who thinks they are above ideology because their ideology is the dominant worldview of their culture. Ideology has substance and verifiable consequences that can be judged.
But I think you've read into what I'm saying too much in order to defend yourself and the terrible job you do moderating this website; my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences. Speech does have consequences, even if it's polite. But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate than be seen as taking a side, so here we are. That's the charitable interpretation, anyways.
I haven't implied that, and in fact am careful never to imply nor assume it. I'm making an empirical observation about the conditions under which this complaint comes up, and how similar they are.
> my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences.
That sounds fine in principle, but in practice it just shifts the language from 'what is the correct ideology' to 'what speech has negative consequences'. Since you can easily predict the latter from the former—that is, if you know what a person says about the first, it's easy to predict what they will say about the second—I don't see much difference there.
> But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate
Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
One can be on board with the critique of naive neutrality which you refer to in your first sentence (and which, btw, is so often repeated that, if we're going to call things trite, we should include that one), without agreeing that a community like this must be run by mods who publicly consign themselves to a single ideological box and moderate based on the definitions it dictates. That may be what committed ideologues would like, but the majority of the community would not. It's also incompatible with the intellectual curiosity that the site is trying to organize around, so we don't have the option anyhow, if we want HN to exist for its intended purpose.
But you absolutely are implying that, because you're implying that you're acting without ideological commitment. You're obviously not saying it, but the implication is that I'm ideologically committed (and therefore myopic, foolish, not intellectually curious) and you're either not or able to act as though you're not.
> Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
This sounds to me like a slippery slope argument (or perhaps an argument for a strong form of moral relativism): because someone, somewhere might disagree that something is misinformation, it's actually impossible (or maybe just undesirable) to definitively say something is or isn't that. There are certainly gray areas and practical limits (I'd be totally incapable of judging whether any article on chemistry contains disinformation, for example). That's not a reason not to try.
Optimizing the site for "intellectual curiosity", narrowly defined as a _free marketplace of ideas_, is itself a strong ideological commitment. Intellectual curiosity is absolutely good, but restricting misinformation and hate significantly improves the signal to noise ratio of that discussion. I understand the fear that fringe points of view with merit might be drowned out, since historically some things we now broadly regard as true were fringe positions.
But at the same time the quality of discussion here is through the floor when certain topics come up because large volumes of people who know nothing on the subject are simply regurgitating culture war nonsense and abusing the voting system to prevent actual knowledge on the subject from spreading. This site ends up just being another avenue for bad-faith argumentation and outright lies to drown out the truth. This is especially obvious when discussions on some minorities happen: because the people spreading outright lies or repeating culture war talking points are numerous, loud, and _polite_, actual discussion is utterly impossible. The moderation policy serves to provide a shield to bad-faith actors (for example, through "just asking questions"[1]) while silencing those who are actually intellectually curious through inaction.
For a concrete example, some of the most curious and intelligent people I know happen to be transgender. The subject of transgender people is one of the worst topics on this site right now because that group is the scapegoat du jour for the far right. When those people try to argue against commonplace lies and share actual information, they're shut down through the voting system and are outnumbered. They're subject to being called all sorts of horrible, false things... politely and indirectly. As such, they've left. The quality of discussion everywhere goes down, anyone _actually_ curious about the subject only has the loudest but wrong opinions available, and my friends end up feeling isolated and hated. Who benefits from that? Not those of us interested in good discussion. Only the people spreading misinformation for their own political purposes and people who have more emotionally invested in the idea of a free marketplace of ideas than in the truth.
Anyways, I realize your opinion on the matter is unchangeable. I just wish that the site were more honest about its own strong ideological commitments.
I feel like we're hitting a point where we'd have to clarify what we mean by some of these phrases or risk talking past each other, and that's too hard to do in this context. (For example we probably mean something different by "ideological commitment".) I'd like to add a few things though—and of course you're also welcome to do that if you want.
One thing is, I personally wouldn't put the HN concept of "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" anywhere near the phrase "free marketplace of ideas". The word "marketplace" has many associations, some of which are inimical to what we want here. Ditto for "free". Neither word belongs to, let's call it, the domain language of HN moderation (and I could even say bad things about "ideas").
For me, "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" has to do with (1) learning from each other (which implies community, and a marketplace is not a community); and above all, (2) avoiding tedious repetition. The problem with political and ideological battle (on HN) is that it falls on the undesirable side of both lines: its endless hammering of talking points is repetitive; and its pitch of high indignation is destructive to openness and curiosity. If this is a 2x2 matrix, that's the bad/bad quadrant—and note that it's the bad/bad quadrant regardless of which ideology generates the content.
Another thing is, this community has lots of transgender members, they're as welcome as anyone, and some who I know of make some of the best contributions to the site. We don't tolerate slurs or abuse, and warn and/or ban accounts that post those. The community also does a good job of flagging them. Some stick around for a while, but people are welcome to (and do) email hn@ycombinator.com when they see them, and we always follow up. The topic, of course, is fraught on HN, just as in society at large, and people inevitably have conflicting ideas about what constitutes a slur or an abuse as opposed to, say, a wrong opinion. But I don't believe the site is as bad as you say it is on this front. If it is, then there are a lot of posts going unflagged and unmoderated that I'm unaware of.
Last thing is, what does 'misinformation' mean if not 'falsehood'? But then you're asking mods to decide what's true vs. what's false and impose those decisions—which strikes me as absurd. How on earth would we do that? We don't have a truth meter [1, 2]. We have our views about what's true vs. false like anyone does, but I'm not so hubristic as to imagine that my views are the correct ones and wield power with them. That is the worst quality I can imagine in a moderator, and the thing the community would most reject. (I'm also not so hubristic as to imagine that I don't do that, unintentionally—at most I can say that I've spent 10 years trying to get better at not doing it, and practice has an effect.)
Eager ideologues of every flavour say "you don't have a misinformation meter? no problem - use mine!" But the power to decide and enforce what counts as misinformation is literally the power to decide what's true and thereby control the site. Now I'm repeating what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42418981 and we're in a cycle.
Moderation, at least as I understand it on HN, simply can't work on such principles (deciding contentious questions by decree). It needs principles on a different level that can foster the kind of community and discussion that has a chance of remaining curious, and then maybe the community can do the job of figuring out what's true vs. false together.
That doesn't mean I'm reducing this to relativism and I suspect if we were to look at a list of borderline posts together, we'd end up agreeing about many. Maybe most. I don't want culture war talking points, for example, or just-asking-questions baiting, any more than you do. But I want grounds for saying "we don't want that here" other than "you are wrong according to my ideology"—and indeed, I don't want culture war talking points or just-asking-questions baiting in any direction. It's not as if it's ok for curiosity one way and then not ok if you flip an ideological bit.
The top comment on this very thread at the time I write this is clear bad-faith disinformation. Life is a Cabaret, but the Cabaret is not life. The tone here has changed for the worse, especially since the election, and I cannot keep pretending.
Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385079? I have zero idea what the technicalities of the bankruptcy judgment are or should be, but what I do know after an embarrassing number of years doing this job is:
(1) there's no such thing as "clear bad-faith" - to decide that would require knowing someone else's inner state. We don't have access to that about each other, and people are far too quick to draw conclusions about it—thousands of times too quick;
(2) usually the person who seems to be in bad faith just has a different working set of information and a very different background than you; they may be wrong of course, but that's not a crime or sin. We're all wrong anyhow.
(3) the only response to "disinformation" that works (or has a hope of working) is to answer false claims with true ones and bad arguments with better arguments.
I can also tell you that HN hasn't much changed since the election. Or if it has, I haven't noticed, or seen data suggesting it. People have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.
> people have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever the real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.
I think it is generally agreed upon that the volume of shared misinformation and individuals believing misinformation has been dramatically increasing over the last decade as preferences in media has shifted.
It would be interesting if the population of HN wasn't following this trend.
The two sibling commenters spend hours per week on HN and haven't seen this. I spend an hour or so a week looking for this --- you can see it in my comment history --- over and above the probable hours per day I spend on HN (I am on HN professionally).
It's an open-access site, so if you go looking for this stuff, you will absolutely find it. But it tends, strongly, to come from throwaway accounts, and is virtually always flagged off the site. I used to point this stuff out to Dan, but have mostly stopped, because by the time he sees the email it's already dead.
So, no, sorry, I don't think the "festering" charge will stick.
I also spend many hours per week and haven't seen something like this in months. I don't think you're being honest, especially because you're on a new account and likely are an alt of another poster here. You're definitely stretching the definitions of "plenty" and "at every opportunity" at the very least, if not outright misrepresenting the situation as more common than it actually is.
If the comments made are downvoted or flagged, then your claim is also dishonest, because contrary to your claims, nothing is "festering" because its getting penalized and hidden and banned.
I appreciate the substance of your reply, but please don't tell people that you think they're being dishonest (even when you do think that) - it weakens your comment and breaks the site guidelines. If you stick to your substantive points, your posts will be more effective and you won't run the risk of misinterpreting someone else's intent.
I don't want to pick on you personally (so I apologize if it feels that way), but I also don't want to leave this unresponded to when we've had to ask you so many times to stop breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40910766).
I think most HN readers are glad that we ask users not to personally attack others (questioning whether they can read, calling them morons and rubes, telling them to grow up, that they should be ashamed, are out of touch with reality, and so on), —or that we ask commenters not to post that women are asking for too much, that European capital rightfully belongs to the United States, and so on.
Is that "moderation based entirely on tone, not content"? I don't think so; I think that distinction is unsupportable. But whether it is or not, it's clear that we can't have people attacking each other like this, and I'm pretty confident that the community agrees.
Of course it's based on tone. You repeatedly let users antagonize one other, until someone breaks guidelines, you advocated for a startup that was named "fucking awesome," after the concept that they were taking advantage of labor arbitrage, you seem to ignore the realities of mainstream sentiments when they are controversial in order to make your job as a message board janitor easier, and you pick and choose when to ignore hyperbole.
All a reader has to do is observe your behavior, and it's clear what kind of person you are. You make it obvious by your retelling of your personal judgement of my commentaries here. I didn't realize you were St. Peter, Dan.
So Dan, if you don't want people to think you're an asshole, don't be an asshole. But don't tell me Hacker News janitorial moderation isn't based on tone when the guidelines themselves dictate it.
You're bullshitting every reader here and you're showing every user that you're comfortable opening up your admin tools and regurgitating pinned comments without context to stick it to me, and any other reader who dares question your methodology.
Oh and by the way, thank you for privately downweighting my account and numerous other people's here when I had previously consistently been a top comment in a number of threads. When it was inconvenient for you and a comment had well over a hundred upvotes, it's so nice that you can hide behind moderation tools and just send that comment straight to the bottom of a thread.
Don't lie. I have what, hundreds? Thousands? Of comments here? You thought a single percent? A tenth of a percent? Were distasteful? I've been here for probably 15 years and yeah, you pick on people personally.
It's supportable, but unlike what moderation tools you have, Hacker News' codebase doesn't allow me to pin your comments unless I want them to end up in my general pool. And unlike you, I'm not paid a salary to pour over people's comments online.
Don't do this. You do this bad faith stuff all the time and have for years. Don't lie to me and everyone else by saying sorry and then acting like an asshole the next few sentences. Oh whoops. Sorry, didn't mean to pick on you. Then reading off everything you can.
This articulates something I couldn't put my finger on. I think it comes from the internet becoming the main propaganda tool of -- well could be any government -- but for the audience here nation states or actors hostile to the English speaking "west".
The well-spoken troll gets people that are not caught by the meme gifs/jpgs. It requires more work on the propaganda side, but persistence pays off it seems.
Memes alone are not enough to turn most people here, but an account spewing hard-to-disprove nonsense on social media, or someone willing to shill on podcasts tickles the "DYOR" itch.
This feeds back into the comments here and "talking points" are spread.
Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd. I'm not being hyperbolic saying people would be less mad at him if he had done the shooting himself.
And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
Jones continued to inflict harm on families who’d lost children, and profited significantly from it both financially and politically. He defied multiple courts, too, so there was no question of premeditation or incapacity, just repeated decisions to cause harm year after year.
That’s the difference: true crime podcasts don’t cause harm on that scale, and few people are going to defy the authority of the legal system the way he did.
While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones. Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.
It makes sense that Jones would lose the case, but the scale of the judgements was eye watering and is difficult to justify. The scale of the compensation is in a different world to the amount of damage done (intentionally, the bulk is punative). That changes the nature of what is going on.
He's been ignoring the courts. I don't know what you want them to do? I guess they could put him in prison, but I'm guessing that would be considered harsh too.
Again, for the 2nd time, its not what he's done, it's that he's ignoring everyone telling him to stop, including the government. I don't know what you expect the punishment for that to be. If it were you or I we would have had our asses dragged into prison a long time ago. He's only gotten this far because of his money.
Prison would probably be better. I don't think they should let him off the hook, but I'd expect a lot of people lie in court and flashy penalties for Jones aren't going to change that, so there are questions here about consistency of outcome for people going to court. Given that his lawyers were in on it it is questionable whether he does actually understand the risks of his actions, he appears to be getting very bad quality legal support.
He could be go to court every day of his life, lie continuously, fight them every step of the way and it still wouldn't do a level of harm that justify some of the payouts. They are huge, numbers have been tossed around in the range of billions. The engineering value of an entire human life is only around the 10 million mark. And the courts agree with a lot of that because these are punitive damages, so it is very much a judgement call about what is appropriate. It doesn't look like the judges are doing a great job on that front. The punishments are too extreme; from the outside it looks like Jones targeting these people was the best thing that ever happened to them by a wide margin.
> The Jones lawyers argued that the discovery requests were for documents that don't exist, and that's why they were not produced.
And then they accidentally sent all of the non-existent documents to the plaintiffs, showing Jones had committed perjury. And then they forgot to claim it as privileged in a timely fashion. And then Jones got confronted with the lie in court. And then they got sanctioned for the fuckup. Oops.
>And then they accidentally sent all of the non-existent documents to the plaintiffs
That's not what these two linked articles say. The AP articles about this state that the improper conduct was about disclosure of information the plaintiffs had sent the Jones legal team. Nothing to do with discovery that was requested from Jones.
> During parts of his testimony stretching over two days in a Texas courtroom, Jones repeatedly told jurors that he does not use email and that he had searched the contents of his phone for messages pertaining to Sandy Hook after he was sued by several family members of the victims for falsely saying the shooting was a hoax.
> Jones said that his phone search, done during the discovery phase of the trial, did not turn up any relevant messages. Texas Judge Maya Guerra Gamble has already ruled in favor of Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis by default, saying that Jones did not comply with the rules of discovery in the case.
Nevertheless, this one liner about this topic does not specify what the discovery requests were. If the request was about finding text messages regarding a specific topic, as the term "relevant" implies, then just because text messages from Jones exist (and were improperly disclosed), doesn't speak to whether or not those text messages were relevant in this context or not.
You seem to be completely uninformed about the case. Jones has repeatedly defied the court, hidden evidence, refused to comply. He spent years lying about the parents causing them to be harassed constantly. Ruining their already ruined lives. He caused these parents to have to move multiple times to get away from his insane listeners. All the while, privately, Jones knew he was wrong. We know this from his private communications that his own attorneys accidentally turned over. To this day, Jones continues to spout lies about the court and the judge after multiple court orders and contempts of court. No amount of money is enough to undo the damage Jones has done. But taking it all is at least a start. He is a sociopathic cancer and deserves to be in jail.
You’re welcome to try to get the laws against defamation repealed but until then there is a specific legal standard which was met in this case. If you think that’s unfair, perhaps start by asking yourself whether his lawyers made the same argument and why it failed.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.
Do you have any examples supporting the equivalence you’re claiming? The high judgements were caused by his defiance of earlier judgements so that pattern is really what we’re looking for.
How was that harassment? They directed a baseless smear campaign which posed a significant risk to Dominion’s business. Unless we’re defining “harassment” as “accountability”, that seems fair.
I think the more important aspect is that both of these were cases where someone knowingly promulgated false information fully aware that their story was not supported by the facts. Real journalists don’t tend to do that both because it’s unethical and because it can be financially ruinous.
The situation is different in cases where the truth isn’t clear or where supporting evidence turns out to be fake because in those cases a real journalistic organization will retract or update their story. Had either of them been willing to do so, they almost certainly wouldn’t have even been sued. The Sandy Hook settlement was so large because it was obvious that Jones simply wasn’t going to leave the victims alone.
Which wasn't the statements made by employees of Fox News. Perhaps if they had made such a statement they wouldn't have paid out several tons of money.
First, that’s not the same as what fox news alleged - if they’d simply run a “hacker x reported being able to alter the software” story they’d have been in the clear legally.
Second, elections are systems, not individual voting machines. Someone being able to tamper with unlimited physical access is not the same as being able to do so in an actual election (e.g. your bank’s PC probably aren’t perfect either but you can’t just sit down and start hacking them), and that’s only a small part of the actual system - as a simple example, if someone could make it record a vote for a different candidate than you tapped, it’d be caught by your review of the paper ballot which is actually counted. If they messed with the counting system, a hand recount would show huge discrepancies.
The underlying thing to remember here is that nobody seriously believed there was a problem. They started backwards from the desire to pretend Trump didn’t lose and repeated conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory as needed to say that outcome was real. That’s why they lost the lawsuit because it was clear that it was essentially political advertising pretending to be news, with complete disregard for the truth. That also forced the lawsuit since left unchallenged the smear campaign would have harmed Dominion’s business, whereas if there’d been anything factual the company would have been compelled to fix a real problem.
> I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones
They're telling him to stop. That's what the judgement really is. He refused to defend himself in court and he's been told that he needs to stop. And you need to stop carrying water for him unless you can point to a single specific thing that the court did to him that was not fair, and making vague and uninformed statements about the big picture result doesn't count.
> While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones.
As a single human being, he's literally not capable of suffering as much as the bereaved relatives of a classroom full of murdered children, shortly afterwards made the targets often by name and photo of the most insane people in the country.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history.
Is this even an argument? They get sued all the time, and lose. They haven't ever viciously and endlessly gone after the parents of a classroom full of dead children. They did go after Richard Jewell and Steven J. Hatfill, though.
My understanding is he didn't lose the case on the merits. During discovery he was required to hand over documents from his Google account, but Google had locked his account and he couldn't get access. The judge then ruled he was in default for failing to produce.
This is obviously a massive abuse of the justice system, violating the maxim that the law does not compel the impossible. But, since the prevailing opinion (including both judge and jury) observably is "enh, fuck that guy" nobody much cares. However the shoe is going to be on the other foot sooner or later. It may be that hounding Alex Jones wasn't worth the precedent (making this style of lawfare acceptable, not an actual legal precedent) that this case sets.
I can easily imagine a case where, say, X blocks discovery in a similar way to achieve a similar outcome for someone on the left. Do we want this to be how we do things?
This is not at all what happened. I can't speak to his Google account, but Jones failed to produce text messages from his phone referencing Sandy Hook, claiming they didn't exist. Then his lawyers mistakenly sent a copy of the entire contents of his phone to the prosecution, showing that the text messages did in fact exist, and would have been found for a simple keyword search for "Sandy Hook," demonstrating that they were trying to conceal these messages from the court.
Jones lied under oath that he did not have the messages he had been ordered to provide but then accidentally turned them over, which came out quite dramatically in court:
Any time someone tells something is “obviously a massive abuse of the justice system”, ask them for details. Many people lie for political reasons knowing that their followers will not check the facts, but those claims usually fall apart as soon as you do. Lying to a judge or doing something you were ordered not to do is going to get you in trouble no matter what else is going on.
In the case of discovery about Google, note that there were two separate problems:
The first was that he lied about a spreadsheet not existing, and then the defense got evidence that it did - since that behavior was habitual, a judge is going to punish it more harshly than an isolated mistake which is promptly corrected.
The second problem was that he was trying to use the defense that he didn’t profit from Sandy Hook stories while not providing data which could have been used to test that claim. The judge didn’t jail him for that, but he wasn’t allowed to make an unverified “trust me bro” claim.
When was the last time he was profiting from Sandy Hook conspiracies? I heard him apologize for it years ago and say he doesn't believe it.
And true crime podcasts definitely do cause harm, the fans of those shows love playing vigilante detective, stalking and harassing people close to the case to get information. I remember a few years ago there was an incident where they were protesting outside of some guy's house because he was a suspect in his girlfriend's disappearance, so he couldn't even go outside. True crime is an entire industry monetizing tragedies in realtime on a scale the Sandy Hook conspiracies never came anywhere close to.
With someone like Alex Jones, the statement 'I heard him apologize for it' is pretty much meaningless as he demonstrably changes his stance constantly to fit the most useful minute-to-minute narrative for himself.
You basically need to look at the long-term complete picture of how he characterizes his role (I'd suggest https://knowledgefight.com/ as a great source for this) in relation to Sandy Hook.
I cannot recall a specific instance of him apologizing, but I'm convinced he has at one point or another done so. But the number of times he's minimized, ignored, mischaracterized or outright lied about his involvement and impact on the Sandy Hook victims far, far, (FAR) outweighs the actual times he's ever admitted fault and/or apologized.
The deposition of his father clearly laid out that they saw spikes in sales when the sandy hook conspiracy was mentioned and actively sought to replicate it.
How about having people threatening to rape and murder your family because they're convinced your lying and know where you live so you constantly have to move and try to hide your whereabouts.
The crime was defamation and there was an entire court case about it which was upheld on appeal. Alex got his day(s) in court and he lost and now is in the finding out phase of fucking around. The people who harassed these families did so only because of the lies perpetuated by Alex Jones. He knew this to be the case and doubled and tripled down on it.
If I figured out who you were, told millions of people your name, where you lived, and lies about how you did something horrible and they started harassing and threatening you would you actually just think I'm exercising my free speech right just because I never sent those threats myself?
This was extensively covered in multiple court cases which are public record. Why don’t you familiarize yourself with them and come back go this thread once you have a better understanding of what it’s about?
That is your job: you’re questioning the court cases which have very well documented public records, you need to say which specific case was wrong and explain why you disagree.
> Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is the Jones/Sandy Hook case-- like the Fox/Dominion case-- was an outlier because there is nearly never that amount of evidence to be able to pass the high bar for defamation.
So I think it's the other way around-- Jones was comically brazen in the claims he made. Hence the huge amounts in the Jones cases. (And if the podcasters are as brazen, go tell the real living people about their open-and-shut defamation cases and collect a nice finders fee for yourself. :)
Jones was also completely hostile to the courts and legal process. That will get you a larger punishment than someone who did the same actions but respected the court.
I watched some of his videos at the time and to me it seemed mostly like the exact same content that he always does. Very much not brazen claims of facts, just musing and speculating that it's all fake and the parents are smiling so they might be actors. That's it. And the entire time he was emphasizing that he doesn't know for sure and it's all theory.
he specifically called out parents by name, constantly made claims that they were obviously crisis actors, showed pictures of the parents, and did nothing when his listeners started harassing the parents daily.
You probably mean parents who went on live television to give interviews? Well obviously he can show "pictures" of people who were on TV with their name.
The sentence you're claiming isn't hyperbolic is hyperbolic. While you can absolutely reasonably disagree with the judgement, I don't believe you can reasonably use a phrase like "seems like a nut" to summarize his part in this, if you're at all familiar with it and are being honest. "Immoral" would be the absolute minimum descriptor one could employ, even in the context of cold objectivity.
And why should we compare this to the podcast you're describing? They're two completely different kinds of immorality, and are not teams I must pick from.
As a CT native, you'll never coax an ounce of sympathy for Jones from me. He made his bed, doubled down, and faced justice. The system worked at least one time.
Nancy Grace comes to mind, who has far more reach being on national television. She made claims about people who were later found to be guilty. Her speculation pushed harassment.
Alex Jones has far more listeners than Nancy Grace has ever had. He was pulling down 8 figures selling fake boner pills and tin foil hats on his merch website.
I'm unable to find a number about how many people listened to him around the time period, but still arguably, she was a very well known public figure, even if some people didn't watch her. My mom would watch her show religiously.
Boeing killed people while making a not-good-enough design for a highly complex airplane system. And even though it killed 346 ppl, it continues to get millions people safely from point to point safely.
It's negligent and they need to change, but it's pretty forgivable.
Jones went on a mic and ripped false info, enriching no one but himself and grieving these families repeatedly.
This is misrepresentation, they didn't just happen to make a mistake in a complex situation. The crime was to know about the mistake and still not fix it - on purpose. The crime was to know that they should be giving people training on this system for safety reasons but they didn't anyway. Afaik it is an additional misrepresentation that the same system is now continuing on to fly. It is not, they fixed it and patched it.
Some of the issues were reported and a decision maker thought "we can get by without this". Pretty much the same reason the Challenger exploded. With a large company, there's gonna be reports about all sorts of stuff all the time, and you have to sort through the noise. They failed to do that here.
But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?
Crashing airplanes is VERY predictably bad for the stock price.
>But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?
This is not taking into account how humans are. People raise their children really badly all the time even though they know what they are doing is bad but they just don't care in the moment. Who wants a bad child? But they still make all the mistakes and end up producing bad children. Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.
> Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.
That is not the basis for our system of law. Intention (mens rea) matters greatly. Hence anyone who understands law shouldn't be surprised at comparing outcomes between the boeing case and the jones case.
You can disagree with it, but you really shouldn't be surprised.
> And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
Can you cite any data on that at all? I’m aware of the genre of podcast you’re referring to but I’ve never been aware of it even remotely being the most popular genre.
That says nothing about "women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible" even existing at all. (Although I'm sure there's some examples of it somewhere.)
Popping open Podcast Addict, the top 10 podcasts right now are:
1. No Such Thing As A Fish;
2. My Brother, My Brother And Me;
3. Planet Money;
4. Revolutions;
5. 99% Invisible;
6. Stuff You Should Know;
7. The Adventure Zone;
8. This American Life;
9. Freakinomics Radio;
10. The Rest Is History
I had to scroll to #32 to find Casefile which sorta fits your criteria, except it's hosted by a dude and I think he generally discusses older cases.
> And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
I am totally fine with convicting those for slander too. It is a pretty disgusting market.
I feel like your first paragraph has some slight sense, but then you demolish it with the second paragraph which just shows that you actually have no idea who Alex Jones is or what he has done
I don't agree with Jones' political positions, but as someone who was not born in America, I think I can see the issue in a less passionate and partisan way. For me it is clear that the this judgment had a gigantic political vector.
I fully agree on the guilty verdict, but the sentence, frankly, was meant as a political message for Jones and everyone else on his side of the political spectrum: Stop talking the things you talk, because we are coming for you, and we get you, you won't like it.
As someone who was born in a corrupt small town in a corrupt banana republic, and was somewhat familiar with this kind of thing, it was pretty easy to see it for what it was.
Does that sound as worrisome when you remember that his “talk” was repeatedly accusing parents of faking their own dead children, to the point that many of them were receiving violent threats from his listeners? Nobody went after him because he had weird views on tax policy or international relations, it was because he refused to leave suffering families alone.
This is also a good time to consider what you are saying by calling it a “political vector”. Lying about a mass shooting snd harassment aren’t traditionally a partisan position so by using that framing you’re implicitly saying they belong to his party.
> Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd.
I'm normally extremely sympathetic to this argument, but not only was this a conspiracy theory about dead children, but it implicated the bereaved, devastated parents and all of the relatives of those children. It's so many people that you can't really make up for it, ever. There's no number of dollars or good deeds that will get him into paradise.
The fact that he still operates in much the same way as before makes me think he's blessed by intelligence agencies to use as pretense for what they want to do or as distraction from what they are doing.
I really don't understand how a judgement this large can be reasonable in a case where nobody has had his house burned down.
A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments.
I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't fine somebody the value of an entire town unless he's done destruction of that order, or at least a fraction of that order.
Stealing from an earlier comment of mine [1] in case you want to read the comments.
Alex Jones declared in court that his show reaches about a hundred million people. If that's true then he's paying $10 for every person who heard him defaming the families of dead children.
This would be the same principle as those fines in Nordic countries sometimes that depend on how rich someone is. If you can influence one hundred million people and use that power in a criminally irresponsible way, you get a proportionate fine.
Yeah, we don't have that in Sweden except for criminal acts, and then the fines are a certain number of days of your income as a substitute for imprisonment.
In civil cases our judgements are usually not enormous.
I don't feel that your reasoning above makes the judgement more reasonable. Maybe he does reach that many people, but he obviously makes nowhere near that amount of money and it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
> it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
This point made me curious so I quickly looked around. Fox News paid a $787.5 million settlement [1] for making false claims about Dominion. Given that this happened as the trial was about to start, it's reasonable to assume that Fox News expected to lose even more if the issue went to trial. And that's for a party that arguably would have followed court orders, something Alex Jones refused to do.
Next in line is Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered to pay $150 million for defaming two election workers [2]. If Alex Jones defamed 12 families then it comes out roughly the same.
The acts of defamation were extreme, clear cut, repetitive and devoid of remorse. I for one like knowing that if someone ruins my reputation with cruel lies in such a malicious and relentless way that they may face extreme consequences.
How about in a case where libel was relentlessly thrown at families over the course of years, on one of the internets largest and most engaged audiences, leading to harassment, threats, and assault? What should the judgment be for that?
I emphasized that it wasn’t just over words said, but the frequency of, audience size, and actual real world harm that’s taken place as a result. And as other commenters have pointed out, he acted in contempt of the court on several occasions
The same way that big media organizations get away with this in court.
"This content is entertainment and there's no way that any reasonable person could construe this information as facts." If MSNBC, CNN and Fox News can get away with this argument every time they are sued, I don't see how InfoWars doesn't.
But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
> But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
My sibling in Christ, Jones is paying because he fucked around with courts. He was told to stop by court, and he didn't. He had a chance to defend himself, and he passed on it.
That's not true either though. The default judgment was for not complying with the discovery process to the satisfaction of the court. Other options like perjury charges were available to the court, but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.
Also in many cases courts will allow you to walk back from the circumstances that ended up with a person in default and to proceed with a fair trial. I even have direct experience with this in a foreclosure/foreign-judgments case.
The court could have allowed Jones to correct the financial and web-analytics records and proceed, but it didn't.
I'm not going to dig up the transcripts, but I was following this pretty closely when it happened. If memory serves right, Jones was given several chances to comply with discovery requests and was constantly attempting to misdirect and otherwise disrupt the proceedings. It's not like the court balked at the first weird thing the defense did and immediately entered into a default judgement. I believe the default judgement is the only thing that makes any sense in this case. The courts aren't there to play games with people like Jones.
edit: I dug up the judgement anyways. Take a look and tell me if any of this isn't reasonable. How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
> The Court now finds that a default judgment on liability should be granted. The Court finds that Defendants’ discovery conduct in this case has shown flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules. The Court finds Defendants’ conduct is greatly aggravated by the consistent pattern of discovery abuse throughout the other Sandy Hook cases pending before this Court. Prior to the discovery abuse in this case, Defendants also violated this Court’s discovery orders in Lewis v. Jones, et al. ... and Heslin v. Jones, et al. .... After next violating the October 18, 2019 discovery order in this case, Defendants also failed to timely answer discovery in Pozner v. Jones, et al. ..., another Sandy Hook lawsuit, as well as Fontaine v. InfoWars, LLC, et al. ..., a similar lawsuit involving Defendants’ publications
Parties play games in cases of this nature all the time. Court battles like this can be bitter.
Perjury is a criminal charge. Contempt is an option to. Judges use the lever of jail time to deal with situations like this all the time (again, direct experience here -- a surrogate court judge put two 70+ year old ladies in Rikers for a month for failing to comply with the court repeatedly over years). Going to default was exceptional behavior that nobody shed a tear for because it's Alex Jones.
Edit: To answer your question
> How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
If you're looking to make a political statement, sure none.
If you're looking to have a fair trial, there's still steps A, B and C.
Even the fact that he had to fight all those cases for the same thing separately is a deliberate step to fuck him. Then the court treating giving the same data in each trial as a separate offense is certainly cherry-picking.
I'm not really complaining though because the concept of a fair trial does not exist. Civil or criminal. Do whatever you can not to end up in court. It always boils down to who has the most resources and the appetite for battle. Some pockets (like the state's) are near-infinite.
>given several chances to comply with discovery requests
The Jones side claims that these discovery requests were for documents that don't exist. The linked judgement provides no detail on what the specific discovery requests were that went unanswered.
Do you know what the discovery requests were for specifically?
But I know that "that document doesn't exist" is a valid response to a discovery request. Silence is not a valid response, even if the document doesn't exist.
(If one side falsely claims the document doesn't exist, the other side then can present evidence to the judge that the document does in fact exist, and that the first side is withholding evidence. If you play that game and get caught, various bad things can happen to you. The judge can look more skeptically at everything you say thereafter, the judge can rule that the other side is entitled to assuming the contents of the document are whatever would be most damaging to your side's case, you or your lawyers can be fined, and your lawyers can be disbarred. Judges deal with this kind of stuff all the time; detecting and blocking such games is a major part of what they do.)
The judgement document does not go into any detail therefore we don't know whether the Jones team responded with "these documents don't exist" or not. If that was their position, why wouldn't they have responded to that effect? There would be no motivation to do otherwise.
skulk updated their post upthread to include an actual quote from the judgment. That says quite enough. It doesn't have to list specifics of a repeated, flagrant, bad-faith pattern of attempts to disrupt discovery; the rest of the record of the case will do so, in detail after detail after detail.
I haven't really tried since the SCO v. IBM days. But for a federal case, you used to be able to go to the courthouse and ask to look at the case file. You could make copies of anything you want (at their rates per page). Or you could use PACER to view it, if you had an account.
I suspect things are more on line these days rather than less, but I haven't tried lately. If nothing else, you should still be able to see everything on PACER. (If they are online instead of in PACER, there may be a delay time - three months, maybe? But for this case, that shouldn't matter.)
I have never, ever seen a judge use contempt or a default judgment (against someone represented in court) without directly threatening to use that power first.
>but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.
Institution that is a fundamental part of the establishment and status quo jumps at the chance to shit all over someone who's shtick is undermining public trust in the establishment and status quo. Water is wet. More news at 11.
Yeah, I think the part that makes this so controversial isn't that they exercised their discretion to screw him, which is absolutely expected, but that the court chose a total amount so large as to be newsworthy and garner sympathy for Jones and make people question the actions of the court by itself. The idea that some singular kook running a talk show could get a judgement that we rarely ever see levied upon major corporations that pour far more man hours into far more definable evil makes people who've never heard of the guy ask WTF.
If that's the case, I sure hope nobody finds my post history from my teen years, or the history of anyone who was a rebellious teen on the internet in the 2000s.
Alex jones sold something like $165M in supplements in the 3 years preceding this case… this is somehow the opposite of people complaining that judgements against FB are too small based on the Revenue.
It was a default judgement. No trial took place and there was no ability for the jury to see evidence from both sides. The monetary amount was absolutely based on feelings.
So you're saying the legal system should hinge on the judgement of what random people believe is "crazy" rather than judges, juries, laws, etc. One opinion should outweigh everyone and everything else?
Yes, but a billion dollars. It's 30x the sale price of Minalyzer, a very cool Swedish firm which was bought by Veracio.
It's a level where, when it is an international case, it makes sense for states to get involved with diplomatic pressure. Surely your legal system must be more reasonable than this, because if it's like this, how can it function?
It wasn't a billion dollars for a single thing, it was awards to 15 different defendants, ranging from ~30-120 million each.
More importantly, you're missing that this was a default judgment - Jones didn't defend himself, so the award is kind of the theoretical maximum. The results aren't comparable to regular court cases where both sides make their case.
Why should the system accommodate people who refuse to defend themselves?
I understand that in a system like Russia where dissidents face made-up charges and their attorneys are harassed by the state. But Alex Jones isn’t in that kind of position at all. He has no problem getting legal representation.
The default judgment basically means he admitted guilt by his refusal. That was his choice.
Nonsense - a legal system must apply the law. Also, Jones wasn't "weird or peculiar" - he repeatedly disobeyed and misled the court.
This is like a soccer match where one team won by fifty goals, because the other team repeatedly committed fouls and then left the pitch, and you're arguing that the referee should disallow some of the goals because you feel in your gut that fifty is too many.
It must give reasonable results, and a 1 billion judgement against individual over something like this is not.
That procedure or rules have been followed is no reason to accept an absurd outcome. An absurd outcome is rather a reason to reject a set of rules or procedures.
And this absurd outcome is partially due to a flagrant disregard for the sets of rules and procedures that came before this case.
The Knowledge Fight podcast covers this case in its entirety and it's clear that Infowars et al. has toed the line of criminal to delay and deny justice to the victims. The legal system hit the end of the road and said "everything owed to the victims or everything Infowars has" and this is the result.
But the ruling was for compensatory damages - that is, the compensate the victims. It wasn't a punitive damages - which would make more sense - basically "You don't get to have your infowars any more".
Compensatory damages is making the claim that the sandy hook families actually suffered $1B in damages.
Because damages are easy to calculate - how much money did Jones make from intentionally lying about the victim? That money is the result of him selling their repuation without their consent - the market decided what the value of that act was.
Well partly true... The part where no one wants to watch your videos seems extremely reasonable.
Unfortunately you veer way out of reasonableness when you compare the crime of arson with the civil law of defamation. Criminal law and civil law are very different things... So much so that im not even sure what you're trying to get at with your analogy.
You do seem upset about it though, and that does make sense... I'd imagine the world would be scary without even a basic understanding of the rules that you're held to. Fortunately this information is readily available... Some review material for junior high civics classes will cover most of what you need to know, and should only take you an hour or two to go through.
Same reason Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy charges and CCE. Unusually harsh for those convictions and a first time offender. The point is, as cliche as it sounds, to send a message.
By his own admission, Jones spent years spreading malicious lies about these people. Some people have had to go in to hiding because his unhinged followers started tracking these people down.
As soon as you say "I think more gun control might be a good thing to prevent children from being murdered" you get threatened, bullied, and harassed by a lunatic unhinged fringe stoked up by dirty malicious lies. Is this free speech? Of course not.
He has worked for years to shut people up by creating a hostile anger-filled environment where any normal person is afraid to go against him. Alex Jones hates free speech.
It's not, as defamation should have legal consequences. A one billion dollar payout verdict is just orders of magnitude off in terms of proportionality.
Unfortunately, Alex Jones the person and the nature of Sandy Hook means that most people won't be able to look at this situation with any sort of sanity. The verdict could have been 100 trillion and people would have said it was deserved.
I'm not sure that is the argument that you think it is. If a jury awarded it after seeing all the evidence and the majority of people agree with it, wouldn't that indicate that it is fair? What criteria do you have that overrides the vast majority of people's sense of fairness?
I think you'd feel differently if some person with a huge following spread lies about you and your family and those lies resulted in thousands of people threatening and harassing your family.
As has been noted in other threads on this page: free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want without consequence. It specifically does NOT mean you cannot get sued for saying something that demonstrably causes immense harm to someone.
Right the problem here is the targeted, selective enforcement -- really, overenforcement -- of laws. Nobody would argue that people hit with $100 million judgments for copyright violations while torrenting music actually had copyright on that music. They didn't. But the point of the eye watering judgments was to send a message. Same here.
>Nobody would argue that people hit with $100 million judgments for copyright violations while torrenting music actually had copyright on that music
I don't understand the above, but they've actually made this judgement, and it's much too large. A firm worth as little as 30 million can be an incredible innovative company, supported by a government and serious effort, and here we have people just handing out a 1 billion dollar fine over something where nothing even close to that value has been destroyed.
It's as I said in my initial comment, the value of a whole town.
The goal of punitive damages is to prevent the person from engaging in the illegal activity again.
If Jones stops spreading lies about this people, then perhaps you have an argument, and a smaller punitive judgement would be enough. But if he keeps going, then we can only conclude that the judgement wasn't enough.
They know Alex Jones has money. They're coming after his money. I think it's as simple as that. And I wouldn't be surprised if the judge simply doesn't like the guy.
He lead a mob of his audience to threaten families that just had a child in their family murdered based on lies. There's no price on how horrible that is. Argue all you want, it went through a long process to get to that number so good luck with that.
It is clear that Jones and his relatives have moved money and assets around in order to shield them from the verdict. Now, money that should have been already given to the victims is being used to steal back the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place. The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences. There are no words for the evil going on here. What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
That's not what this judgement says. It actually says the sale did not generate enough money for the creditors and the process should be run again. I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.
The creditors agreed to and supported the Global Tetrahedron plan to purchase Infowars and settle the bankruptcy. Seems like the judge is overstepping given Delaware law on this matter.
The main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate.
So long as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways.
> main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate
Did the judge argue against the single round or the sealed price?
Criticising sealed bids is nonsense. The gold-standard auction (Vickrey, or more accurately, VCG) features sealed bids. If the judge is criticising sealed bids at all, The Onion should appeal.
Criticising a single-round auction, particularly with two bidders, on the other hand, is valid.
> as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways
Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
I have real world experience with a lot of different auction designs being deployed, including many variations of the VCG auction.
The VCG auction is only good in theory. In practice, most people don't know how much they actually value a thing, and when they are trying to play the VCG game they typically underbid and later have deep remorse. That's the most common mistake, but I've seen plenty of other mistakes as well.
In other words, VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes.
In my experience, the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go. Instead, you have to talk yourself into taking a risk on being left holding the bag if you choose to push the price up.
> VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes
May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions? You're describing unsophisticated bidders unwilling to expend search costs. For them, yes, "the seller has an interest in providing participants with as much information as possible about the object’s value" both before bidding starts and during it, the latter due to the impact to bids being less than the overcoming of search costs.
> the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go
Another comment highlights why this doesn't work for high-value items [2]. (They also assume bona fide bids, which isn't a problem if you can filter out shill bids.)
> May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions?
It varies. In all cases, the value was below $20,000, in many cases the auction was non-recurring and >$1,000 (for example, specific web domains). I've seen enough smart people fumble a $1,000+ VCG auction that I'd be nervous to assume bidding would be any better at $100 million. I've also seen enough investors fumble $10m+ investment deals (not auctions though) to feel comfortable asserting that a higher value auction does not necessarily imply that the participants will be better at auction theory.
> “It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added.
So it sounds like the judge specifically had issues with the use of sealed bids.
The exact form of the auction is really really important though. A Vickery auction is single round and sealed but is critically a second price auction so bidder are incentivized to bid their maximum because they will get the second price which wasn't the case in this auction. Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size.
> Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
The blatant attempts to move assets out of InfoWars during the bankruptcy is an entirely different story but that money may technically come legally from outside the estate.
> exact form of the auction is really really important though
Sure. But nobody uses Vickrey because it's impossible to explain to the public why the highest bid wasn't accepted.
> Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size
Which is exactly what happens in any single-round first-price format. The only thing an open auction does is facilitate collusion. Let me repeat: for a single-round first-price auction, sealed bids are the only way to go.
> that money may technically come legally from outside the estate
It may but it doesn't. Jones saying the judge "ruled in our favour" (emphasis mine) sort of gives away the game.
There's a huge one people use all the time without knowing it, eBay is a second price auction too most people just don't use it like one. You can place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment. It just automatically semi-unseals bids as new bids come in so it looks a lot more like a live outcry auction.
> eBay is a second price auction too most people just don't use it like one. You can place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment. It just automatically semi-unseals bids as new bids come in so it looks a lot more like a live outcry auction.
This sounds small, but it's a huge difference. Let's I know that some widget is actually extremely valuable, and would be willing to pay up to $1,000. You don't know this, and are willing to pay $80. In a true second-price auction I put in $1000, you put in $80, the bids are unsealed and I pay $80.
But with the e-bay system, if I put in $1,000 at the beginning I've partially tipped my hand by bidding it up to $80. You started with some uncertainty about the value of the object, but knowing that I agree it's worth at least $80 pushes you in the direction of thinking it's worth more. This is a major advantage of sniping: by putting your bid in only at the last minute you keep others from reacting to your bid by changing theirs, and so convert the auction into something much closer to a true second-price auction.
Yes it different but it does work to increase the bid which is the goal of an auction, discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time. The fact that it's worse of you as a bidder hoping to get a deal is actually good for it as an auction design.
There's also some assumptions built into these analyses that there's at least two people who have a reasonable perception of the value of an item. Things get massively more difficult to analyze when you start including changes in perceived value.
> fact that it's worse of you as a bidder hoping to get a deal is actually good for it as an auction design
The point is, in the above example, you wouldn't bid $1,000. So I will bid $50. Then $60. Then $70. Then $80. Then $90. And then, seeing the price has changed, I will stop. And wait. I am willing to pay $1,000. But it doesn't ever make sense for me to bid that.
Even in the eBay example you're betting against their being a third party that will attempt to come in with a late bid so the auction closes before you can respond. If you want the item it's still optimal to bid your maximum and allow the second price mechanism to function, if you bid $1000 and there's only one other bid of $80 (and the price increment is $10 or 12.5%) you get the item for $90 either way no matter if you bid that manually or if you placed a maximum bid. That's how a semi-sealed second price auction works (at least as eBay implements it) the next minimum bid is revealed as new bids come in that are responding like it's a live cry out auction. If there are multiple max bids it's just set to the highest second price plus the bid increment and the max bid is still hidden.
That's the beauty of the eBay system it works for people to interact in two ways, as a more boring sealed second bid system and as a live cry auction. The biggest point it falls apart is you need a certain number of people to understand the system to act rationally about it. If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one.
> you're betting against their being a third party that will attempt to come in with a late bid so the auction closes before you can respond
Yes. It's why people use bots, e.g. [1].
For low-value products, particularly amidst repeat auctions, the incentive to do so is small enough that one can mostly ignore it. For a high-stakes auction, you're just devolving the game into a high-frequency race.
> If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one
The point is it really only works as an English auction. The "sealed" bid is for convenience. (It's not really a sealed or even semi-sealed bid, it's just a dumb auto-bidding bot.) Run a major auction with this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
You can use bots or you can bid your true maximum and receive the best price available below it. You can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is. If all the sniping bidder are above the sealed bidders then the auction still functions to discover higher prices just not as efficiently.
> this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
Sure but no one does, the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism. Major auctions don't need to make that accommodation, the audience can be relied on to read and think about the auction structure which is unfortunately not an option you can really take for a mass market tool.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Of course you can. You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit. The only case where the auction is efficient is if the automatic bidder is the highest and someone else bids up to their maximum.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Correct. But eBay doesn't have sealed bids. You can absolutely snipe an auto-bidder; this is like the first high-speed algorithm that was ever developed in the real markets.
> no one does
Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
> the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism
...yes. The eBay model is a compromise that works for unsophisticated bidders and low-value auctions. eBay's model is a known-flawed model that does not "discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time" [1].
> You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit.
That's not sniping. Inherent to last second sniping is you get a limited amount of chances to boost your bids, in the best case you're taking one shot at the bid to place it at the last millisecond eBay will accept your bid. You're trying to get the last bid in on an auction so no one has a chance to respond. Incrementally bidding up to find the ceiling is directly opposed to the goal of having a sniping bot.
> Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
That was talking about other auction runners using the eBay model for extremely high value items because of the complexity of execution, not about people using bots. I know people use bots it's just that to win they have to beat the bid placed by people using the second price functionality. I'm not denying their existence just questioning how effectively they actually distort the auction structure.
If a lot of different people (using different bots to avoid GIXEN's automatic mini auction) all place their maximum bids at the last second the winner is still the person with the max bid be that a bot user or a pre bidder.
The winning strategy to win that bidding war is still to place your maximum bid in the bot and if everyone does that it's just a normal sealed second price auction. The bot strategy just relies on there not being enough interest in every item and finding one where you can bid less than your maximum and still win which is also true of a pure sealed second price auction. I'm just not seeing where the strategy and outcome differ by including bots if there are second price bidders in the mix bidding their true max.
most people just don't use ... place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment
The reason people don't do this on eBay is because sellers can have a friend bid on the item to raise the second-place bid more than you're willing to pay (shill bidding). The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay. Bidding a higher amount leaves you vulnerable to these shill bidding tactics.
> The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay.
Of course... why would you ever bid more than you're willing to pay? Huge doesn't mean more than your maximum.
Also those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment. If they fail they can not pay out but the seller is out their time and any listing fees (depending on the eBay era we're talking about). Conceivably you're still willing to pay your maximum bid the second time an item is available in most circumstances.
Even shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item. The goal of the auction is to benefit the seller not the buyer's ability to get a deal. It would probably be fixable by making the bid more binding but that's a separate issue you're still paying at max your nominal maximum price if you win.
> those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment
Yes. That or you use one shill to uncloak the max and then another to bid just below it. Worst case, as you said, you're only out your listing fee.
> shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item
Which is why for high-value items in a system subject to shill bids, bona fide bidders don't put their actual maximum price into an unsealed (or semi-sealed) system. Which lowers the auction price.
Klemperer wrote an approachable intro to auction theory.
> multi-round or not, they should still be equivalent in expected revenue to VCG - no
VCG is second price, so we're already in a sub-optimal regime with a first-price format. (All while illustrating why Vickrey auctions don't work with unsophisictated observers. Could you imagine the shitshow if The Onion won and then didn't have to pay their bid, but Jones's?)
Given first price, I don't think the number of rounds is revenue equivalent.
I thought the other reason was that some creditors were trying to use their debt forgiveness as a credit to purchase inforwars. Which obviously doesn't make sense in a bankruptcy, since the whole point is the creditors are not going to get paid back 100%.
> Which obviously doesn't make sense in a bankruptcy, since the whole point is the creditors are not going to get paid back 100%
The creditors already own the asset. The estate is selling, not Alex Jones.
If you asked every creditor which bid they preferred, which do you think they'd choose? The creditors forgoing their claims obviously prefer one. As for the rest, they'll choose the one that pays them more: The Onion's bid.
This isn't how bankruptcy works in practice, but it's a good shorthand for what the correct answer should be.
The Onion's bid is the one where the creditors are applying their debt. The competing offer is more cash.
The whole point of bankruptcy is that the creditors do not get to vote and the solution that makes the majority happy isn't the best one. In an ideal bankruptcy everyone recovers the same percentage of their debt.
They quoted the relevant portion. The creditors do not own infowars already.
A court appointed trustee is liquidating it, the owner has not changed (and will not until it officially sells).
Certain creditors giving up some of their claim can shift more money to other creditors effectively increasing the amount paid out by the estate, thereby satisfying more creditors so it's completely kosher just slightly odd. It's unusual because most companies are just companies and the creditors have less/no emotional investment in anything other than receiving the maximum amount of money from the bankruptcy.
I don't see what emotions have to do with it. If a business has a claim for $28 million in debt against a bankrupt company with near zero cash, I could easily see them saying "we'll bid the full $28 million for the asset X". Presumably the asset X has some non-zero value. Even if comically low (like a single small office building), collecting the value of that asset is much better than $0.
Emotions come into it where some creditors are willing to forgo their portion of the sale proceeds for a particular outcome. That counts as the bid satisfying some portion of the debt and now other creditors potentially get more money from the bankruptcy. The law allows for this, banks do it all the time on foreclosure auctions splashing the bids with their outstanding loan amount making it unprofitable for others to bid and winning the house they can then sell in a regular manner.
The issue is when $50 million is owed and some of the debtors offer to give up their $28 million dollar claim for the building. But then there is no cash for the other debtors with a $22 million dollar claim.
As opposed to selling the building for $1 million cash and everyone getting 2% of what they are owed.
It's the value that goes to the creditors in the bankruptcy and is the legal requirement for the bankruptcy process. Jones gets none of this money he doesn't own InfoWars since he entered the bankruptcy process.
Indeed - is there a history of democrat-nominated judges acting in corrupt manner enriching the politicians that nominated them? We're not comparing apples to apples here. One team is playing by the rules, and one team has burned the rule book, eaten the ashes, then shit out the ashes, then ate the shit again.
They typically file in the United States Court for the District of Delaware, a federal court located in Delaware. Delaware law plays a significant part in these cases even though they’re in Fed court. Corporate charters, filings, fiduciary duties, property rights, choice of laws, etc etc etc are all determined by Delaware law and used in the federal court.
Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
So, Delaware law does in fact have nearly everything to do with it.
> Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
Federal bankruptcy law sets the substantive as well as procedural rules for bankruptcy, and its substantive provisions trump any state law, but, OTOH, state law has some role both in determining what the set of claims going in to bankruptcy are and, to the extent permitted in federal bankruptcy law, setting things like allowable personal exemptions, etc.
Yep! This is all correct. The point remains, however, that Delaware law does have a substantial amount to do with bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware, which is really the point I was responding to.
I may have been wrong to say "nothing" but from what I understand Delaware law has very little to do with it and I don't see how it would be relevant to this particular ruling, but I am always open to learning more as I find the topic of law quite interesting.
I don’t know in this case specifically. In the typical case though I’ve seen corporate charters enhance fiduciary duties, I’ve seen them specify auction procedures, I’ve seen them give certain classes certain rights, and most importantly for this case I’ve seen them define corporate governance during the auction sale.
So potentially has massive implications for the auction and its fairness.
Taking the judges decision at face value here is fundamentally the problem - because it relies largely on Alex Jones as an arbiter of reality.
The judge seems to take Jones, the guy who lost the auction, as the arbiter of what happened. That is a problem and not just because of the strong potential for bias, and not just because the trustee would be a more obvious source of truth - because he ran the auction. Its a problem at a deeper level because the judge seems set on taking Alex Jones as a good faith actor. Every step in the court process has shown that not to be true. We aren't here randomly and this bankruptcy doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Even setting aside that nonsense. THe judge seems confused on the difference between money and value. Thats the type of thing an undergrad gets wrong.
The actual issue is that the winning bid was $7m- $1.75m cash + $5.25m in debt forgiveness. The question is whether that bid is higher than the competing $3.5m all-cash bid.
That $5.25m debt forgiveness would have to be valued at $1.75m or more for the winning bid to actually be higher, but if other creditors are assuming that they will have losses of higher than 66% then the $3.5m all-cash bid would actually be better for other creditors.
FUAC's offer was all cash. The Onion offered less cash, but offered other incentives (AIUI, a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future). Saying that The Onion's bid was lower requires you to put a dollar value on those other incentives. The fact that the two creditors (read: victims' families) that would benefit from those incentives were willing to sacrifice some of the debt they were owed so they could benefit from those incentives suggests that at least _they_ think those incentives were worth more than the cash upfront, and the amount of debt they were willing to sacrifice gives you an implicit baseline for that dollar value.
Given the site we're on: it's like saying that an offer with a lower base salary but higher equity is automatically a worse offer than a bigger salary with no stock.
> a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future
What is that realistically? They said they will turn it into gun safety information. How does a gun safety information site make money out of an audience of people expecting a guy shouting about conspiracy theories?
I don't know what it is. It's an investment, it carries risks with it. That said, if I were one of the Sandy Hook families, turning Infowars into a gun safety site would hold more value than any money you could pay me. Classic case of "maximising shareholder value" not being the same as "maximising revenue".
What that is realistically is irrelevant to the value to the bankruptcy estate - the value to the estate is the amount of debt those creditors are willing to forgive in return for those risks.
The idea that Global Tetrahedron would generate revenue from InfoWars is a farce. Jones is InfoWars. Any market value assigned to InfoWars without Jones explicitly involvement is a farce. Even a non bankruptcy sale of InfoWars would require him to participate in the business for an extended period of time. Even then, it'd just be some investor bankrolling Jones.
Yes, that's precisely what I mean. It might or might not be a bad bet, but the Sandy Hook families are just as entitled to take that bet as anybody else. The idea that it's farcical to entertain any offer that doesn't involve putting Jones back in charge leads you down a really weird road.
That seems true for any attempt to continue using the IP for the same thing. Turning it into a parody of that thing might have an audience (and therefore produce ad revenue), would not seem to need Jones involved, and be something for which Global Tetrahedron seems well resourced.
It's complicated - it went to the bidder that would result in the two largest debtors being the happiest with the outcome but that bidder didn't bid the most money in a regular manner.
The structure of the bid was quite complex but essentially the largest debtor agreed to enlarge the share the second largest debtor would receive by supplementing it from their own share due to the awards in the two court cases being so drastically different (basically the largest debtor decided to decrease their own share in that specific bid to supplement the second largest debtor) - this bid was the one that the primary debtor prefers and would award a lot more value to the secondary debtor than the bid that was, on paper, larger.
There are some good detailed analyses of the arrangement out there that would give you a much better understanding than I can communicate second-hand - I'd suggest the overview by LegalEagle[1], personally.
> went to the bidder that would result in the two largest debtors being the happiest with the outcome but that bidder didn't bid the most money in a regular manner
The creditors own the asset. If every dollar the creditors are owed voted, which bid would they choose?
The onion bid - by far. If the bid was chosen by creditors weighted by owed value the Connecticut families would solely dictate the terms as they are owed more than 90% of the value resulting from this auction.
If this is the case, dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no? They are assigning value and signaling accordingly.
> dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no?
Sure. I’m trying to approximate a metric that gives their weighted interest. My point is the owners of the asset are selling it, and it seems their interests are obviously maximised by one bid.
Just navel gazing here maybe there is case precedent or law here.
The debtor generally deserves their case to be discharged resolved liquidated closed and done forever.
Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this. Alex Jones himself could convert his case to a chapter 13 and set up a “repayment” plan based on his own anticipated/potential earnings from his own business. It would possibly even be higher, infowars intended audience is probably more profitable than people laughing at infowars on Ben Collins bluesky feed.
The people who got a personal judgment aren’t made whole by a promise of future restitution by someone purchasing his business assets.
What if the onion went bankrupt next year and said oh we’re not going to pay that anymore?
That would be an interesting case to test: a person being relieved from a fraud or criminal tort, as it’s handed off to a third party buying their business, who themselves didn’t commit fraud or a criminal tort and merely became insolvent which is dischargeable.
In the case where the “creditors” own the asset to settle their claim, that’s another story, whether they make $1 or a billion dollars disposing of it is no longer the debtors problem
In the same way that returning my smashed up uninsured car to a secured lender doesn’t make them whole for my discharged loan either.
>Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this.
Sure it does, the Onion would be paying the royalties, Alex Jones already doesn't own it, it's essentially owned by an estate that is selling it off to cover Alex Jones' debts.
That's incorrect - it's a lot of text to say it went to the second highest bidder. The onion bid was the one that provided more value to the creditors.
From what I've read, it's not incorrect. Orthogonal valuations are not part of the bid value. This is why The Onion was second (the winner). It was not the highest bid (the considered part). The end.
The Judge has decided that's unfair, likely due to some bias (intellectual, political, etc.)
This is the comment I was looking for. He said he was going to intervene and something to the effect of “fix it.” This seems like a logical outcome of that statement.
You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid, I'm kind of okay with that. Just kind of. His fix will not go to Jones. Jones is not going away however this ends. Just the brand. He can create a new brand.
>You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid,
He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's literally where all news gets broken. All of it. And he's using it to influence global politics.
Inflated values was Musk's own words, not mine. To the point, he was forced by a court to honor his original higher price than what he wanted to pay after re-evaluating it. Not sure why you're quibbling over the fact that everyone thinks Musk paid an inflated price.
>Not sure why you're quibbling over the fact that everyone thinks Musk paid an inflated price.
Not everyone thinks this. Are you talking about the financial geniuses in the comments?
>To the point, he was forced by a court to honor his original higher price than what he wanted to pay after re-evaluating it.
What's your point? The original comment was to imply "Haha! Elon overpaid for Twitter!". The company is worth more than $44B. Not sure why you're quibbling about being able to buy at the absolute rock bottom price, even when he got and will continue to get value from the purchase.
> He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you.
It's indisputable that Twitter was worth $44B at the time of the sale because by definition the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree to perform the transaction.
What's also indisputable is that even Elon Musk was refusing to pay that much for Twitter and tried to back down until he was sued to force him to put his money where his mouth was.
>It's indisputable that Twitter was worth $44B at the time of the sale because by definition the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree to perform the transaction.
I know you think this is some kind of deep philosophical insight, but there's an entire industry built around getting value from an asset beyond the price paid. We don't live in a world of perfect information.
Jones will create his own new brand once this is settled.
So it is more of a question to the bankruptcy court itself, as I would agree that there's no value in Infowars without Jones. So my opening bid to the court is $1.
Will the losing bidders drop out, or not? In a sealed bid you have to guess what others will bid - you want to bid $1 more than your competitors (or if you will lose the bid make your competitor pay as much as possible). The judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding.
> judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding. Who is right I don't know.
Sealed-bid auctions are incredibly common across markets [1]. Real estate. Corporate mergers.
Note, too, that an English auction is revenue equivalent to a second-price sealed-bid auction [2], and here we had a first-price sealed-bid auction with two bidders.
There may be valid reasons to challenge this auction. Sealed bids is absolutely, definitively not one.
I am not disagreeing with anything you have said here. Sealed-bid is common. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't. It is debatable if it is better or not.
No, it really isn’t. Not with two bidders. The moment the first party announces their bid you have perfect collusion (if the second party, rationally, runs out the clock) or a stalled auction (if running out the clock is impossible, thereby always allowing someone to always claim they’ll bid better).
you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold. Repeating the auction just seems pointless, but another avenue could be for the assets to not be sold, and the claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business. Then over time they can potentially see a better recovery than what they are getting from a sale.
> you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold
Wrong. Vickrey auctions are well studied in single-item auctions even with two bidders [1]. (They perform between 4/3 and 2 compared to an optimal omniscient auction. Not solved. But not unstudied.)
> claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business
This is Chapter 7. The bankruptcy estate already legally owns the asset, not Jones.
You can test this in boardgames about auctioning: See Modern Art, a game about profiting from art, where you have multiple forma of bidding. Part of the game is to figure out when each auction will provide the most money.
Blind bidding doesn't let people improve their bid, but it also lets someone bid much higher than the second best bid, so it can be extremely profitable in some situations. Compare to a version of said auction where you bid only once, but where the winner will only pay the second best bid plus one.
Uncertainty makes bids go up. Introducing the possibility that perhaps there might be a second round after a bid turned out to be too low reduces uncertainty.
Imagine game theory dynamics in poker if an unhappy player could say "well, come to think of it, I guess I did not really want to see, I'd rather fold"
In a single round sealed bid auction, it’s equally likely that a winner will have bid more than they would have in open bidding since they only get one shot to name a price.
> I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.
I no longer remember the title of the paper but it was on the Gordon-Brown-era spectrum auctions. Basically if bidders can obtain information about each others preferences other than via the auction - or in some cases even via the auction - the expected price is lower. I think it applies when a limited number of bidders are interested. If Elon is interested then all bets are off :-)
This seems to me like a victim of attempted murder suing the assailant into bankruptcy, where one of the assailant's main assets is a really expensive gun, and the assailant is still saying how much they'd like to kill the victim with that gun.
Surely there must be a legally viable way to resolve such a bankruptcy that doesn't involve the assailant buying back the gun with funds raised from friends.
You speak practically. Unfortunately the courts do not, and as a result, the courts are suffering a deficit of trust and confidence, nationally.[1] The problems transcend one case and unfortunately they do not point clearly to one answer or a single set of answers. Is it the system? Is it the laws? Is it the people? Why do we get bizarre elevation of form, and results wholly devoid of justice?
The only reason Biden pardoned his son was that Trump explicitly said he was going to use the DoJ for a punitive witch-hunt. No father would ever subject their child to that.
If Harris had won, Biden would not have pardoned Hunter. Likely Harris would've pardoned him in a year or two after he'd seen prison.
They rejected a plea deal. That almost never happens. He was 100% guilty of some things, but they wanted to drag out the whole process for publicity rather than to actually do some semblance of 'justice'.
And some of these incoming people threatened to keep going after him just to inflict pain on his father.
These are no longer the party of Romney and McCain. "The cruelty is the point".
> They rejected a plea deal. That almost never happens
They rejected it because it was worded to absolve him of all crimes, not just those charged, and the judge found the parties did not agree on which interpretation was correct so there was no agreement. It is completely appropriate for the court to want to know exactly what the plea agreement covers and to make sure both sides actually agree on the meaning of it. They could have ended it by coming up with a simple, normal plea agreement that doesn't have that strange ambiguity.
If anything, that looks more like an attempt to do a backdoor non-pardon pardon than some kind of persecution. It was only "dragged out" because Biden's DoJ did not agree in court with Hunter Biden's lawyers on what they had actually agreed to.
And despite the "they" in your sentence seeming to refer to Republicans in some capacity, from start to finish, the Hunter Biden prosecution was done by Joe Biden's Department of Justice. You may complain that the judge was appointed by Trump, but the charges couldn't have been brought to begin with without Biden's DoJ authorizing it.
> Comparing one guy who was in the hot seat only because of his surname
There exists boatloads of concrete evidence Hunter Biden was guilty of several categories of crimes, related to drugs, corruption, illegal firearms and child prostitutes.
There’s a reason he had to be pardoned by Joe, right? He essentially created a “the full laptop” pardon, complete unprecedented.
Any other person guilty of half these things would be in for life.
You got it backwards. He didn’t get a shit storm due to his last name. He got a free pass due to it.
I promise this is an honest question: has ANY president since the civil war reconciliation blanket pardoned someone for an entire decade for all known and unknown federal crimes?
> Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.
That is damn close. This one is quite interesting in and of its twice as long and concerns someone who doesn't have the kind of immunity presidents have recently been under scrutiny for possibly having.
Another interesting thing I found about Hunter's pardon was that the president openly said isolated prosecutions of lying on the 4473 are unfairly targeted, but then baffling only pardoned his son for it.
How could you possibly claim that Jone's has faced no consequences when the best case scenario is him spending $10-100MM to buy back his business from his creditors?
> Instead we have people crying that free speech is the actual evil crime here.
Is this a satire comment? I hope so or else you need to do some reading on what "free speech" actually means. It doesn't let you defame someone, for example, by telling them they were crisis actors in a mass killing of school children.
I think what Alex Jones did is more than mere defamation.
Repeatedly lying about the reality of a school mass shooting, over years, in such a way that he caused threats to be made against the families of victims?
Incitement to credible threats of violence, and especially continuing to do so even after you're aware that's what your listeners are doing, deserves severe consequences.
It has fairly strict criteria which Mr. Jones emphatically did not meet. It's referred to as the Brandenburg test, or the "imminent lawless action" test, you can read more here.
Incitement means means explicitly encouraging. Just because someone people made threats of violence to the families because they believed what Alex Jones said about the shootings, doesn't mean that saying "The shootings were faked" is incitement. If Jones had explicitly said "the families deserve to suffer violent consequences for helping fake the shootings", that would be incitement.
That's why he wasn't convicted of incitement, he was convicted of defamation.
Because accuracy is important when discussing legal terms - he wasn't convicted. Defamation is a civil offense, and not a crime. He lost a lawsuit, he did not become a convict.
Watch the Behind the Bastards podcast on Alex Jones or read some of the testimony from his various cases. The amount of evidence burying him is incontrovertible. His actions before during and after are incontrovertible.
There’s a reason even the right wing hardliners abandoned this guy.
He was literally, as in literally, comparing the families of the victims to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
I don’t know about you, but if someone has been screaming at me for years that I need to be ready for armed conflict with “the enemy” and then points to someone screaming “that guy’s Hitler”, I would definitely take that as explicit encouragement. But obviously it’s all “just comedy” right?
Anyone defending Alex Jones in this case is either ignorant, a fool, or an absolute garbage human being.
I am going to pick ignorant in this case.
> “Folks, we got to get private investigators up to Sandy Hook right now. Because I’m telling you this — this stinks to highest heaven.”
> “Why did Hitler blow up the Reichstag — to get control! Why do governments stage these things — to get our guns! Why can’t people get that through their head?”
Blanket statements like this are worse than useless. It's a nuanced discussion of damages, not a conversation of whether Alex Jones was right or wrong.
The only thing improper about the process was that Jones tried to screw around with it instead of actually cooperating with the legal system. The judge rightfully came down on him like a ton of bricks for his behavior. Follow court orders and provide evidence when it’s required. If you don’t, you’re going to lose your case.
In the article they quote the judge saying "nobody did anything wrong". And the judgemental was to get more money from the sale. Absolutely 0 about Jones keeping anything.
OK if nobody did anything wrong then why is the sale cancelled? Obviously something stinks here. I also never said AJ would keep anything. The property has to be disposed of correctly according to established procedures put in place to protect everyone.
No, it's not. He will not be paying that. He might have paid a smaller yet still large amount, but he's certainly not going to work in McDonalds to pay off $1 billion dollars. He has the same legal rights as anyone else to not be a debt slave.
I don’t think they’ll throw him in jail if he sells off all his assets, pays everything he can, but refuses to work a job so he can pay more.
Being liable for an amount more than you have means the people you owe won’t be able to get the full amount, but it doesn’t mean you get to keep all your stuff and pay them nothing.
Garnishment is taking a portion of income, not taking the actual source of it. No business means no income, no income means no garnishment. I love how you cite Wikipedia as if grown adults here have never heard of garnishment. Then again education really is going downhill these days I guess.
Taking away some amount of wages is very much a thing, as everyone who ever divorced can tell you. You better not ask how math works there, because it’s not fun.
As I said to someone else, taking some feasible payment from income is different from rendering someone unemployed. If you took a construction worker's tools, a taxi drivers car, or anything like that, then you put them out of business and render them incapable of paying. As far as divorce or child support, the same principle applies (or ought to). If the worker cannot sustain himself and his necessary expenses, he will become unemployed and incapable of paying.
Well, the catch is, you may not like what the judge decides is feasible. At least in the divorce cases the interests of the parties have to be balanced, here they don't have to be.
I'm not arguing against bankruptcy. I'm saying that bankruptcy is a structured process that is supposed to generate monetary outcomes for everyone. Selling off assets in a non-competitive process is basically a criminal move, especially if you collude with one of the bidders who is also a creditor.
Bankruptcy itself aside, the judgement against Alex Jones here is huge. I haven't looked it up but I'm sure it broke records. The plaintiffs' initial demands of trillions of dollars were absolutely insane. They could have actually gotten more money with a lower judgement that allowed him to pay over time. But clearly restitution is not the objective.
> Selling off assets in a non-competitive process is basically a criminal move, especially if you collude with one of the bidders who is also a creditor.
Not sure why the bankruptcy trustee working with the companies largest creditors, so large, that a simple proportionate would result in them claiming pretty much the entire possible payout, can be considered collusion.
The only people who can possibly be harmed are the creditors themselves. If they want to strike a deal that results in more equitable outcome, but with less total cash, that’s their business. Remember Alex Jones is on the hook for close to a billon dollars, and that sum has already been through various appeals and due process already, it’s no longer up for debate. The only question left is how Jones is gonna pay it. Unless someone creditably believes someone is going to hand over close to a billion dollars to purchase InfoWars, it seems silly to reject an offer that the creditors themselves believe is fair and reasonable.
>Not sure why the bankruptcy trustee working with the companies largest creditors, so large, that a simple proportionate would result in them claiming pretty much the entire possible payout, can be considered collusion.
Because there is no actual money, there must be consensus among creditors, and the assets in question might more than pay the debt (in general). I believe there are also tax implications to writing off debt in some cases, as well as tax implications associated with the actual sale of property. So no, you can't just go rogue and take possession of someone's property for any price you like without even having the cash, just because they haven't paid their debts or they are an unlikeable person.
> Because there is no actual money, there must be consensus among creditors, and the assets in question might more than pay the debt (in general).
What makes you think there wasn’t agreement from all the creditors? There is zero chance the assets can cover the debt (which is close to a billion dollars). The whole point of the deal was that the primary creditor was giving up part of their claim to allow the other creditors to actually see a real payout. There was real cash on the table, and under the rejected deal, every creditor, except the biggest, would see more actual cash in their pocket.
All of this was only possible because the largest creditors worked with the trustee to create a better deal for everyone involved. The fact it also allowed the largest creditors to stick it Alex Jones was icing on top.
> So no, you can't just go rogue and take possession of someone's property for any price you like without even having the cash, just because they haven't paid their debts or they are an unlikeable person.
If you’re the one that owns their debts, then yes you absolutely can. The current owner has already forfeited their claim to the property when they defaulted on the debt and started bankruptcy proceedings. Why the hell would the owner of the debt be required to have the needed cash on hand to repay themselves, that’s ridiculous.
it very much was a case of FAFO. he lost the case by repeatedly skipping his deposition (once with a fake doctor's note), and by refusing to participate in the discovery process. them during the damages trial, he repeatedly lied on the stand in obvious ways, and also went on air repeatedly while the trial was ongoing to call the judge and jury insane, on drugs, etc. the trial strategy of loudly and repeatedly defaming the jury turns out to be a bad one since it does a very good job explaining to the jury just how awful being a target of Jones was.
Sealed auctions are a competitive manner and the sandy hook families are in all practical reality the only creditors of note. Their damages absolutely dwarf his other creditors to the point where they were already in line to effectively receive nothing. Going against the will of the families is absurd to begin with.
No they are not. Technically nobody knows what someone might be willing to pay. That is why public auctions are the default. The only reason an auction should be private is to protect the identity or interests of the bidders. Taking one round of bids from private parties is not an auction.
Yes they are. They encourage people to make the best bid they reasonably can based on their desire to ensure the purchase goes through. There's a reason they are the de facto standard for bidding on government contracts.
> Technically nobody knows what someone might be willing to pay.
This is correct. But what you don't seem to understand is that this also causes people to overbid. This is the reason why the vickrey method was created - to ensure that the highest bidder does not massively overpay against the second.
> That is why public auctions are the default.
Public auctions are the default for... what? Bankruptcy? In the US, yes. In Canada and other parts of the world, no. And default does not mean only option or best option.
> The only reason an auction should be private is to protect the identity or interests of the bidders.
They are frequently used explicitly because they often get the person selling the best offer. If the people bidding in auction have asymmetric purchasing power, in an open auction, the winning bid will be slightly over the purchasing power of the weaker party. In a sealed bid auction, the winning party will frequently have a bid with a larger delta than they would have in an open auction.
> Taking one round of bids from private parties is not an auction.
Nothing about the word 'auction' precludes a single round of bidding, sealed or otherwise.
Bankruptcy is a process to make whole the debtors - in this case the primary debtors (those representing far more than 90% of the debt) were content with the outcome. The process was approved by everyone who is a relevant party to this matter - the original owner (Jones) no longer has any say in what happens to their former assets.
Just to reiterate - the trillions number is irrelevant - it's just an initial damages claim. The judgements were for 965M and 50M - slightly over 1B in total - and the expected final award to the injured parties is likely going to be below 200k.
It's not the only objective, punishment is also an objective. If not you get settlements like Purdue Pharma's one which even after paying billions in damages still had made more money than that, you don't want an incentive to break the law like that, it becomes just another cost for the business and not really a punishment for it.
Yeah, but nobody ever argues conservative values when adhering to those gives a disadvantage to the one arguing. Proper conservative argument should make my life easier and predictable at the expense of other.
Exactly. On the same vein, it's only legal if it benefits them (“Finally, a judge followed the law.”), otherwise it's illegal persecution trying to silence his free speech.
Let's not discuss "proper processes" when Jones illegally hid evidence and refused to participate in our legal system to the point of getting a default judgement against him. Everything he was accused of he did - he refused the right to participate in our justice system and accepted full liability for his actions.
On the point of "any award in the billions (much less trillions, as they initially demanded) is exorbitant for mere defamation" this is a pretty clear misunderstanding of our legal system as it is today. Initial claims are a mere formality that do nothing but potentially limit damages - the judgements rendered against Jones were 965M in the Connecticut case and 50M in the Texas case - no other numbers are relevant. Finally, referring to 1.015B as "Billions" feels rather dishonest - the total award is technically above a billion but the families will see nothing near that amount in the final resolution.
It's perfectly fair to stop but I did want to highlight one thing:
> It's not a mere technical distinction. The fact that the number is so high essentially guarantees that AJ cannot pay it. A lower amount might have actually been paid. What can we make of this? The intent was not to get restitution, but rather to destroy the business. That seems unethical.
There is actually an important reason to secure an absurdly high judgement - some of the creditors involved in this situation are Jones parents (and I believe some affiliate companies also hold some of the debt). The judgement will be divided proportionally by debt so the size of the judgement will impact how much money from the bankruptcy sale Jones' parents will receive.
I also think it's fair to view this case through the lens of ongoing damages - Jones has received C&Ds about Sandyhook and ignored them - even during the trial he continued to cause additional damages. There was every indication (to me at least) that if the business survived the damages would continue and the only way to reasonably make the other parties whole was to destroy the business.
I understand this may feel like unnecessary censorship but the path to this point was AJ repeatedly ignoring the justice system saying "Stop doing that" and his response to the process up to this point hasn't been to act in good faith.
> Ok then, the lawsuit was settled with an absurdly large judgement. Nobody thinks he has this money.
The judgement was derived from the absurdly large damages he was proven to have caused to his victims.
If he has no money to compensate the victims of his actions for the absurdly large damage he caused then this means he's bound to declare bankruptcy.
> I think it's relevant as to the intent, which is to get a ridiculous sum rather than simply a reasonable one.
The intent is to ensure that people like Alex Jones cannot cause damages to innocent third-parties. The intent is to bring down legal consequences that match the damages caused to others in order to hold him accountable for his actions. Think: if you are going to constrain damages to your cash grab perspective, you'd be ensuring that those well off would be free to cause damages to everyone around them provided the are not as rich so that worst case scenario they would pay a symbolic fine and change nothing in their antisocial behavior. Do you think this makes sense?
>The judgement was derived from the absurdly large damages he was proven to have caused to his victims.
Obviously the amount of damages is entirely subjective. AJ said mean and inaccurate things on his podcast or something and that's about the extent of what happened. No person or thing was physically harmed because of this. There was no doubt some stress involved in being the subject of his podcast, but how much is that worth? There are people who literally get killed or maimed and their families don't get anywhere near this kind of settlement.
>The intent is to ensure that people like Alex Jones cannot cause damages to innocent third-parties. The intent is to bring down legal consequences that match the damages caused to others in order to hold him accountable for his actions. Think: if you are going to constrain damages to your cash grab perspective, you'd be ensuring that those well off would be free to cause damages to everyone around them provided the are not as rich so that worst case scenario they would pay a symbolic fine and change nothing in their antisocial behavior. Do you think this makes sense?
The emotional damages caused to others here are unfortunate but not worth a billion dollars (at least from where I'm sitting). You don't have to go to such extremes to discourage someone rich from doing bad things. It could have been a more reasonable number that can actually be paid over a reasonable amount of time. Making those payments would remind the offender to be more careful.
And its not simply that he accused some parents of faking their children's deaths. He also specifically instructed his listeners to rise up and "find out the truth". And he did so repeatedly to an audience he knew to be heavily armed, and prone to violent performances of their beliefs. And he did so after being ordered, repeatedly, to stop saying such things, and to retract his statements. But he persisted, arguably because he wanted the revenue he received from having that audience.
Now, most of these parents have dealt with consistent harassment of varying severity revolving around their dead kids for longer than the children have been alive in the first place. Many of these parents never even got the chance to grieve in peace before the harassment, stalking, assault and attempted murder (not sure what else a drive-by-shooting qualifies as) began.
Certainly, if any of these nutters continued to harass the parents after Jones issued a retraction, that's entirely on the nutter. But the thing about our legal definition of slander/libel is that it does take into account what happens when third parties hear and act on the slander/libel. Like, if I accuse somebody of pedophilia, and somebody else, of their own accord, murders the person I accused, the murder is considered in determining what the legal remedies are against me, even as the murderer is on the hook for the murder as such.
Since when does this "Ability to pay" metric have anything to do with "Damages"?
A judgement is what happens when the parties fail to come to any agreement about a settlement; A settlement would be where you'd figure in realistic actual compensation odds.
Also: "Destroying a business" and "unethical"? Businesses are artificial constructs we create and protect only for the social benefit they bring; They have inferior ethical status to human being in terms of accountability, behavioral psychology, and the sheer intangibility of meaningfully "harming" a business. We should be employing meaningfully large civil judgements against businesses far more often, because our criminal laws being difficult to apply at corporate scale so often fail to deter criminal wrongdoing which the justice system would otherwise throw the book at a biological human for.
Steal one person's house out from under them using fraud and we throw you in prison for 10 years. Do it with 100,000 houses from beneath the corporate veil, and we bail you out for your losses from having to relinquish the mortgage.
If not sizable fines, we should be employing "The Death Penalty", and simply revoking their corporate charter and seizing all their assets in a blanket action, when they do abhorrent things. Because, and I can't stress this enough - they aren't people, they're potentially dangerous, amoral / psychopathic algorithms which will only comply with rules to the extent that rules will be enforced in a way that destroys shareholder value.
What he did was beyond mere defamation. It was heinous, it was blatant and deliberate dishonesty, and targeted vulnerable victims.
Repeating the verifiable lie that the Sandy Hook incident did not happen, and promoting violence against the surviving families, despite repeated opportunities to stop without penalty, is beyond forgivable.
And this penalty is because he declined to defend this behavior. Remember, it's a default judgement.
The conditioning to the public is that this behavior is not tolerated in a civil society, no matter what your political leanings. Him losing his "intellectual property", but not his voice, is getting off lightly.
No matter how heinous you may find his speech, in America, under the First Amendment, Jones (or any nutball or even Nazi you may choose to pick) has a right to say it - even if he has a large Radio and Podcast megaphone.
The First Amendment is nearly absolute, and must protect unpopular and offensive speech even more than it protects popular speech.
(Don't start with the bogus "fire in a crowded theater exception" - that wording comes from Schenk v. United States (which was not even a 1A case, but involved the Espionage Act), and was nearly entirely overturned in 1969's Brandenburg v. Ohio. The clear falsity of the "Fire!" claim has repeatedly and wrongly used as a justification for suppressing speech for a century, to the detriment of us all.)
As much as I'd personally enjoy never hearing from or about him again, I agree that 1A is an extremely important right that should be defended, even if you hate what the person is saying.
But free speech does NOT mean freedom from consequences. Taking away infowars does not stop him from continuing to speak his nonsense.
(nb this is not a defense of Alex Jones or the events of the article, please read my whole comment to understand my point)
> But free speech does NOT mean freedom from consequences
Freedom of speech most certainly means freedom from coercive consequences. Or do you think the first amendment merely prevents the government from engaging in physical prior restraint such as putting duct tape over your mouth, and post facto punishment is legal? Ultimately this "consequences" refrain is a broken talking point that was arrived at by people arguing for the attractive cryptofascism of big tech censorship [0].
The right answer is that there are "exceptions" [1] for freedom of speech based on other concepts. For example, forming a contract (especially a verbal one) is done entirely through speech but yet still commits parties to performing other actions in a legally enforceable way. Defamation and harassment are other concepts that get equitably weighed against the ideal of freedom of speech. And those last two are what Jones ran afoul of.
[0] It started off something like "... consequences from private parties" and then the last bit got dropped because the focus wasn't a good faith discussion of freedom but rather a cheering on of the consequences. See also the fake libertarians saying "edgy" things like those who can't afford food should die - their focus isn't really the freedom but rather it's the death.
[1] In actuality they are not exceptions but rather equitable balances. The axiomatic-foundation framing of rights is a dead end, as it intrinsically supports the cryptofascism of denying rights through an ever-increasing amount of preconditions.
You are 100℅ right but on here this kind of insightful comment is usually downvoted. I should have way higher karma but I have a bad habit of pointing out things that should be obvious to at least the Americans here. Keep up the effort!
You may wish to look up the concept of 'jawboning' if you're under the misapprehension that this sort of workaround to the First Amendment is generally supported by historical jurisprudence.
You're going to be hearing that word a lot in the next four years. May as well get a head start on it.
It's clear how these people operate. Everything is black or white, good or bad. If someone is bad, then they are wholly evil and every allegation against them is true, no proof required. The key goal is to destroy him and the exact justification used is an unimportant detail.
>A better example in the US is the thousands of innocent black men who have been hanged from a tree because "everyone knows they did it"
Atrocities against people were committed using this logic since the dawn of humanity. The bigger problem is this way of thinking is used to justify the vilification of people even to this day. See debates on supporting US election candidates.
It’s being done right out in the open by having his parents “own” his vitamin business, which is now bidding for InfoWars. This is one of the big problems with how the court is handling this case.
This is a lie. Hiding assets is trivially easy. You just shouldn't hide them by literally hiding them or not telling about them.
Selling the assets for almost free to a different organisation just before you go get your bankrupty is the way to go.
If it is legal and done in plain sight, then it is not "hiding" by definition.
If it were illegal, the court and the lawyers representing parents would have done something about the fact of the sale.
Hide: "put or keep out of sight; conceal from the view or notice of others."
The fact is that most of complainers here would be laughed out of the bancruptcy court, yourself included.
Selling assets for nothing before bancruptcy is legal, but will almost certainly be scrutinized by the court. The court has a broad power to collect the proceeds, sue the purchaser for the difference from the market value, and take additional steps to recover assets.
In the financial world, hiding an asset doesn't always mean making it literally invisible. It just means making it out of reach to the collector.
You can argue about the legality of what he did if you want, but being a pedant about the dictionary definition of the word "hide" just detracts from your main point by showing that you're arguing in bad faith.
Fine, I'll go with your definition. I already pointed out (which you didn't bother to read) that fire-sale of assets before the bancruptcy does not make them out of reach to the collector. Maybe you need yet another definition. Try harder.
The argument the lawsuit wasn't about defending the honor of the dead kids while going after the nearest deep pockets is pretty questionable. I don't condone what Jones said but it seems pretty clear to me the reason the parents wanted the money was because they felt Jones was selling a false story about their children.
> This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights.
It’s fascinating (and worrying) how the people who cry the loudest about the first amendment are the ones who least understand it. The right to free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything without consequences. If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.
I’m reminded of the Twitter engineer who said “Twitter wants to censor bullying and harassment, and the idea of free speech is that you can bully and harass people”. No dude, not it’s not.
> The right to free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything without consequences. If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.
Right, and how do you obtain that "proof of deliberateness"? Or measure that non-physical harm in a way that doesn't give power to people who just don't like what you're saying (possibly the truth)?
Most people in favour of free speech already know about libel and defamation, you're just trying to muddy the waters here.
You obtain it through a court, exactly had happened here. Jones as a deliberate lair, who has ruined the lives of dozens of people who had already had the most terrible thing happen to them -- the murder of a child.
It actually wasn't. The case was decided on a default in discovery and no facts were ever tried. Then the separate penalty trial was started immediately afterwards. The judgement is being appealed, but in Texas, you can collect anyways. If the appeal is successful, then the claimants may have to pay any difference back, or reduce the total amount they can expect to receive from escrow.
I really don't think people appreciate the precedents involved here. Including that one of the claimants is was an active FBI agent at the time and was suing over claims involving his job performance which has never been done before.
> Jones as a deliberate lair
Well, it could be that he actually believes what he says, if so, what exactly should happen then? This was never heard by a jury or judged on those merits.
Whether their stories about what they dealt with are true or not, they have incredible incentive to make sure they present such dealings as worth a billion dollars. You can't put a price on human life, but if you could surely those children are worth a billion and more, so they just took the money from Jones (the nearest lying person they hated) instead of the broke murderer.
Bernhard Gaetz famously said (accurately) the victims family never got a dime from him after the lawsuit. It's quite likely similar will be said from Jones, although they can take the scraps of Infowars which is worth very little without their star loon. They are grasping at straws while being yanked around by attorneys, while the brutal truth is the real enemy that murdered their children is in a grave and they will never be able to truly dish out justice to him while they flail around looking for it elsewhere.
People do have their children murdered, and it's terrible, but they often go on with their lives.
Because of Jones, these parents were harrassed for years, forced to move home and go into hiding. Yes, it wasn't Jones doing the harrassing directly, but he was the one accussing them of being actors for years.
I don't at all agree with what Jones said. I find it disgusting. But you should take a look at some of the videos of the parents. There is one, where the dad is laughing and smiling and suddenly goes up to the microphone and switches to sad dad mode.
Now being a thinking, somewhat empathetic human being I understand people handle grief differently. I don't think he was an actor. But I understand why he might be viewed that way. It seems insane to me that somehow it was lawfared that Jone's real interpretation that it looked like acting to him (it looked like acting to me, but I know it wasn't and those kids really were killed) and somehow it is his fault that he is liable for harrassment others do under the flag of agreeing with Jones' take. That has an incredibly chilling effect on speech.
Jones did lose the civil case but it was a weird one, in the right venue, at the right time, in the worst possible light, and with pretty bad representation both of himself and spotty counsel. It's not something to look at to rest your hat on for how these things will continue to be interpreted in the future.
I do not find it credible to jump from one person showing a happy emotion at a stressful time, which happens in the real world all the time, to “this whole thing was the biggest setup of all time, a dozen children are fake, there are no bodies buried in the ground, but no one will admit it out of the hundreds who must have been involved”, and then to continue that, with no concrete evidence, for years and years (Jones will say he mentioned this once or twice. That is a clear lie with obvious evidence against it, we have the tapes proving it).
Again, if he’d said this once, or even a couple of times, we wouldn’t be here now. If jones could have provided any reasonable evidence to back up his claims, we wouldn’t be here now.
No I don't find it credible. I do find it credible that Jones would latch on to it out of reasons devoid of personal malice, and that even if he thought it wasn't true he would still be incapable of anything other than obsessing the anti-viewpoint presented by the government, if you know anything about the guy.
It is important people like Jones exist, even if what they spout almost all the time is vicious lies that nutjobs cite to harass people. Someone needs to bear the banner of the conspiracy angle, and drum up whatever evidence they can find.
There’s a long history of law and court cases that have set the rules for making this determination. Do you think this is the first such case in history, that no one has thought of this before? These sorts of laws go back thousands of years in general and hundreds of years specifically in the US. You are not some super genius who just realized it’s hard to figure out if people are intentionally lying. That part of the case is long over with here.
I feel like if this is your position, you should make it clear you’re not talking about the first amendment here, which is subject to interpretation by US courts. I’m not sure how you would do this succinctly though. Maybe “Unamerican Free Speech”?
> Right, and how do you obtain that "proof of deliberateness"? Or measure that non-physical harm in a way that doesn't give power to people who just don't like what you're saying (possibly the truth)?
If only there were a system of formal rules and a process where evidence is presented by highly trained and experienced experts, presided over by an impartial arbiter, with deliberation, established precedent, a system of appeals, and if only that system had been used here.
You're stretching it. In the US the government can't arrest for causing offense to someone specifically because of the 1st amendment...You can get sued for libel (very high bar and it's notoriously difficult in the US) but you're not going to be rounded up and put into a corrections facility for being offensive.
The Sandy Hook parents received death threats for years because of him. That’s not “being offensive”, it’s tormenting people and putting their lives in peril.
How can you prove that the person sending a death threat was specifically motivated by a specific, broad act of speech?
This is an impossible, unenforceable premise. It has no basis in law either in theory or practice.
Example lines of inquiry: How does one identify the “first mover”? How does one identify the integrity of the “calls”? What if the calls are a single caller represented separately? What if the calls are falsely represented by motive?
FFS, nobody is stopping him from speaking! He's being held accountable for his own words. You have it completely backwards: this is Free Speech in action.
Dude you are uninformed! Jones profited off the sandy hook families, elevated people like halzig, and accused the parents of being crisis actors which directly led to harassment. Jones is the one with the platform spreading these lies and that is why he got sued.
Also he certainly may have won the defamation cases against him. Too bad he totally made a joke of the process which led to the default judgement. Maybe he thought providing the discovery info was worse?
Listen to his depositions yourself if you don't believe me. Jones is a sociopath.
If someone started a rumour that “the_optimist on HN sleeps with seventeen goats every Thursday” and you started getting calls of people saying “you’re a pervert for sleeping with seventeen goats”, it would be quite obvious what motivated the call, would it not?
Before calling something impossible, consider the bare minimum effort to skim the linked article, or read any article on this subject. It is in fact quite trivial and provable.
Your hypothetical is neither trivial nor provable.
How does one identify the “first mover”? How does one identify the integrity of the “calls”? What if the calls are a single caller represented separately? What if the calls are falsely represented by motive?
What if I, in fact, have today received 400 calls on the matter you have stated? Am I eligible to sue you?
It's horrifying to me that when people don't like a defendant they're willing to justify almost any reduction of that person's rights in an effort to see them "punished."
> you can and should be punished.
This is a civil case. Why should he be "punished?" Shouldn't he just have to pay a settlement? Why is a billion dollars a reasonable penalty for his actions? Why must he necessarily sell his platform when the platform will make the most money staying in Jones' control? Why is it important to the victims in this case to ensure that a specific owner controls these assets?
> I’m reminded of the Twitter engineer who said
Okay, does that have any bearing on this particular case, or it's details?
The media is routinely used for psyops to bully people into certain policies for profit using known lies with no accountability, either all media companies should be held accountable for this or none should.
If the Judaical system enforces content regulation selectively, that is objectively worse than pure free speech since it encourages propaganda AND suppresses dissent of that propaganda. Also no one cares what you're ok with, go report some facebook posts if you want to feel like an idea authority.
Most people who have this opinion going in tend to change it when the learn the particulars of the case. Jones absolutely knew he was lying, he did it deliberately, the lies caused incredible real world harm, he knew they were causing harm and he kept doing it because that’s his business model and that’s how he gets rich.
>If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.
The first amendment absolutely gives you the right to lie, and the right to profit from that lying if you're not explicitly committing fraud or defaming anyone. You may disagree with it, but that's what the law is.
Well I hate to break it to you but profiting by lying is the definition of fraud. In general if someone is impacted by your actions you are open to legal ramifications.
That's incredibly pedantic. What Alex Jones engaged in was nothing remotely like "fraud". The poster you're replying to is correct, the first amendment does protect "liars".
This is defamation, which is also against the law. However, the damages here are incredibly minor, and thus not worth punishing. Most people probably don't believe you.
However, if I made a lie about you that caused you to lose your employment and become unhireable, is that also protected speech?
You don't have a right to harm others with lies. You don't have a right to lie.
There is no evidence that being made of marshmallows is damaging to one’s reputation, and thus this would not necessarily be classified as defamatory. The law requires proven damage. The details are tricky.
I'm aware. That's why I mentioned it. There's no remediation if there's no damages.
If I'm made of marshmallows I'm not human and not eligible for health insurance. If my insurer believes your claim which is a reckless disregard for the truth and I'm denied coverage, you're liable. If my wife leaves me because she didn't want to marry a marshmallow and causes massive legal damages and emotional harms you're liable for defamation.
It's like you're arguing you have the right to punch. Like, sure, swing your arms wherever. But your right to swing your arms ends at the tip of my nose.
You seem to have the concepts logically inverted. Mistruth is necessary for defamation but not sufficient. You are quite certainly allowed to lie, generally. You are even allowed to lie about me, and there is no exemption to the recognition of God-granted freedoms for it in the US.
However, there are very specific exceptions. You are not allowed to lie under oath. You are not allowed to defraud. You are not allowed to defame. Those states are each defined separate and apart from “lying,” which is freely permissible.
Defamation is basically lying about someone to damage their reputation. So I don't think that the first amendment gives you the right to lie?
Also, doctors and lawyers are subjected to discipline by their respective guild. So even if it's your right to say bullshit, you might lose your job and license.
Arguably, there's no to little consequence of being a nobody and lying about something like autism and vaccine. It's probably isn't worth the effort to sue folks. That said, misinformation is clearly harmful and we shouldn't let people lie unchecked.
He recklessly caused a lot of pain to families that already suffered a horrific tragedy, and profited from the attention by being (almost literally) a snake-oil salesman. He deserves a large punishment.
It's not a punishment, it's a debt. If you steal a sandwich and eat it you'll be fined, that's a punishment and a transaction with the state, and you'll also pay the owner damages, which is not a transaction with the state.
How so? Is the difference between having to repay Lisa when you've caused her harm and having to pay the state because you did something criminal that hard for you to understand that you actually consider it a matter of "legalistic" quibbling?
Would you accept a jurisdiction where, instead of going to prison, you could just pay someone a bunch of money after you've raped or performed some other obviously criminal act against them?
None of what I've written in this thread is about the correctness in how damages are measured, I don't see the relevance of your comment. To me it seems like you're confusing suffering with punishment. Debt is commonly painful, but it's not a punishment.
The purpose of paying damages is to substitute someone else for harm you've caused. This is altogether another purpose than punishments. Paying damages is a reparation, punishment is based in another set of principles.
Actually generally for emotional damage you don't. In the US you're perfectly free to insult someone and hurt their feelings without being liable to pay them damages.
No it really doesn't. There are no legal consequences for insulting someone, unless you actually defame them. Nearly all defamation cases are dismissed by the court immediately for not rising to the very high level of facts required for defamation.
Yes, defamation. Many such cases are dismissed; this one was not and resulted in large punitive damages being awarded.
Less relevant to this case, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress can also both be against the law in the United States.
The interesting precedent here is if you lie about the dead (who until this fiction, had no protection from defamation), you have defamed any living person who says the opposite and factual information about them.
But we all know the precedent set in this case was a lie. Otherwise anyone who said the kids were really killed would have standing, since Jones thought they were "crisis actors."
We all know this was really used as a back door way to pay the parents for dishonoring the dead. Basically "meh we can't extract justice from the murderer, best we can do is get a lot of money from someone with mutual hate."
Edit: s/precedent/historical precedent/ . I did not mean to imply as assumed below this precedent is legally binding.
Interesting analysis... one potential wrinkle: There is no precedent being set here. This is just the expected outcome within the framework set by past precedent... Nothing novel or new happened wrt the law or anything else. It's just a bog standard case of a trashy asshole riling up his idiotic followers for money, and taking it well beyond the long established line of acceptable.
Prison and fines are punishments, having to pay damages is not. When you can't afford to pay your debts, bankruptcy is not a punishment, it's a process to clear out the debts so both debtor and creditors can move on.
Punishment regulates the relation between a person and the state and is a part of criminal law, paying damages is part of civil law.
The intent is explicitly and specifically to punish someone and be a punishment.
Compensatory damages are awarded in an attempt to compensate the plaintiff for the damage they received due to the actions of the defendant. Punitive damages are awarded to the plaintiff on top of the compensatory damages and their exact purpose is to punish the defendant for their actions.
They are two different types of damages and the exact purpose of punitive damages is to be a punishment. It's their raison d'etre. They were created to provide further levers to punish people.
This is correct. People should split intent and outcome. So for example: you going to prison is a punishment. Your wife leaving you because of it, is not part of the punishment, that is an outcome, but it is not an outcome that is intended.
The same here. There are damaged to be payed to the victims of alex' Jones heinous lies that have provably made the lives of people that were already victims so much worse. The judges entitled them to restitution for the damages done and because Jones didn't turn up for court and had contempt for the court by ignoring direct orders they probably punished him by making the sum very high.
However. Going bankrupt was not the aim of the punishment. It just asks a high sum. He might have been able to pay it, which would have been fine. However. Jones didnt stop being an unethical human (pretty objectively, as long as you don't believe his lies) and tried to slither out of his duty to pay.
> Jones didn't turn up for court and had contempt for the court by ignoring direct orders they probably punished him by making the sum very high.
Just fyi he did, the court kept claiming he had to produce documents / analytics he said he didn’t have. There’s no evidence the documents ever existed, but judge disagreed, so they issued a default judgement (ie no trial).
Which, sure I think is nuts. But I don’t see anything in there besides his opinion and trying to support his bat shit crazy opinion. So what, he thinks it was a fake event. As far as I can tell from this (and perhaps I’m missing something), he didn’t do anything to anyone. If we start penalizing calling people a liar, we’re going to end up in a much worse place where all we have are liars
Just FYI, the plaintiffs lawyers (not necessarily the court) was requesting financial documents that FSS LLC are required by law to have. They had two years to comply and did not.
Also FYI 'a trial was never held' is a common talking point used by Alex Jones on his program. He and his lawyers are responsible for there not being a trial. Their conduct guaranteed that there was no trial. It's a farce for him to complain about something that he is responsible for.
What's your view on statutory damages for copyright infringement? "Wilful infringement" has statutory damages up to $150k per work. This is similar. Like this it's a punishment imposed by the state, through the medium of inflated damages.
No, I do not consider damages in copyright infringement a punishment. Whether damages are measured correctly or not in some case or other is beside the point I was making.
No, but "commercial speech" does, though the protection is weaker than it is for political speech.
Commerce is constitutionally regulated in another way, by article I of the US constitution having a commerce clause allowing regulation, which, for example, is the basis of drug prohibition.
> This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights.
They'll never be able to stop him from creating "The Alex Jones Off the Deep End Show" where he thrills listeners with zany tales of conspiracies that can only be held at bay with these brand new supplements. He just has to forfeit Infowars and its assets.
> They'll never be able to stop him from creating "The Alex Jones Off the Deep End Show" where he thrills listeners with zany tales of conspiracies that can only be held at bay with these brand new supplements
So you're unable to think about this problem without putting your bias at the forefront?
> He just has to forfeit Infowars and its assets.
Actually, with this ruling, he does not. Roger Stone's group will get a legitimate change to purchase it to keep it under Jones' control. If you think that's a miscarriage of justice, as the OP does, can you explain why?
Why is forfeiture of his platform a necessity in your eyes?
> So you're unable to think about this problem without putting your bias at the forefront?
He is a conspiracy theorist, this is his thing. And he sells supplements on his show. Those are facts, right? I suppose my bias only shows with the characterization of "zany tales"? But IMO it's not even a stretch, this guy seems really quite off base.
> Why is forfeiture of his platform a necessity in your eyes?
I mean, it's not. But he has assets and liabilities, right? Right now his liabilities vastly outweigh his assets. So it's unjust to deny his creditors access to his assets. He can keep his house and a car, I guess. Or whatever is normal/typical assets to be preserved in bankruptcy. But his interest in Infowars is not an inalienable right.
He has free speech, freer speech than any generation before him. He could broadcast a new show from his personal cell phone and it would be dynamite production value compared to AM radio shows that have been used in decades past (and still used today). He can even resume saying things about Sandy Hook victims that he walked back during the trial. He just risks new liabilities if he does that.
They won a defamation lawsuit when what he did was way more than just defamation. He deliberately made the families' lives hell, and did that for profit.
>He was fined over a billion dollars, in what world is losing a billion dollars no consequences?
Parent’s point is that the amount of the fine doesn’t matter if he is able to avoid paying it. It could have been a quadrillion. A fine only matters if you actually have to pay it.
On an average-person-level, some municipalities nearby me have decided to not basically not do anything about parking fines. As a result, there are vehicles that over ten thousand dollars of fine. But they are still allowed to renew their registration and drive their vehicle. So it’s just a made up demerit.
Reminds me of that Russian court that recently fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Funnily enough this was along similar lines to the Alex Jones case but in reverse.
He was fined a billion dollars, but it will never be collected, he never lost a billion dollars. With this decision all his debts are pardoned and he gets to keep his megaphone, that is very "no consequences".
America was founded with a constitution that guarantee's citizens a megaphone as part of a list of inalienable rights (God given per words in the constitution). Bankrupting Jones won't remove his ability speak or muzzle him and it's more than likely only going to give him more of an audience. He'll still be able to voice his performance art about growing babies-in-cows-for-25-years and gay-frogs. He'll more than likely struggle to sell his seeds and end-of-times nonsense and he's probably been debanked. But megaphone wise he'll be louder than ever.
The correct term is intersex, but whatever. But in addition
> EE2 exposure at all concentrations lowered male sexual arousal, indicated by decreased proportions of advertisement calls and increased proportions of the call type rasping, which characterizes a sexually unaroused state of a male.
So the males also became uninterested in sex with females. Given that I think you must be really nitpicking to find fault with what he said.
I was always under the impression that the performance art he did with the frogs was in reference to Chlorpyrifos. And I am in concert with Alex Jones here. I agree with him. This crap is not good, is banned throughout the world, and is a mammalian neurotoxin.
But you and I both know he crosses the line (and enjoys doing so) from authentic to clown. He'll bedazzle a libertarian and country boy with quirky strange perspectives that have a kernel of truth and then drag them down into the dark ass netherworld he's living his life in. He spins people up and inflames their amygdala's and connects the dots to some dark metaphysical Ba'al. But then he still comes back around and sells you some seeds and some product to stock your nuclear fall out shelter. He's one part performance artist one part grifter. But he crossed a third rail when he tried pulling the parents of a school shooting into his bi-polarish world. Bottom line with a guy like Alex Jones is that he's always going to connect the natural failure-state of a system (FDA regulatory capture) to some fever dream Ba'al conspiracy vs acknowledging that humans and their systems are flawed and that the natural state of a government is one in which it is picking winners and losers (cronyism) and it's been that way in his country since Washington's soldiers and officers mutinied over pensions. https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collect.... That didn't need the illuminati becuase, like the FDA, it's the natural mode of humanity and a system to fail.
He wasn't fined. He had a judgement for damages against him. They are different things with a similar outcome (he's out a billion dollars) - accuracy is important.
Also - until he actually pays any of that billion dollars, there have been no consequences.
Additionally, it's important to highlight that he refused to properly comply with the legal process - so it was a default judgement. This is essentially unheard of due to how unwise it is.
We can consider his non-compliance an investment in his audience. By refusing to comply, he signals his supporters that the lawsuit is unfair persecution. And they believe him.
His lawyer already stated “Finally, a judge followed the law.”.
Now that it's public knowledge how low the bids were, a re-auction might attract many more bidders and raise a LOT more money for the creditors. It is certainly not an asset with any appeal to me, but a talented brand and e-commerce operator can likely generate a river of cash flow from the IP/audience for sale here.
This is kind of bullshit. The Sandy Hook families were a part of The Onion’s bid. They were clearly ok with it.
The court knows it can’t sell it back to Jones or a proxy of, but this decision also allows Jones to continue as if he hadn’t sold. And I think that’s what they’re aiming for
Wait, so you can be fined 1.5 Billion for reporting on a conspiracy theory?
BTW, this is a lot more than pharmaceutical companies pay out for actually killing people.
I remember watching the trial and it was the most ridiculous thing every. The defendant (Alex) wasn't allowed to say he's innocent because the judge defaulted him. Yet the prosecution was allowed to bring in all kinds of evidence of his guilt (other than him being defaulted) and present that to the jury.
So in essence, you're guilty because the judge said so, and the prosecution gets to pile on about your guilt, but you can't testify to the jury counter your guilt.
Yet somehow this a jury trial.
The other ridiculous thing was he was defaulted for namely not showing Youtube ad revenue for his shows, after youtube deleted his channel.
They also awarded an FBI agent, I guess for hurt feelings, not even related to the families.
1.5 Billion .... apparently not a political prosecution of a critic, designed to silence him by taking InfoWars off air.
You know when Alex offered $55 million to settle. The lawyers somehow decided to get less by pushing for the bankruptcy.
Jones repeatedly violated court orders, withheld subpoenaed documents, ignored depositions, and disrupted the trial every chance he got, and so received a default judgement. I don't know where you heard the line about YouTube ad revenue but that's got nothing to do with nothing. Everything that happened was his own fault. He was extended plenty of leeway and he blew every last bit of it. If he thought the amount of money was unreasonable, he should have showed up to the trial and said so without doing fifty things worth being held in contempt of court for.
I don't watch the trial and don't know anything about Alex Jones but didn't he show up? His own lawyer "accidentally" sent his private text messages to the plaintiff attorneys.
Of course the judge allowed that mistake to be used in trial.
So I think he did show up as least from that memory of the trial.
Showing up isn't what he got in trouble and received a default judgement for was was not complying with discovery. He was required to produce certain things like messages about certain topics and financial records. For some topics they returned no records and later when the full phone record was sent by mistake there were texts with the keywords from the discovery request. Some documents they simply refused to produce and have lied ever since about actually providing.
And about the phone there are avenues to block the use of evidence accidentally sent to the opposition but Jones's lawyers failed to raise those when the plaintiff's lawyer pointed out the phone copy was included in the documents sent to them. They had the chance to get it excluded but failed to so it was allowed, it wasn't the judge allowing something unusual it was Jones and his lawyers being a complete disaster in the case.
This is like getting accused of murder, and the judge finding you guilty because you didn't produce knife during discovery, the prosecution said you had.
Just absurd.
Then skipping ahead to the sentencing, and the judge telling your lawyers that if you testify you're not guilty to the jury, he'll find you and your lawyers in contempt (jail-able offence).
While lining up a long list of crying victims to tell the jury how horrible you are.
That's far from what actually happened to Jones and also you're mixing metaphors of criminal and civil trials which are very very different in the US. There were years between the start of the trial and the default judgements and the behavior extended beyond just failing to produce requested files people legitimately don't have requested records all the time in litigation and they do not suffer the same outcome because they properly cooperate with the process and demonstrate they they do not have the documents instead of refusing to provide them.
Jones lied and continues to lie to this day about why he lost the case because it's a liar and a con man and the claim he's persecuted unfairly helps him sell his supplements to his audience.
>they properly cooperate with the process and demonstrate they they do not have >the documents instead of refusing to provide them.
You make the assumption that it's practically possible to prove a negative like that. For example, prove that unicorns don't exist ... maybe you just haven't looked long and hard enough.
> Jones lied and continues to lie to this day about why he lost the case because > it's a liar and a con man and the claim he's persecuted unfairly helps him
> sell his supplements to his audience.
If all that Alex did was lie, I don't think anyone would care about him.
Clearly he's been on the political radar because his "conspiracy theories" too often turned out to be true..
I don't think you're being very charitable to his audience.
People enjoy listening to a counter negative to the mainstream narrative. And some people find great value in it, enough to support him by buying his supplements.
Alex speaks in hyperbolic ways, people can make whatever they want of that. If he calls P. Diddy a deep state demon, for example. Is that a lie? Demons don't exist. Sure. But can humans approach demon like behaviour. I think so.
> This is like getting accused of murder, and the judge finding you guilty because you didn't produce knife during discovery, the prosecution said you had. Just absurd.
> Then skipping ahead to the sentencing, and the judge telling your lawyers that if you testify you're not guilty to the jury, he'll find you and your lawyers in contempt (jail-able offence).
The same will happen to you in any criminal trial if you try to argue innocent post-conviction, during the sentencing phase. The time to argue innocence is during the trial itself.
> While lining up a long list of crying victims to tell the jury how horrible you are.
Again, standard practice in sentencing. Jones is entitled to his own character witnesses, if he can find some.
1. The phone records are from the last 2 years. So not during the time frame of the actual broadcasts about Sandy Hook happened ( which happened way earlier...)
2. He gave the phone records to his lawyer, which goes against claims of him not co-operating. His lawyers would determine which messages get sent over to the prosecution. For example, private communications with his legal team would be protected and would not need to be disclosed.
The defence sent over the entire phone backup, by mistake. Why is this a gotcha you think it is?
The prosecution also acted unethically by not informing the defence that they received protected communications, they weren't entitled to.
The prosecution let the trial happen for 2 weeks, and had not informed the judge that they actually had the information, that they used to get the judge to default him for not cooperating!
So how is this not actually grounds to throw the case out?
Seems like misconduct.
Also, just because he mentioned Sandy Hook in a text message with his lawyers, or privately, doesn't mean the prosecution is automatically entitled to it.
"For example, why didn’t Mr. Jones’ attorney take advantage of the 'snap-back' provision in the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure (Rule 193.3) and assert a privilege on the text messages within the 10-day prescribed period? We know from court filings that Plaintiff’s counsel (Mark Bankston) sent an email to Mr. Jones’ attorney (Federico Reynal) shortly before midnight on July 22, 2022 stating, 'My assumption is now that you did not intend to send us this? Let me know if I am correct.'"
"All Mr. Reynal had to do was 'identify the material or information produced and state the privilege asserted,' and Mr. Bankston would be required to 'promptly return the specified material or information' and would be prohibited from using it in court."
> Also, just because he mentioned Sandy Hook in a text message with his lawyers, or privately, doesn't mean the prosecution is automatically entitled to it.
Your own clip shows he lied under oath, stating he personally searched the phone for "Sandy Hook" and got zero results.
"My assumption is now that you did not intend to send us
this? Let me know if I am correct.” Id.
In response thereto, Reynal instructed Bankston that “there appears to have been
a mistake in the file transfer. […] Disregard the link and I will work on resending. Id."
Still doesn't excuse the prosecution from not informing the judge in a prompt manner, that they had received the information, who's lack of they used to get a default judgment. They let an entire trial happen, and still did not inform the judge that they had received the information. Prosecution only did so after the defence filled this motion.
>>Your own clip shows he lied under oath, stating he personally searched the
>> phone for "Sandy Hook" and got zero results.
It's possible he lied, but there's other explanations.
1. We don't actually know what kind of phone he was using, and its search capabilities. You're assuming it was the latest apple or Samsung. But it could have been a very basic phone, with limited search capability.
2. The phone in question, was not the one he searched. As Alex was likely using multiple phones (quite possible) over a span of 2 years. Gave the old one to his lawyer to backup, and searched his new phone. People lose or brake or upgrades phones all the time. The backup may not always restore everything. So it's possible there's a difference between what was given to the lawyer and the phone he searched, without any malice.
3. It's possible he searched for Sandy Hook, and still had no results for technical reasons. Eg. Gave the phone to the defence to backup. The backup copied the phone's data to a computer, but also erased the phone.
> Kafkaesque level farce, if the the Judge literally threatens you, and your lawyers with jail for daring to testify that you're not guilty during your own trial. Just think about it.
Not during; after. Similarly, you can't argue innocence at criminal sentencing proceedings.
It wasn't his trial though, he lost that by default judgement for failing to produce documents including financial records, he can't say he's not guilty because he isn't it would be a lie. We know a lot of those documents exist because Jones's lawyers accidentally sent a copy of his entire phone with records that should have been produced.
You're right is almost never done, not many cases are lost by default because most defendants and their lawyers aren't incompetent enough to get to that point. They had years to comply with discovery or demonstrate that they did not have access to the documents
> testify that you're not guilty during your own trial.
> Not allowed to make any sort of free speech / free press argument
He didn't get to raise those because they're not relevant at a damages hearing. If he'd complied with discovery instead of blocking it every chance he got he would have had the ability to raise those at trial. He was warned, he persisted and was punished for it. We know his lawyers had the documents because they accidentally turned them over later then failed to raise an objection that would have stopped them from being shared and used during the damages hearing.
> Reporting on it
He didn't just report on things he made statements as facts that it was staged, the kids are still alive/were never alive, doxxed Pozner's home address and was one of the first to do so in the days after the shooting. It's not just reporting that got Jones in trouble.
He did it and he did it to himself because the optics of fighting a "show trial" were better for him and his supplement business than the slim chance he could win if he fought the trial legitimately.
Ignoring the fact that he lost for not participating and for lying throughout the process...which is why we are were we are...its worth reviewing what he actually did.
A really entertaining podcast has actually done a series of episodes on the depositions in the case. If you are curious about the facts heres a list of those episodes:
I haven't invested time watching all of the trials or following this as closely as some. It is strange that for all of the demonization of AJ, there aren't any compelling clips of him inciting his viewers or specifically mentioning the names of the family members.
Given how aggressive the partisan media is, you'd think they would have an established set of incriminating soundbites. When I did look into it deeper, I found that the case was decided by a default decision. Maybe there are reasons for these legal technicalities. I can appreciate that.
If the standard for the discussion is, "AJ was found guilty in court", then we should be clear that this doesn't mean he was found guilty in the substance of the case. Posters here should consider that before going off the deep end in demonizing AJ. HN is a site where discussions routinely involve citing sources. Yet, this part is assumed.
An unprecedented 1.5B in judgement, some of which goes to an FBI agent who worked on the case? Specifically on that point, there are compelling reasons why libel laws apply differently or not at all to government officials. Mainly this revolves around the threat of censoring regime critics. See also: lese-majesty.
Then we find that the plaintiffs' lawyers are explicitly a political group, "The Everytown Group For Gun Control", funded by Michael Bloomberg. Lawyers have claimed that they don't actually want to collect the damages for their client, rather that they have an ulterior motive in shutting down InfoWars. It isn't unreasonable to view this as a war of political factions.
The drama is on-going, but now it is viewed within the context of partisan lawfare against a former and now elected president.
None of these observations are inexplicable, but taken all-together, they fail the smell test for this poster.
Yeah, I did, and if you watched then you understand why it was defaulted since Alex Jones refused to participate, was found in contempt of court for not produce materials relevant to the case, a default judgment is the punishment for not participating in the legal process.
If he wanted to avoid it then he could abide by the law and be a part in his own judgment before it came to that.
Alex Jones owes a lot of money after the lawsuits against hi , if he was hired back at Infowars everything he made would be clawed over. Second, Alex Jobes is what his followers are interested in, if he still has any followers left. Anyone else who buys this asset will not be able to extract any value from it.
This is all totally ridiculous. The assets are only worth a large amount when run as a disinformation outlet for Russian/extreme-right propaganda. Since no buyer is going to do that (see earlier, that gets you sued), the assets aren't worth much.
United States Bankruptcy Judge Christopher M. López was appointed to the United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Texas, effective August 14, 2019. Judge López was sworn in by United States Circuit Judge Gregg Costa on Wednesday, August 14, 2019.
Yes absolutely. Being found not guilty of a crime or being pardoned has no bearing on the evidence that exists which is presented in a separate civil case against you.
There’s no double jeopardy in a civil case - it’s a matter of if someone has a claim of damages.
It's not about pardoning, it's about what US bankruptcy trustee thinks is ok or not ok. Had this happen under Trump administration, I would assume that the trustee would not even allow such a deal to go ahead in the first place.
Trump, nor any other president, can eliminate the court's decision. A president's power would be limited to appointing judges in open positions, so potentially the responsible appeals court (up to the SCOTUS) could be influenced, but not controlled.
The elected government isn't making this decision anyways, this is in a court in front of a judge (one previously appointed by the president-elect, no less).
People posting in this thread seem to think a Trump DOJ appointed trustee would act in a way that benefits Alex Jones.
Infowars has a large following and has been very supportive of Trump while being critical of Biden. The rationale for the motivation to act politically in both directions is certainly there.
I posted the same news 24 days ago, it got downvote-brigaded by malicious actors (at the same time they were upvote-brigading fake news that he lost InfoWars to The Onion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160692
This. A core part of defamation cases (especially from a damages point of view), is showing that the false statements caused harm, and that's generally by way of those statements influncing other's beliefs and actions (apart from harassment, this could also take the form of people being unwilling to work with/provide a service to the defamed party because of said statements).
(Note that it's important that the statements are false, and depending on some details, that either they were known to be false at the time, or that there was a reckless disregard to the truth, i.e. no effort was made to determine if they were true or false. If you state something that is true, or is false but you had good reason to believe is true, or that is merely an opinion, then it's not defamation even if someone harassess them or worse)
Jones was never technically tried for anything. He refused to participate in the trial in a meaningful manner and had a default judgment against him instead.
Thank you. Can you elaborate? Wouldn’t jones stating garbage like the shooting didn’t happen etc. be opinion? How were his statements defamation ? I missed where he defamed the families as I don’t listen to his shows.
IANAL, but the semantics of opinion vs fact are typically tangential to the court's determination of defamation. However, in many cases it's a matter of framing: "I think that ..." prefixing a statement can carry a lot of weight versus presenting it as a fact.
I don't think anything can ever happen in the US -- that's part of the First Amendment.
I do think there should be some other way that would lead to Alex Jones lose his audience. But I don't see anything happening yet.
Trump and Elon are not nearly as bad as Alex Jones (arguably), and lots of people don't like them, but they have an audience, lots of other people like them, support them and send money to them. If they are not held responsible for things they say, if Trump is aquitted of January 6th, I don't think people should expect much to happen.
I understood the parent as saying, "These people point at humor when asked whey they do certain provocative things when clearly it's much more about their personal politics than humor." Obvious, but lost in the sarcasm.
Musk filed saying that he owns the X accounts and they aren't allowed to be sold according to the TOS. The X accounts were removed from the pending sale.
All social media accounts are owned by the company and they can and do shutdown people every second of everyday. This is the least surprising.
Instagram just shutdown the account of the suspected ceo killer. That person didn't break any social media rules (didn't post copyright or tell someone off or spam marketplace) but instagram has the right.
You can support people's right to say what they want, while also saying it's against the house rules to impersonate other people. Doesn't seem that unreasonable.
But it's not impersonation. Jones was ordered by a court to give up all the Infowars assets, including the brand and the associated social media handles. The sale is on hold for legal reasons but that's beside the point.
The namespace on Twitter is not property owned by the user. It's just namespace which is owned by Twitter. The use of it is at the sole discretion of Twitter. If Twitter doesn't think that it's appropriate that this group be able to represent themselves as "Alex Jones" or "Infowars" in their namespace then they don't have to. It doesn't matter if it's a voluntary sale or a court ordered transfer.
My default action would be to just take all the handles away. I wouldn't tolerate allowing courts to redefine my namespace into other people's property. Especially if I just paid $44 billion to purchase it!
I'd definitely not allow the new owners of Infowars to have Alex Jones personal Twitter handle(s) because they are not Alex Jones and doing so would be an admission that my namespace is not my private property, but that of someone else.
If a court were to order transfer of assets, your argument would find a limit.
That's what courts do.
Rarely enough that there's not a whole lot of coverage but I'm finding a few cases:
We have previously written an OnPoint about the law concerning ownership of social media accounts in light of the explosive growth in the use of such media for commercial advertising, product development and customer engagement. We presented on this and related topics at the Federal Bar Association and MyLawCLE webinar on September 6, 2023. We then wrote an OnPoint about the Second Circuit’s decision in JLM Couture, Inc. v. Hayley Paige Gutman, in which the Second Circuit instructed that ownership and control of social media accounts created during employment or in connection with one’s employment should be determined on a case-by-case basis without a pre-determined multifactor test.
[T]he court issued a memorandum opinion regarding the social media accounts on April 3, 2015. The court ruled that the reorganized debtor was entitled to direct control of the social media accounts — a Facebook page and a Twitter account — because the accounts were business accounts, not Alcede’s personal accounts. The court’s analysis was thorough and will be frequently cited in future social media cases.
This is a decidedly different case than, say, squatting or hijacking an identifier, or having a service provider arbitrarily reassign it. Both instances of which definitely do occur.
The first often enough that there are multiple how-to guides to recovery and avoidance:
I understand these arguments, which is why I'd just kill the accounts if I were Twitter or Facebook or even HN. It's not in Twitter's interest to allow these handles to be property. It's not in the interest of Twitter to allow some high profile account to be taken over in this manner. I'm not a fan on Alex Jones, but it wouldn't be good for Twitter to let these people take over his account. The users who do interact with the account expect to be interacting with Alex Jones, so handing the account over only degrades Twitter's service for those users.
It's perfectly reasonable for Twitter to care more about its own integrity and value, like how users would prefer things to be moderated, than whether people who Alex Jones owes money to can extract any value from his social media handles.
The difference between Elon Musk buying Twitter is that the previous owners sold it willingly and everyone accepts that Twitter is Musk's now, and he can do as he likes, even renaming the site. Nobody believes that the Onion or whoever is really Infowars just because some bankruptcy judge says so. When Musk acquired Twitter he continued operating the service. The new owners of Infowars have no intention of continuing it.
If anyone acquired a browser plugin or mobile app in a bankruptcy, got the app store credentials, then pushed updates changing the fundamental nature of the app to something its existing users don't want or expect, then they shouldn't be surprised if the app store just removes them. Same goes for social media handles.
If a court were to say "transfer the accounts", then a failure to do so would put the entity (a private individual, company, or other organisation or institution) in violation of the court's express order.
It's also nonsense, if that was true then every merger and acquisition would need fresh Twitter accounts. He's thumbing the scale here and back justifying it.
The claim that he owns the account is not the same as claiming to own its contents. E.g. a landlord that owns an apartment typically does not have a claim on their tenant's property in the apartment, except under special circumstances. They may have some liability for their tenant's property in some cases, e.g. if they knowingly allow a bomb factory. But Section 230 is an explicit waiver for that liability in terms of speech.
Both parties are very interested in limiting the scope of that waiver in different ways, but that's the current law, and it tends to be broadly interpreted.
I haven't seen the filing, but I presume you mean that X filed saying that they own the accounts, right?
I don't get why people conflate Elon Musk with the companies that he runs. I imagine he has controlling stakes in all of them, but for the most part he's probably not even a majority shareholder in most of the companies he's running.
You bring up a fair point. In my mind, Musk has taken so much control over X that it's more of a direct relationship than Tesla or SpaceX would be.
For this filing, IIRC It was reported that Musk instructed X to step in on Jone's request for help. That feels different to me than GM shutting down a project. It feels politically motivated by Musk's personal beliefs then a decision being made on the company's behalf for the benefit of the company.
But I do accept the criticism that it was X that filed, not Musk and I mis-spoke in my original comment
X does have a vested interested in ensuring its usernames and accounts do not legally become alienable property that can be auctioned in a bankruptcy auction. They don’t technically allow accounts or usernames to be sold at all (or follows, engagement and so forth), although I’m sure this happens quite often under the radar.
X can and has taken any username they want away from a user for any or no reason.
Filing a brief in a bankruptcy auction that “this property is ours, not the debtor’s, and may not be auctioned or also” is an obvious way for them to publicly assert their rights and ownership.
Because X is purely a platform to do whatever Elon wants. It’s so blatantly obvious that this decision came from Musk even if it was delivered indirectly.
Isn't that how all companies operate? For instance, GM reconsidering Cruise is clearly from Mary Barra, but the decision is overall a GM decision. Saying "Mary Barra is shutting down Cruise" would just seem childish.
I don't think the full ownership structure is publicly known, but feel free to link me to it if I'm wrong. Capital other than his did come in as part of the acquisition; there's almost 100 shareholders.
I think you're missing context? Infowars is rabidly pro-MAGA. Trump appeared on Alex Jones numerous times. The Onion is an entertainment company with more attachment to reality than Infowars. I would like to think a judge wouldn't allow friends of Alex Jones to take the company back.
> The Onion is an entertainment company with more attachment to reality than Infowars
Yep, that's exactly why it could have been the most entertaining outcome. What's funner than replacing "BS made for serious people" with "serious parodies"?
I don't understand. Infowars would be owned by the same people if Musk or Trump bought it. It would be funny if the Onion owned it. MAGA cult doesn't really do humor, just cruelty.
The deal wasn't shaky. It was an auction where there were only two potential buyers who actually rocked up. It wasn't secret, it was public. It was issued by a court, including a process where bidders had to submit offers before a deadline. [0]
ThreeSixty Asset Advisors ran the process. As they often do. Tranzon Asset Advisors assisted, as they often do. There were confidentiality agreements and sealed bids... But that's the normal process for selling off assets through a court.
A sealed bid is designed to avoid negotiation, and other processes more easily manipulated by bias, unconscious or otherwise. The bids are unseen between the buyers, and opened at the same time.
There were a "large number" of interested parties before the deadline. However, most pulled out and did not submit a bid before the deadline. Leaving only two.
Some potential bidders, like The Barbed Wire, stated that they pulled out because they simply couldn't afford the expected sale price.
All of this was the exact same procedure for other forfeiture assets.
The Judge did not find any wrong doing by the buyers, but rather lamented that the final sale price was too low. That's it. Not a procedural stuff up. That was followed correctly.
> "I don't like second-guessing trustees," the judge said, but that is exactly what he did.
> "It's clear that [U.S. bankruptcy trustee Christopher Murray] left a lot of money on the table," Lopez said, adding that he thought the process was "doomed" the moment Murray decided to cancel a live auction and call for sealed "best and final" offers instead.
"A three-judge panel of the Connecticut Appellate Court found that a jury's October 2022 decision to award $965 million in damages plus attorneys fees and costs to families of the shooting's victims was not unreasonable given the mental anguish they suffered due to the lies by Jones about Sandy Hook."
They found fault with a smaller portion of the whole award, and even there not because it was found to be excessive: "the judges found fault only with a portion awarding $150 million in damages under a state unfair trade practices law, finding that should be thrown out because it did not properly apply to the facts of the case."
The damages seem excessive to me. If he were the shooter, it would be justified, but he was not. I'm surprised the appellate court upheld it. Don't get me wrong, what Jones did was pretty horrible, especially after having just lost their kids right before Christmas. The presents were still under the tree. I couldn't imagine, but he wasn't the shooter.
If it stands, it would also set a pretty bad precedent. Trump could sue MSNBC for $1B for their RussiaGate reporting. Gaetz could sue ABC for $1B their View reporting, etc. They would be effectively shut down.
Or maybe it would be good. It would force news organizations to not be so sloppy.
> Because they are usually paid in excess of the plaintiff's provable injuries, punitive damages are awarded only in special cases, usually under tort law, if the defendant's conduct was egregiously insidious.
Only 1/3 were punative and those were for attorney's fees, but yes, you still have to prove injuries in the first place.
Lopez ruled that more than $1.1 billion of those verdicts, awarded for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, cannot be wiped away in bankruptcy. But he ruled that other parts of the verdicts, including $324 million in attorneys' fees that were awarded as punitive damages in the Connecticut case, could possibly be discharged.
The $1B is a ridiculous number that will never get repaid and it's just to make a big emotional virtuous show. Judges aren't supposed to be emotional, judges aren't supposed to let their personal feelings affect their virdict. If it was say $15, $20, $35 million, the families might get something. It makes a mockery out of the justice system and just goes to show how unserious law is in the US today. Why not $5 trillion? Why not $50 trillion, would that be too obvious where $1 billion somehow is not? Reminds me of the trial in Idiocracy.
Jones had a default judgement against him because he repeatedly failed to comply with court orders and discovery. It probably didn't help that he openly declared on his show that his idiotic behavior was a clever plan to fool the courts... apparently a couple million fools can't keep a secret.
"Refuse" is an action verb, "Dislike" is a stative verb. The infinitive phrase ("to allow") serves as a complement to the verb "refuse," forming a grammatically correct structure. refusare = deny.
I wasn't saying it was grammatically incorrect, just that it was a very bloated and roundabout expression instead of saying something simpler like "the court refuses the merger".
The first auction was illegal and this article should be seen as the mea culpa. The families bid the theoretical future earnings of jones instead of actual money. The trustee secretly accepted, but had to walk it back when it was exposed.
It's like bidding on a foreclosed house with $0 but beating everybody because you say you're going to rent it and pay back the bank with that money.
All: if you're going to comment here, please review the site guidelines and make sure to stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There's way too much nasty dross in this thread. No, the topic does not make that ok. As you'll see when you review the guidelines, "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://archive.is/8q8m8
This is probably the correct decision. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash, and in the case of a bankruptcy, cash completely trumps any notion of "giving up debt." Especially when the debt being settled is astronomically large and you are giving up a very small portion of it ($7 million out of $1.5 billion). The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar.
Additionally, the auction here was run farcically, and basically seemed designed to create an outcome where the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty behavior? Just in order to get cash to compensate them at pennies on the dollar for his previous round of nasty behavior?
I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether.
Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
Selling to a business involved with the individual that lost in court.. It seems like a Fraudulent Conveyance to my non lawyer self (but I could be wrong)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_conveyance
The fraudulent conveyance may have been the move of the vitamin company itself, but the purchase in bankruptcy wouldn't be a fraudulent transation.
Letting Jones buy back his 'bankrupt' assets using money he fraudulently hid goes against the spirit of the law, even in the purchasing phase.
This guy should be living in his parents basement and barred from publishing on any significant media platforms. He's proven willing to exploit victims for personal gain to the tune of the millions of dollars.
Why? The creditors still get paid regardless.
Why should Jones be stopped from hiding assets from bankruptcy?
Or why should he be prohibited from profiting from exploitation of crime victims via broadcast platforms?
Regardless of whether victims get paid money, they were harmed emotionally by Jones's outsourced harassment. They don't need money. They need justice in the form of peace from harassment. And Jones seems set on exploiting them and the courts for his own enrichment.
Very odd that the judge didn’t write his or her reasoning in his ruling..
It's not a good outcome, but it's also not fraudulent conveyance. Principally because the proceeds of the sale go to the victims.
They go to the creditors including his primary sponsor. This is not a bad outcome it's the only correct legal outcome.
What you are saying is we should allow a creditor (of many) to sell an asset to whoever they choose at a lower market rate because it's the right political move in this one case. Why wouldn't those rules be applied in other cases.. you can sell any asset for a dollar to yourself and the bankrupt person will still be on the hook for the total debt minus a dollar. Letting a single creditor value assets below marketrate and direct a sale to someone they wanted would be a completely unfair process.
This isn’t about politics, it’s about justice. The only reason politics is even in the equation is because Jones has made his living as a political blatherskite.
Law is almost inherently poliical. Politics was in the equation the moment Jones decided to pretend a tragic school shooting was fake news.
So where is justice in this equation then?
The plantiffs getting compensated is the "justice". The courts ruled wrongdoing and the consequence is some sort of payout.
That’s a legal remedy not justice. Justice wouldn’t let Jones potentially buy back the company using money the siphoned off and hid from the court.
I agree. I never said there weren't loopholes in the remedy. We'll see if they manage to close it off.
That is not what happened, though.
One group of creditors said they were willing to abandon some of their claims, which means other creditors would have gotten a larger share of the smaller bid, effectively making these other creditors better off.
The proceeds of the sale will not come close to the value of the judgement - and Jones has acted extremely dishonestly through the process and repeatedly tried to move value from his company to his parents and other affiliate companies. I don't believe it's a fraudulent conveyance but there's a lot of awful happening here.
>A transfer will be fraudulent if made with actual intent to hinder, delay, or defraud any creditor.
If they get it less, later, or more chaotically, or if that was the intent it is.
Unfortunately, norms aren't going to stop this company from reharming it's victims.
[flagged]
They have a debt judgement not economic power. They can sell that debit judgement to a company who collects. They can take the money from the result of the court process and try to buy infowars after this is all over.
They don't have a judgement of ownership in infowars they have a debt and the court is forcing Alex to sell all assets to cover the debt. Then the rest is written off and he gets a black mark on his credit report.
There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.
Besides others are in line as well.
And killing the infowars brand means little in the short/long run. The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
> They don't have a judgement of ownership in infowars they have a debt and the court is forcing Alex to sell all assets to cover the debt.
It's a chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy estate already owns the infowars assets.
> There are rules around this process for a reason. If you allowed someone who has a debt judgement to just take over a company what is it's true value. Alex could try to value infowars at a trillion. So they put it up for an auction to get the real value. That's the fairest way for all cases.
Specifically, the reason is protecting minority and junior creditors (including the debtor when assets are in excess of debts). If nobody offered up enough cash to pay off the debts in full and there is only one creditor who would rather have the business than the best cash offer, I don't think there'd be any reason for the courts to object. The big issue is, again, minority creditors getting less than their "fair share" of the assets, along with over-compensating senior claims with junior ones outstanding.
Neither are at issue here - The Onion's offer paid more cash to the minority creditors, the majority creditor opted into the deal, and the assets are clearly worth less than the debts.
"Cash to minority creditors" doesn't matter. "Cash to the estate" is all that matters. The Onion's offer carried $1.75 million in cash to the creditors. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered $3.5 million in cash.
Onions offer was 1.75 million in cash and one party forgiving the estate enough money for the minority creditors to be better off. Which mathematically requires the offer to be worth more than 3.5 million in cash to his estate.
The Onion bid was legally the correct bid to accept. It's got nothing to do with the cash amount, totally irrelevant.
> So they put it up for an auction to get the real value.
Except Onion’s bid minimized Alex Jones debt and was the preferred outcome by his creditors. Offering more cash isn’t the same as making a larger bid here.
It was the preferred outcome by the majority of his creditors, not by all his creditors (note that preferred != economically best). If the creditors were unanimous in their preferences, there would be no issue before the court.
No the judge stated he believes it could be sold at a higher price not that the deal wasn’t structured properly.
There’s been confusion on the math. Because one party was forgoing a portion of their share everyone else not just the other victims would be better off financially.
ps: Economic maximization alone isn’t relevant here. The underlying economic value matters when individuals aren’t voluntarily participating in a transaction. If I destroy your car then I owe you based on the cars worth, but if you trade in your car moderately under blue book perhaps you’re just in a hurry.
I think the word "preferred" has been a bit overloaded in this discussion. There is a sense of economic advantage that you may be using, and this deal in that sense is "preferred" for everyone. There is the other sense of stated preferences, and this deal is clearly not in the stated preferences of one of the parties (hence the appeal to a court).
I think if the creditors unanimously wanted this to happen, it probably would not have been reversed over the idea that there could have been a higher value. The fact that this issue was raised to a court indicates that at least one creditor did not prefer it.
The article mentions Alex Jones was objecting to the transfer rather than creditors. Having a new round of bidding, especially with increased publicity is a reasonable thing to do.
I’m simply agreeing with independent 3rd parties who state that The Onion’s bid was larger and better for the creditors. Alex Jones clearly doesn’t want his life’s worked turned into such an obvious mockery, but while he’d love to sell these business to his parents for 1 dollar but the courts are acting to maximize the transaction’s value. Thus he can only object in terms of monetary value not his personal preferences.
Does the business that offered to buy InfoWars also not get shafted by the sale to The Onion?
By one creditor agreeing to forgo their debt only if The Onion buys it, that single creditor puts any other potential buyer at a disadvantage. It seems the highest bidder, regardless of whether that is another Alex Jones entity, has a fair counterargument such that this type of sweetheart deal is not fair to interested purchasers.
In what way is that different from any other larger bid? The math is identical to them borrowing ~5 million and then getting it back immediately afterwards.
In both cases the other creditors end up with more money and Alex Jones ends up with less dept. It feels unfair because you’re judging the debt as uncollectible, but they would be receiving more cash from other winners so they aren’t just sacrificing hypothetical money.
I’m sure if a large enough offer was made they would happily walk away with everything they would be entitled to, but losing some cash for a final fuck to someone who profited from their suffering and actively attacked them seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
It is both unfair to Alex Jones and any third party bidding on the asset. If some entity was willing to pay more for InfoWars than the debt AJ owes his creditors, he would be able to keep the extra.
If A owes B and C money and has to sell some asset to satisify the claim, the only fair way to value the asset is to sell it in the open market, an auction. If D will pay $5 for it and E will pay $500 for it, it would be unfair to both A and E if B waves his hands and say he forgoes his claim so long as D gets to buy the item.
I understand that InfoWars is likely being sold at auction because no buyer was willing to purchase it for a price that would satisify the debt before bankruptcy, but there is a nomzero chance that some buyer shows up and is willing to pay more for it than someone else specifically to keep it out of that particular buyers hands. Strange. Farfetched. Buy possible. And it wouldn't be fair to allow preference by those owed the debt as it defeats the fair market price process.
It’s normal for entities owed money to be able to use that debt in these kinds of auctions. They still need to cover whatever fraction of debt is owed to 3rd parties with actual cash. This is a backstop as auctions often result in far lower values for assets than a longer sales process can provide.
It also results in debtors getting out of more debt.
> I understand that InfoWars is likely being sold at auction because no buyer was willing to purchase it for a price that would satisify the debt before bankruptcy, but there is a nomzero chance that some buyer shows up and is willing to pay more for it than someone else specifically to keep it out of that particular buyers hands. Strange. Farfetched. Buy possible. And it wouldn't be fair to allow preference by those owed the debt as it defeats the fair market price process.
A blind auction happened and if someone had offered even 1% of Alex Jones debt for info wars they would have won. The specific deal setup by the Onion provided 1.7 million dollars to satisfy other creditors, but the Texas families are owed 49 million. So even if the Connecticut families agreed to accept nothing any deal handing more than 1.7 million to the Texas families would have won.
Further, while it seems impossible for Alex Jones to ever get out of this debt, the Onion deal got him closest to that possibility.
> And killing the infowars brand means little in the short/long run. The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
This is absolutely true. Other media people that lost their job or channel, handle on various platforms, typically refresh to the same number of followers within a year or two.
> The real brand is Alex's name. It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
They get to garnish those profits, too.
No bankruptcy resolves the debt. Otherwise there would be no point in a bankruptcy process.
No, not necessarily, and not in this case.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/alex-jones-cant-avoid-sandy-ho...
> Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones cannot use his personal bankruptcy to escape paying at least $1.1 billion in defamation damages stemming from his repeated lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday.
> Bankruptcy can be used to wipe out debts and legal judgments, but not if they result from "willful or malicious injury" caused by the debtor, according to a decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas.
Bankruptcies have all sorts of exceptions like this for fraud, student loans, child support, unpaid taxes, etc.
Exactly.
The intent of bankruptcy law is to benefit the economy by allowing people and corporations to take risks and start over.
It's not to let them get away with defamation.
So there's a line between healthy economic risk-taking (bankruptcy discharges) and bad behavior (bankruptcy doesn't affect that).
FTX creditors would like to have a word with you.
Alex Jones told the court that Alex Jones was just a character he played, so that character should now belong to the bankruptcy estate and be sold off. If Alex Jones were to play Alex Jones on TV ever again, that would be a copyright violation against whoever owns the Alex Jones character.
It does seem likely to be true, although apparently, based on its bid, his affiliated company sees $3.5 million worth of extra value in keeping the Infowars brand and structure as opposed to going that route.
>It's not like his audience will suddenly not follow him to a new show with a new name.
you'd be surprised how many fall off from a migration. It's no different network effect from anything else. The hardcore will follow, the passive will fall off. Even a cult following like this isn't immune to this (simply more resilient).
Nah it's just typical rich people getting away with everything stuff & we'll continue to let it happen because we are hapless.
It does really appear that America's getting her own, homegrown oligarchs.
We've had them for a long time; basically the only time we've tried to reduce their power was the Great Depression and post-WWII era, but since the 70s we've been letting them off the leash.
Correct. 10/10 summary
Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller... we've had them.
They've mostly kept a low profile since the Great Depression though. And plenty would be oligarchs were taxed out of the upper class by the WW2 tax brackets.
The families that lost their wealth in the Civil War and the families who had to pay a little more tax because of the New Deal and the people still mad about LBJ era civil rights legislation have all banded together.
America has had oligarchs for a very long time. The government is very much in the pocket of big businesses
> Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
Nope. Under the rejected deal, other creditors would have seen a larger payout, because aggrieved families are actual two separate groups. One with a claim near a billion dollars, and other with a claim of only a few million (I think, it may be less).
As a result the aggrieved families with the larger claim were set to basically hoover up all the cash from the bankruptcy, and the deal with the Onion was to create a better deal for the other families by having the larger claim reduced to allow a fair split of the total cash raised.
Also of note, the other creditors agreed to this bid.
$1.5 billion is more than Exxon paid for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Alex Jones must have been really nasty.
I don't know everything but I visited Valdez once and the locals told me Exxon wrote the 1.5 billion off of their taxable income so ended up not being punished.
The locals are right to be pissed.
But the logic seems a bit flawed... when you spend 2.1 billion in funding and then write it off on taxes, you are not saving 2.1 billion, you are saving YourTaxRate% of 2.1 billion, right?
The environment is lucky that it was Exxon who made the mistake of hiring an incompetent and overworked crew (per NTSB); they had more resources to deal with the consequences of an (allegedly?) drunk captain than smaller firms. I had a PhD relative working at Exxon whose work was halted and spent a year or two of his life working on the mess; not sure if that was part of the 2.1 billion or in addition to it. Certainly there was non-financial opportunity cost not even measured.
Like "Fire safety codes written in blood", the international requirement for oil tankers to have double hulls ensued.
> I have to say, just as a matter of gut instinct, it sure feels like when the court finds that Alex Jones damaged people—at a value orders of magnitude beyond that of his company—those people should be allowed to decide that, to them, there's value in snuffing out his ill-behaving company altogether.
It seems like there's an easy way for them to do that though: Just bid on it themselves and dispose of it however they want. They can bid arbitrarily high because they're the ones who get the money, if they want to dismantle the company or sell it to The Onion more than they want the money from what would otherwise be the highest bidder.
That's what they did, and that's what was rejected here, right?
Although it sounds like maybe this was more of a procedural rejection than a dispositive one...
> That's what they did, and that's what was rejected here, right?
Except they weren't the highest bidder?
They were if you count the amount they claimed to be putting in from their award:
“The total value of The Onion’s bid was $7 million, including $1.75 million in cash put up by Global Tetrahedron, with the rest coming from the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, who essentially opted to put a portion of their potential earnings from a defamation judgment against Mr. Jones toward The Onion’s bid.”
Their bid was essentially "something that economically feels like $100k more than the next highest bidder to people who aren't us" which is a clever contractual construction but not an auction bid.
Not if they have to put up actual cash...
Do they though? Put up that portion of the debt owed to them by the estate, which should be valued in at least that amount.
Did you read the article? That's exactly what they did.
Did you read the article? Jones was arguing that the families shouldn't be able to do that but the article doesn't say anything about whether he won that argument and the only reason it specifies for why the judge rejected the sale is this:
> Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.
Which implies they might just be able to redo the auction without secret bids and get the same result.
Once secret bids are known, and the auction is conducted again, usually the party with the biggest pockets then just wades in and takes it.
Once the price is known, several parties tend to walk away.
> Once the price is known, several parties tend to walk away.
This is why you disclose the current winning bid, which will be <minimum bid increment> over the second highest current bid. If that's already more than you're willing to pay then you weren't going to win anyway. If it isn't, you can put in your bid and then the previous winning bidder has to outbid you again. Which they might do, but you don't know that and until the bid is above what you're willing to pay you don't lose anything by placing bids which as far as you know might actually win.
Hence the if
>Isn't it a little strange, though, that the system notionally decided that the families are owed an enormous amount of economic power as compensation for the nasty behavior of Alex Jones' media company, but at the same time it's obliging them not to use that economic power to prevent the sale of the media company to a "new owner" still affiliated with an unrepentant Alex Jones, who will undoubtedly continue the nasty behavior? Just in order to get cash to compensate them at pennies on the dollar for his previous round of nasty behavior?
This is regrettable, but I don't think the court system offers a remedy sufficient for the grief Jones caused. This is why the court awarded what is frankly an absurd sum... truly, what is the point of awarding numbers that large? They're never paid out.
There this a strict defamation case, where the plaintiff's reputations were actually damaged in a way that harmed their income/worth, then we'd likely have seen a more rational award. Whatever it was that Jones did to these people, it's not the same tort as defamation. In that, he calls them embezzlers or pedos or something, they lose their jobs... and we can put a number to the damage he inflicted. Instead, he claimed they were actors, they never had any children, and this was some sort of hoax. Had crazy people coming out of the woodwork to harass them and stalk them. But the only sort of court order that could remediate that would be one that muzzles Jones from saying this shit... prior restraint. Something the Constitution wouldn't allow for.
I actually wonder if what he did shouldn't be characterized as a crime instead of a tort. Were he prosecuted and imprisoned (or even just put on probation), then the government would have the authority/leverage to (temporarily) prohibit this speech. Even then, he'd be made a martyr by his fans and it would continue as soon as the sentence was served.
There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process. The objective of a bankruptcy court is not to institute some arbitrary meta-ethical standard. It is to deliver maximum cash to the creditors in a fair manner.
>Is the issue that there are other creditors who are unhappy with this, who would get paid before the aggrieved families' damages would? The lawyers seem to be fine with it, as they're the ones advocating for this plan...
Based on discussions I've heard on this subject, a subset of the families was pledging money they didn't have in the non-competitive bidding. This is highly questionable. They may never receive the money they claim for the purchase. So by buying a real asset on the promise of money they aren't going to get, it is taking money away from other people who are rightfully owed money. If they wanted to do it the right way they could try to borrow the money from someone, but nobody in their right mind thinks Alex Jones has this money or ever did. The size of the judgement was calculated to lead to exactly this conclusion. As you said, the judgement was orders of magnitude more than the value of his company. So you should be satisfied with that. It is not necessary for the funniest possible outcome to manifest in order for justice to be served. Alex Jones will not go away because he has rights just like anyone else, and the legal process must conclude eventually.
> There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process.
Sealed bid auctions are not some absurd rarity in this sort of situation and I have no idea why you believe they are.
> There was no public auction of InfoWars
The auction was indeed very public. The bids were not.
The only requirement to participate was you had to show the Trustee that you were serious and had the means to participate. Only 2 parties did that.
The auction dates were published in newspapers and various news outlets announced that it was going to happen.
> There was no public auction of InfoWars. That alone is a stain on the whole process. The objective of a bankruptcy court is not to institute some arbitrary meta-ethical standard. It is to deliver maximum cash to the creditors in a fair manner.
Again, maximimum value not cash.
I say cash loosely speaking. You at least cannot pledge income from debt that is presently being negotiated down or cancelled. That kind of thing isn't "value" because it's imaginary.
This is completely false.
Debt can absolutely be sold for whatever it is worth. In this case, the Jones' debt owned by the Sandy Hook families is fairly valuable to Jones' other debtors because it means they get a bigger slice of the bankruptcy estate. Thus the Sandy Hook families can offer enough of their Jones' debt in the sale to make it more valuable. (Edit: more complicated than how I explained it because both sets of debtors include Sandy Hook families)
This isn't any more "imaginary" than money itself.
but you can pledge the debt itself.
> I say cash loosely speaking
Is this a legal term or something? Not to be rude, but who cares what you mean by it? It's totally besides the point
If you're talking to me or reading my comment then you should care what I mean. Otherwise you're wasting your time.
Obviously "loosely speaking" is not a legal term but I'm sure there is one that means the same. I mean you need real money to buy things, not bad paper. Bankruptcy does not exist to deliver good feels to people, it exists to settle financial matters as objectively as possible.
Right. The debt owed to the creditors...
One reason to have an actual auction is because the liquidation might more than cover the debt and leave the bankrupt person with excess cash. But that only happens if real cash is generated in a competitive liquidation process. The reasons why this backroom dealing stinks are plentiful...
The actual cash is orders of magnitude less than what the creditors are entitled to... did you read the article?
>2x more cash
But because the largest creditor has a claim that is so much larger, the minority creditors will actually get less cash with the vitamin company offer.
The deal was structured so that the minority creditors would get more cash than from any other offer.
The only creditor that would get less cash from this offer is the sandy hook families and they are fine with that.
A very important point. The Onion was going to give $100,000 more to the other creditors than any other bid. That sounds like the better deal. I can't imagine being owed money and having the judge tell me that I'm being forced to get less money in the interest of fairness.
How is it the correct decision that Alex Jones has a judgment against him for more money than he claims to have, but also Alex Jones has enough money to enter a bid to satisfy the judgement? It’s a farce.
but if we launder it through law talking then it cannot be questioned.
My comment has nothing to do with moral righteousness, merely legal correctness.
However, the idea that the InfoWars brand is worth less than $10 million is a bit silly to me given its reach among crazy (and highly manipulable) people, and the low size of both bids (and the fact that only people intimately involved in bankruptcy procedures knew when and how to put in bids) suggests that the auction process was probably not run correctly.
So where were all the other bidders offering $10 million plus?
Not there because the auction was run in a terrible way - it was very hard to submit a bid and the due date got moved forward at the last minute.
There were rumblings that Elon Musk was going to put in a big bid.
If all parties were happy with a bid, why does it need to be run "fairly"? This isn't house auction offereing up an artifact, this is a man guilty in the court of law going bankrupt and divvying off his assets. If the people in charge of said divvying and the ones owed money are happy, who really cares?
All parties were not happy with the bid, which is why this went to a judge.
That's confusing. We know from the reporting that some parties were happy with the bid. I guess, you mean "not all parties were happy..."?
(Please note: this is not a case of ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) ≣ ¬∀x ∈ X P(x). ∀x ∈ X ¬P(x) means "for all x not-P", while ¬∀x ∈ X P(x) reads "there exists no x that P", i.e. there is no party that is happy with the bid, which is either a false statement or not the intended meaning. This is actually a common, but not well-known mistake, so I'm pointing it out.)
EDIT: I even found a reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_quantification
'All that glisters is not gold.' :)
No but honestly who has any use for the Infowars brand besides Alex Jones and the Onion? What would anyone do with it to get a return on their investment?
I don't really know, but Elon Musk has been known to buy media companies that don't give him a good ROI, and he was making noise about putting a bid together on this one.
> and he was making noise about putting a bid together on this one.
The list of things Musk makes noise about but does not do gets a little longer.
The auctioneer should not have shifted the due date for bids after Elon Musk said this, and we would get a clear mark on that list.
>The other creditors are far better off getting more cash
The other creditors get more cash from The Onion's offer. It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer remuneration to minority creditors.
> It was specifically structured to give better-than-next-offer
That is the most farcical bit. When you strip away all the legalese, the offer was literally formulated as "next best offer + $". That is not a valid sealed-bid offer.
The Onion didn't have the cash. It was basically an IOU from one of the families, which is like saying "the very same guy going bankrupt is going to pay us money to buy this business from him" and that makes zero sense. There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.
> The Onion didn't have the cash.
Correct, it was given up by the majority creditors in exchange for non-monetary considerations (specifically, the moral victory of having The Onion own Infowars).
> It was basically an IOU from one of the families
This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason.
> There was also no transparency in the bidding. It should have been a simple auction, to get the maximum amount of money.
This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
>This is fine, people are allowed to act against their own financial interests. That's one thing that having ownership means is that you can ruin the thing you own for any or no reason. The court has zero reason to intervene if a majority creditor is giving up their own share of the proceeds for any or no reason.
You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly.
>This is a non-issue, the trustee was given wide latitude to dispose of the assets in any way he deems fit.
Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
> You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset.
You actually can, so long as it's the best offer for the other creditors. So long as you can come up with sufficient cash for the minority creditors you're entitled to dispose of the asset in any way you see fit. The Pennsylvania families came up with the cash (via The Onion's cash offer and structuring the payout).
You are absolutely correct. Matt Levine wrote about this topic in his newsletter the other day. Well worth subscribing if corporate/legal shenanigans interest you.
In your theoretical framework you can. In real-life bankruptcy court, you almost certainly can't.
Says who? It was clearly going to work like that until more lawyer nitpicking intervened about the auction (not the sale itself).
Honestly I don't see how this theoretical framework is much different from corporate leveraged buyouts.
This isn't a leveraged buyout. Also this structure is not at all like a leveraged buyout.
My point is going over your head. Pledging money that you will never receive to get over the finish line is not the best offer. You could not consider such debt in any other purchase. Going back to that example, if the guy owed $2B pledged to buy the asset for $500M and the other one didn't even know about the auction, or instead pledged $501M, then the one who was owed less would be stealing from the one who was owed more. The fact that neither of them has any actual money is another very troublesome point on its own, as is the fact that the bidding was completely private. There might have been someone willing to pay 10x the winning bid for InfoWars in actual cash and been out of the loop.
Put it in any other context. Do you think a bank would issue a loan whose repayment was contingent on income from an individual who was seeking relief in bankruptcy? Obviously they would not. The court has an obligation to not accept fugazi money to buy real assets.
My understanding is that the other (minor) creditors would get more cash in the Onion offer because the Sandy hook reps weren’t going to take their huge cut in the event their preferred bid was accepted. That means in any other deal, the other creditors would be strictly worse off. The families would be financially worse off but they were the ones driving the decision, so they clearly felt holistically better off.
I don’t see how they shouldn’t be able to take less money themselves as long as the other creditors also got more money.
> Isn't it telling that the same judge said it was done improperly? Trustees have an obligation to follow standard practices which maximize cash flow or at least don't give the appearance of impropriety.
This is incorrect - trustees have an obligation to maximize the benefit to debtors. You'll see common examples of non-monetary benefit when it comes to wills - a cabinet that may be valued at 150$ but has immense sentimental value may be given to inheritors even if there is a 200k bid on it if that is what the beneficiaries all agree to.
You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
>This is incorrect - trustees have an obligation to maximize the benefit to debtors. You'll see common examples of non-monetary benefit when it comes to wills - a cabinet that may be valued at 150$ but has immense sentimental value may be given to inheritors even if there is a 200k bid on it if that is what the beneficiaries all agree to.
Probate court is different from bankruptcy court. You can only do something nonstandard if all creditors agree. Some of these creditors are almost certainly banks that are owed money by AJ.
>You are treating debt discharging too literally like a numbers game - there are other important factors and in this case all the debtors were aligned and would have clearly preferred the deal with the lower monetary value.
There are very few sentimental factors in bankruptcy. The few that do apply (such as protections of property with little value) exist to benefit the debtor and not the creditors.
>You can only do something nonstandard if all creditors agree.
As far as this NYT story goes, they all did agree. It's AJ's lawyer who intervened.
Even if they all did agree, which I don't believe, someone might want to buy the business for a fair price using real cash. That counts for more than fantasy debt that is going away anyway. These processes exist for legitimate reasons no matter how you feel about it.
Said someone had the opportunity to participate in the auction - only two participants chose to do so. The auction was clearly announced and while there was a rule change midway through (which is what this whole kerfuffle is about) both participants agreed to the rule change.
> If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash
No, that's not the _only_ fair way. Suppose the $2B creditor bids $200M in cash and also agrees to forfeit their share of the proceeds from the sale. Then the $1B creditor would receive the entire $200M, which is more than the $167M they would have received from a $500M cash sale. The bid is effectively equivalent to $600M.
Isn't that what happened in the InfoWars case? The bankruptcy judge agreed that the structure of the Onion's bid was valid; he just said the auction would have continued for more rounds.
>>You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly.
Except what if all the creditors prefer that outcome to the "more cash" outcome? If the way it would get divvied up is $499m to you and $1m to me, vs $350m to you and $50m to me (but you get some other benefit that you prefer), why shouldn't that be accepted?
If literally every creditor agreed, maybe so. But I don't think that is the case even among the subset of creditors that is the families. If there are banks involved I'm sure they aren't interested in getting less money.
The two groups of families are the only two creditors. The Connecticut families are owed ~$1bil, the Texas families are owed ~$50mil. Nobody else is getting any money.
The bid that was accepted would give the Texas families more than they would have gotten from the other bid, because the Connecticut families were willing to give it to them, because they valued stripping Jones of his platform higher than the cash.
The only people worse off are the people who submitted the losing bid (Alex Jones' cronies). The creditors, and the estate, were not. And they're the ones the bankruptcy Trustee has the highest duty to.
> Nobody else is getting any money.
It is impossible to infer this simply from the size of the debt. Debts have seniority ordering which dictates who gets paid first, just like liquidation preferences in startups.
Sorry, I was imprecise (and not meaning that it was due to the size of the debt alone).
There are 3 sets of creditors that have potential claims in these proceedings, based on what I can find. The two groups of plaintiffs from the different trials (Connecticut families and Texas families, although there's at least one FBI agent that's part of one of those cases too) and American Express - Jones owes them ~$150k in credit card debt. AmEx is not pushing for this money, for obvious reasons (they wouldn't get it, and it would look bad).
No one in this case is disputing that the money is going to end up with the Sandy Hook families. It's entirely the other bidder in the auction that took this back to the judge.
> Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash
Wait, isn't Alex Jone's essentially bankrupted by the ruling for the Sandy Hook parents? If he has that much cash to offer wouldn't that have been given to the parents who won the suit?
I believe officially the vitamin company is owned by his parents and isn't included in the judgement against Alex Jones.
How is that not fraud?
It is. IIRC he started shuffling assets only after the legal consequences got real. But the legal system is moving slowly. And the victims may get tired of chasing his assets
>But the legal system is moving slowly.
FFS, it's actively working in his favor right now!
It's certainly mafia type of behavior. Now Jones has learned the lesson that as long as he doesn't directly own anything, he is effectively defamation proof. It's almost like an inverse RICO case, he does all the crime whole holding none of the money vs a mob boss rolling in dough while never directly committing the crimes.
Since when has that mattered? He'll get a pardon in 1 month anyway.
Only federal crimes can be pardoned by the president.
Everything here is state-level. The next president can't touch any of it.
They've already suspended his sentencing indefinitely due to the election win.
That's a non-sequitur.
Justice departments don't go after presidents or president-elects in order to prevent a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the remedy in that case.
This policy is entirely unrelated to presidential pardon power.
You're not going after a "President". You are going after a law breaker. He can be President all day long in jail.
The reality is that we've codified that Presidents are largely unable to be investigated and or held to account by the legal system. There was no carve outs in the constitution at any point for anybody in government. This is a new, and probably fatal invention.
> The reality is that we've codified that Presidents are largely unable to be investigated and or held to account by the legal system.
They can be investigated and held to account by Congress. That's what impeachment is. That's the whole point of having impeachment in the constitution.
If Congress fails to exercise its constitutional duty, then the problem lies with the specific representatives that place party above country.
It feels really gross that he was acquitted in the second impeachment partly because he argued that criminal court was the appropriate venue for the issue, and then turned around and argued in criminal court that he was immune for not having been convicted in the impeachment.
I apologize for not getting back to you earlier on this (if you see it at all!)
We've seen it fail over and over. They won't investigate their own seriously, and even when they find the grossest violations of law, they cover it up.
The idea that there will be justice by the voters is laughable.
> He can be President all day long in jail.
Playing devil's advocate, at least in part...
In practice, he cannot perform many of the duties of the office effectively - or perhaps at all - from jail.
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it says he should be President (given the outcome of the process we had). The laws that say he should be in jail are subordinate to the Constitution and so rightly lose out in the minimum way practicable - a delay in sentencing.
...
I do have problems with some of what I've written here, but it seems like a sensible position that could be held unreservedly by someone who disagrees with me on a few questions of fact that do have a subjective component.
Who? Trump? What does that have to do with anything?
Well supposedly federal govt can't intervene in state cases but the conviction against trump is at the state level, so why isn't he being sentenced? Because power isn't about rules.
As others said above, the president has certain immunities to prevent constitutional crises. But that's only for the president, and it's not part of his pardoning powers (which wouldn't work here anyway).
So why isn't he going to jail for felony falsification of business records (forget the classified records case, he's not meant to be immune from that but here we are)
My point is that power is not about what the law says, it's about what people can get away with through their relations with other people.
Trump or Jones?
I agree but the cases are very different. There's not much worth comparing them. It's different kinds of corruption.
His conviction wasn't overturned, they are just delaying his sentencing because he's now going to be the president again. He's not doing it by any power of the federal gov't.
Exactly, there's no rule (certainly no federal rule) that says a guy can't go to jail just because he was elected president. So why isn't he? Because he has power that is not assigned to him by any law. He is a bully with a cult of personality that makes people fear him and/or act as his sycophants.
I wouldn't bet on this. Trump can use a punitive executive order to pressure the state until the governor pardons Alex Jones.
Pardons are for crimes. This is a civil suit, not a criminal one.
Fraud is a crime.
There's no fraud conviction, there can't be a pardon. There's not even fraud charges, so what would the pardon be for... I find your rebuttal confusing.
You can pre-emptively pardon someone. Seemingly.
Likely different legal entities. Johnson & Johnson tried to get out of the talc powder settlement by creating a different legal entity to contain responsibility and damages. A court ruled that invalid but this type of corporate entity manipulation happens all the time. With the vitamin company, it might be that Jones is not majority owner of it but the other owners are sympathetic to him. Giving Jones' ownership stake to the Infowars creditors wouldn't change anything if Jones is not the controlling owner. This is all supposition on my part and perhaps he is the controlling owner but the court for some reason decided not to include it in his bankruptcy assets. It's a weird world when we allow artificial people to exist in the form of corporations.
> This is probably the correct decision.
It is 100% not. It makes fewer creditors whole. Simple as that. It's worse for all creditors involved, as per the creditors. Any suggestion that this is "correct" or better is out of ignorance or deceit.
> The other creditors are far better off getting more cash
The nature of the original deal guaranteed the other creditors got more money than they would from the other offer by $100,000 more. Suggesting that they were getting less is ignorant.
> the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
Again, the Onion was spending real cash.
At best your are completely ignorant of the deal.
It's correct if there's a new, open auction that does even better than the current Onion offer.
The judge ruled out holding a new auction.
...But then, why not cancel that new auction too, in hopes that a third auction will yield even more?
Nothing in the order says the accounting of the bid value was wrong it was mostly the form of the auction taking place as a single sealed bid round that the judge seems to quibble with. Counting debt as part of the bid is also not that unusual or weird, banks will bid their outstanding debt on foreclosure auctions all the time to get control of the house and sell it normally.
How can any entity related to Alex Jones be allowed to buy the InfoWars assets?
In the same way non-corporate 'entities' related to Alex Jones don't owe his debts.
If there's a company of which he's a minority owner, they could decide to buy it, and it would be like his brother buying it.
It is pure bullshit is what it is.
It is fraud and that bid should be disqualified.
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To bankrupt someone who exploited the families of a horrific crime to enrich himself. Not a pretend bankruptcy after most of the real assets have been shuffled off the board ahead of sentencing.
> How exactly is Alex Jones supposed to pay $1 billion dollars to anyone?
One dollar after another.
Alex Jones shuffles assets moments before a legal proceeding (or perhaps during it), goes bankrupt, and his shuffled assets can buy the assets he "lost". I don't have enough legal knowledge to call it fraud, but it sure sounds like what I'd call as a layman "pure bullshit".
>How exactly is Alex Jones supposed to pay $1 billion dollars to anyone?
That sounds like the job of a bankruptcy court now, doesn't it?
Pure bullshit #2: all creditors and debtors agreed on something and suddenly Jones himself says "no not that way!" Why does the debtor get to decide where and how he sells the assets he no longer owns?
>What is the purpose of this entire spectacle?
in case you forgot, a "major news network" tried to play off a tragic school shooting that isn't even 15 years old as a hoax. The family sued and he lost a defamation case over it. In the US (it's REALLY hard to claim defamation in the US, so you really screw up if you lose here).
On top of all of that all, Jones did all his darndest to drag out and overall disrespect the legal system though a mix of shuffling assets, missing court dates, and so many other pieces of foul play that would get any normal citizen charged with perjury (he may have been charged that). That is surely why his ruling costs ran so high.
So the purpose of this entire spectacle runs on 2 major points:
1. don't try to play off a modern, highly televised and recorded event in modern history as a "hoax", especially on a topic as serious as school shootings
2. Don't be a legal asshole and piss off judges in a court case.
That latter one shouldn't even need to be said, but between this and the Gawker trial we clearly have a lot of children who treat the judicial system like it's some casual date on Tinder. Judges don't like being ghosted.
> cash completely trumps any notion of "giving up debt."
Not true. The entire point of bankruptcy proceedings is to resolve debt to the creditors.
And in fact, that wasn't the issue that the Judge took here. The judge didn't like the amount, not the creditors bid.
> The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar.
The other creditors signed off on the deal which is why the Trustee took the bid. Alex Jones would have $3.5 million dollars less debt than if he took the FAUC bid. Which is exactly what the Trustee should prioritize, cutting back on Jone's debt.
I read the details of the auction out of interest. I think it is valid, and in the best interests of the creditors as it currently stands. Interested to see how others have read into it that they offered "more". It was a blind auction and the result is clearly in the best interests of the creditors to take the onion deal.
>Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash
Yes, but shouldn't that already be due to the victims?
This is worse for the victims, because rather than getting that money, and future revenue, they just get that money.
And this all ignores the harm to the victims, of giving Jones control of Infowars again.
They aren't ever going to see all of this $1.5B. I doubt most even want all that money, what they probably want is for Jones not to be able to keep his mouth piece.
No, Legal Eagle covered the sale, and the agreement giving it to the Onion maximized the proceeds to both of the Sandy Hook groups that have won judgement against Alex Jones. With the sale to Alex Jones's set of straw buyers, that wasn't true.
The sale to Alex Jones would have given the creditors basically nothing since the assets used to buy should already be theirs.
Will hold judgement until I read the judge’s opinion, but this bit:
“‘It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,’ Judge Lopez said.”
is nonsense from an auction theoretical perspective.
First-price sealed-bid auctions are a vetted auction system [1]—almost all real estate and corporate mergers, for example, are sold like this, as are government tenders [2]. (They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.)
The bankruptcy estate is selling the asset. Not Alex Jones. The creditors should be deciding who buys their stuff. Not a judge. (The judge is there to coördinate the creditors, not substitute his judgement for theirs.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sealed-bid-auction.asp
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction
> They’re not as efficient as Vickrey auctions [3], but nobody actually does that.
I've always been curious -- do you know why?
It's certainly not for lack of familiarity, considering that paying the second-highest bid is basically how eBay works.
And eBay doesn't reveal people's maximum bids either. And so between that and the prevalence of last-second sniping, it essentially operates as sealed for all practical purposes.
The "winning" offer was formulated such that its cash value depended upon the next best offer. I.e., when you strip away the complexity it was of the form "next best offer + $". That this bid "won" indicates the "auction" was not a sealed-bid auction of the kind you are thinking of.
Wait no none of this is right, it doesn't make it an unsealed auction just because one or more of the bids has terms and conditions. This is how every real-estate transaction is conducted.
What makes it fine in the end is that once you collect all the bids and resolve the legal paperwork you can assign values to the individual bids and compare them which is how people who sell their homes choose what offer to go with. And home sellers do consider intangibles and go with lower-cash offers all the time.
I don't really understand what all the legal kerfuffle is about. Is the court really going to force the families into a sale they don't want when the sale is for their benefit however they choose to define it?
Like other commenters, you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works.
> you have posited a theoretical framework for how a bankruptcy court theoretically should work. None of this is how bankruptcy court actually works
Literally started by saying I'm holding judgement until reading the opinion.
My point is simply that if the reason the judge raised for re-starting the process is solely around the bids being sealed, they're wrong in a provable way.
Oh, it's not that at all. The problem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid. In any case, a judge does make the decisions in a bankruptcy court when the parties disagree about things. In this case, the creditors are not in agreement that this was okay.
A sealed-bid auction is a bit non-standard in a bankruptcy, but there should be no problem if all the bids get revealed post-facto. I wouldn't be surprised if this was mentioned in the opinion because it doesn't help you say that the auction was fair in light of everything else (if you're going to do non-standard stiff, do it in a very clean-looking way).
> roblem with auction procedures in this case wasn't the actual auction methodology, but the lack of notice and the difficulty of submitting a bid
Which would make sense. That's not what the article quotes as the judge's reason (nor what you've said).
The quote in the article criticises sealed bids. That's mind-blowingly wrong to the point of having substance on appeal. It's so wrong I expressed scepticism it's actually the case, scepticism based on experience evaluating bankruptcy claims.
Yeah, the article is incorrect about that (like I said, sealed bids are very unusual in bankruptcy auctions, but the actual opinion cites the other stuff), and when I said that the auction procedure was farcical, I did not mean that the underlying algorithm of the auction was wrong, but that the procedures run by the auctioneer were awful.
Are there practically any other creditors? I would think the creditor owed $1.5B would cause all other creditors to become irrelevant rounding errors as a fraction of a percent. So if the families were to bid $X, then they'd be paying it right back into their other pocket. Seems like just a technicality or theatrics to require them to temporarily come up with cash just to give it right back to themselves. But lawyers love arguing technicalities.
All debt is not equal in seniority (seniority != amount), and yes, there are other creditors. Many people have credit cards, get bank loans, and have a mortgage, and I assume he has also borrowed money from several other sources. Those are creditors.
The next thing to do is think about the order these people get to take money in. Debt isn't one pool, it's a set of multiple priority queues. Asset-backed lines of credit typically have a senior claim to that asset but a junior claim to the general pool of money - Alex Jones, if forced to sell a hypothetical car with a hypothetical $1000 loan, will be paying back that loan in its entirety (if covered by the sale of the car) before the proceeds of that sale go to the $1.5 billion debt. Your general accounts are similarly ordered.
Yes, the set of Sandy Hook parents who won $1.5B would normally get essentially everything, but the Onion agreement had the minority creditors get a lot more money.
> Especially when the debt being settled is astronomically large and you are giving up a very small portion of it ($7 million out of $1.5 billion). The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are worth way less than one cent per dollar.
The whole purpose of the deal was to give everyone, except the largest creditor, more cash. Sure the other deal offered 2x more cash, but the largest creditor is so disproportionately large compared to all the other creditors, they would have basically taken all the cash and left little to nothing for the other creditors. The rejected deal involved the largest creditor voluntarily giving up part of their claim, resulting in a much larger (I.e. something like 10x larger) payout for other creditors, despite the lower dollar value on the entire deal.
So yeah, the other creditors are far better off getting more cash. But to do that InfoWars would need to sell for many multiples more than highest bid seen so far.
If the victims wanted to be victimized again just because people offer more money to continue the victimization operation, sure.
Unfortunately, giving the victims no choice in who owns this stuff means allowing it to be reused for the same harm.
Money is not the only variable in the equation. This is not a legal interpretation of the judges decision.
Side question, because this is the first I'm hearing of him selling vitamins.
Can his vitamins possibly be good? Who would buy these over day, centrum or Costco gummy vitamins.
This is weird to me.
it's fraud, Jones' parents own the vitamin company
So Alex Jones gets to cheat his way out of consequences yet again by transferring his assets to a new company and shopping for a sympathetic judge, just like the last several times?
> Additionally, the auction here was run farcically, and basically seemed designed to create an outcome where the onion gets to buy this website for no money.
You have been lied to.
As I see it, the situation couldn't be any simpler: the oligarchs will take what they want, justice be damned. It was a done deal as soon as Musk entered the scene.
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There's a deep irony in your post that you say it's the correct decision when it's Alex Jones attempting to strongarm his Infowars rights back after losing them in court because he failed to pay his outstanding debts.
Like you do see the obvious corruption here, right?
Am I missing something or does this NYT article not actually say what the judge based his decision on? That would be an important piece of information to have when deciding whether the decision was good or not.
This is the legal pretext, which appears about 2/3 of the way through the article:
> Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.
> auction failed to maximize the amount of money
I don't run auctions but something tells me there's a lot of research behind them that goes into optimizing for this precise thing. It's wild that the judge is disregarding the expertise of the person who was appointed by another judge to run the auction without asserting that the person is not qualified to run it.
It's not only a question of qualifications, they're complaining about a quantity which is not measurable. The auction concluded with a certain maximum bid. Now prove to me there could have been a higher bid. You can't! We measured all the bids, and this one was the highest! EDIT: I'm sorry your honor but the halting problem is undecidable?
this is not the halting problem.
It is quite wild and frankly just shocking.
The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
What's even more crazy about this ruling is he's told the trustee to come up with an alternative solution, that doesn't involve a new auction... But like no other guidance. That leaves the Trustee in a weird situation where the judge has said "I don't like what you did, fix it somehow, but not in a way that uses a new auction".
Frankly, this judge has just been pretty bad at their job. More than a few rulings have been just weird ramblings from the judge with unclear instructions to the trustee and the other parties.
And all this mainly appears to be because the judge doesn't like the amount that Infowars was sold for.
Out of curiosity, does anyone in this thread who is commenting on the quality of this judge or the sanity of his ruling practice bankruptcy law? I don’t, and I’m having a hard time evaluating these claims.
Not a whole lot of bankruptcy lawyers on the internet that I've seen.
But here's one business law lawyer/professor breakdown of the proceedings that I think is pretty good [1]
[1] https://confrontationality.substack.com/p/bankrupt-alex-jone...
So he's been doing bankruptcy for five years, which should be enough time for him to understand the intricacies of the statutes and case law. Sometimes you see judges put in specialty courts with no experience in that domain and make some absurd rulings.
He’s been practicing bankruptcy since at least 2013.
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These kind of comments don’t help any discussion.
(To put this in a less inflammatory way)
if it is indeed true that this judge was appointed by Trump (I haven't looked into it), it is reasonable to believe that it probably wasn't based on merit or understanding of law. This is because he has a long history of promoting/installing people that he believes (whether or not it turns out to be the case) will obey him above all else.
Being "fit for the task" is an afterthought.
> This is because he has a long history of promoting/installing people that he believes (whether or not it turns out to be the case) will obey him above all else.
Is there any evidence of this besides some angry tweets? If this was widely accepted as fact, I don't think the constitutionalists on the right would have supported his re-election, as that doesn't align with separation of powers.
Best evidence would probably the current cabinet picks. Plenty of un and underqualified people are slated for very high positions. Furthermore, the primary thrust of Project 2025 was to install people loyal to trump above all else. The authors of 2025 are on the Trump cabinet.
I can give more details if you like, but I think that's a bit OT from the current discussion for AJ's bankruptcy.
Also, I don't agree with the assessment that Lopez is unqualified or was nefariously picked.
As a former resident of Florida I have never heard Pam B(l)ondi express a rational thought
I don't think the trump admin really cared one way or another about a bankruptcy judge.
FWIW, Lopez has the credentials for the job. [1] He was a bankruptcy lawyer and teacher for years before being appointed as a judge.
I say this as someone not a fan of his rulings. I think the "he was a Trump appointee" critiques are misplaced. He's simply isn't good as a judge which, arguably, is a pretty different skillset from being a lawyer.
[1] http://nbconf.org/team/hon-chris-lopez/
> The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
This is actualy quite common with judges. Or so i heard from Popehat who is a practicing lawyer. What is going on is that the judge is feeling that one side is making a stronger argument, in their opinion, and they then tend to give more procedural leeway to the other side. In order to be, or appear to be unbiased. Then commentators or sometimes even the plantifs interpret it as the judge signaling that the judge is agreeing with them.
Supposedly this is common enough that lawyers get worried if the judge is too “nice” with their side.
So quite often judges make their decisions based on "feels" and then go out of their way to be nice to the other party so they don't appear biased. You can imagine the poor self representing party that has a strong case but is automatically disliked by the judge for not playing the game properly and basically has no chance.
I think you misunderstood. It is not based on "feel" and the greater procedural leeway they provide the party with the perceived or actual weaker argument is not for appearance sake alone. A judge wants both parties to make their best case and if one party fails to do so, they try to help them along to achieve it.
fair enough, thanks for clarifying that. I did not see it that way and in fact that is hopefully how the system works!
Infowars and Alex Jones have some fanatic followers. It should be investigated if the judge has been threatened to come to this conclusion.
You might be surprised to discover that federal judges are extremely not shy about bringing up threats to their safety that involve litigants before them.
Wasn't there some famous case in NY where a business man had to be sanctioned ~10 times before he stopped trying to get death threats against the judges family?
I don't really doubt that judges would bring something up to litigants but I do really doubt the bar would actually do something.
The Onion should be investigated for making a false bid for which they never had the money for.
>Jones' attorney Ben Broocks told Lopez at a hearing on Monday that the Onion only put up half as much cash as the $3.5 million offer from First American United Companies but boosted its bid with "smoke and mirrors" calculations.
Yes and Lopez rejected that as an issue. He also accepted the logic of why the Trustee picked the onion.
What Lopez did not like was the dollar amount and how the auction was ran, that's it.
Lopez kept the Trustee on board, though, because he doesn't believe the Trustee did anything wrong (Strangely since the Trustee organized the auction).
It wasn't a false bid, it was a bid that would have relieved Jones of more debt than the bid FAUC put up. Which was accepted by his creditors.
Judge Lopez was appointed by Trump, so I'd assume that he's acting under instructions. Why would Trump have appointed a judge who wouldn't do favors for him?
I hope you realize that he can't fire judges just because he appointed them.
I believe the implication isn’t that he’d be fired. Rather that doing the bidding of the far right (as instructed) was the deal he made to get the job. I look at it as payment for services rendered.
So what would be the consequences of not honoring these, "instructions"?
Oh, nothing?
There are absolutely social, political, and economic consequences. Those in the political class don’t exist in a separate bubble from each other. There are natural consequences for breaking from the party line, especially on the right, which demands complete fealty.
Natural consequences might be that the judge and their family no longer get to go to the yacht extravagant social gatherings, their kids may no longer have an in at their preferred university, or they may have even have the propaganda machine turned against them - potentially endangering them.
There are so many potential consequences that it’s not even worth trying to mention them all. These are all real threats that keep people in these types of positions aligned with the original intent for putting them there.
> These are all real threats
Real or hypothetical? Still don't see any evidence. FYI it is this kind of posting that goes nowhere, that helped re-elect Trump. People are tired of it and the gaslighting. Hope this helps.
I think maybe you’re running afoul of the same thing you’re accusing me of, which is being too vague. There are plenty of examples such as the lavish gifts given to SCOTUS justices with the expectation that they’ll behave the “right” way. Are you saying these things will still happen if the justice starts behaving counter to the party?
What I’m describing is not some abstract concept, it’s part of human society and I have no doubt you’ve experienced it yourself.
Firing isn't the worst possible consequence by a damn sight. Not all consequences need to work within some legal framework.
So the deal's "contract" is backed by honor then. Doesn't seem to make sense but I suppose it's possible. Is there any evidence that it is happening?
As I understand it, bankruptcy judges are not appointed by the president but rather by the relevant Court of Appeals. And they do not serve for life (because they aren’t Article III judges).
Shouldn't all of the mechanics of the auction been agreed upon explicitly or at least implicitly with past precedent of bankruptcy auctions? How did the lawyers go ahead of an auction that even had a chance of being thrown out by the judge?
This is something that was brought up in the hearings.
For starters, one issue here is the Judge is just, frankly, bad at giving instructions. He left how the auction should be ran up to the Trustee who ultimately used an auction company which handles these sorts of liquation auctions. He didn't give clear instructions on what he wanted.
FAUC (alex jones's new company) did not raise any issues with the auction until after they found out that they lost. They had multiple communications with the auction house and the trustee right up until the winners were announced. It was only after they lost that they started throwing a stink about how the auction was ran.
Frankly, it's a bad faith argument by FAUC that's just sour grapes over losing. They were always going to challenge the results on a loss, but it does look bad for them that they didn't do that until after the loss.
Lopezes problem with the auction was mainly that he felt like the amounts were too low. He didn't really explain why he felt that and has left everything really ambiguous (not a good judge IMO). He has left the managing of infowars under the care of the Trustee and has basically given them a "fix it" order with really no clear guidelines on how they are supposed to do that (other than don't do another auction).
Surely this ruling is immediately (interlocutory) appealable?
Obviously that would add another two years of misery, but still...
Appealable, yes, pretty much all orders are appealable.
Everyone has 2 weeks to file an appeal to this ruling and the Judge has given 30 days for the Trustee to figure out how to fix things.
We'll see what happens.
In any event, yes, likely we are going to see this dragged out like crazy. What's wild is IDK what happens when all the infowars funds dry up if this is stuck in litigation. Bankruptcies aren't usually drawn out like this (and it's somewhat designed to be very streamlined).
Thanks! The archived snapshot doesn’t have that, it must have been added later.
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> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
Not necessarily. In many sealed-bid auctions, bidders hope to win with a lower bid (often much lower) than they would if they were bidding against others in the same room. This is especially true if you have no idea whether anyone else is bidding on the item at all. I have placed very low bids on items in sealed-bid auctions for things I had no immediate need for, but would happily pay for if the cost was very low (and I have won many such items, sometimes because no one else even bid on them).
> I have placed very low bids on items in sealed-bid auctions for things I had no immediate need for, but would happily pay for if the cost was very low
Would you think it would have gone differently in an English Open Cry situation?
You're confused. It's the Vickrey auction which is second-price. English auctions are first-price. First-price sealed-bid auctions are different from Vickrey auctions.
Given how the NYT is describing the entire court case (only a level above shit slinging from Twitter), it sounds like this is less about any rationale and more dragging of the feet to get any kind of "win" out of this whole kerfluffle.
The judge basically says as much in the end:
>“You’ve got to scratch and claw and get everything you can for everyone else,” he said.
Which is a truly bizarre statement for a judge to make given the nature of this entire case. Then again, "good faith errors" certainly shows the bias of this judge here.
> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
That is a very large claim to make that ignores psychology. If it were true, you would never see open cry auctions used anywhere.
> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
Do you have a source for this? I find it hard to believe standard "English" auctions would be so popular if it was true.
Parent commenter's description of the difference between an ascending bid auction and a second price auction (or Vickrey auction) is very confused. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for an introduction to auctions and proofs of the optimality of different auctions for different goals (e.g. the second price auction is proven to maximize social surplus): https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
This is almost entirely wrong in all respects. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for a good introduction to auction design. https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
From the article: "Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret. “It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added."
Wait, couldn’t this same argument be made in reverse? If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer, which suggest sealed bids are most appropriate to maximize the value. Auctions can’t be fairly judged in hindsight, generally speaking.
If the bids are secret and the highest bidder pays what they bid then bidders have the incentive to try to bid strategically, i.e. less than what they'd be willing to pay as long as they think that's more than anyone else would be willing to pay. Plus, if there is someone who thinks it's worth way more than anyone else, they could just place a modest bid and then if they lose buy it from the winner for $1 more than what the winner values it at anyway.
The way you can avoid this with secret bids is to specify that the highest bidder will pay $1 more than the second highest bidder no matter how high they bid. Then everyone has the incentive to actually specify the maximum they'd be willing to pay, because if the next highest bid is lower than that they still actually do want to buy it, but they lose nothing by bidding higher because they only pay a dollar more than the next highest bidder no matter what, and then you maximize bids.
But by that point you don't benefit from keeping the high bid a secret anymore, because of human psychology. Someone bids $100, is the current high bidder and thinks they're getting to buy it, then someone outbids them and loss aversion kicks in so they make a higher bid, even though the first bid was supposed to be their max.
Known as a "second-price" or Vickrey auction for anybody who wants to read some auction game theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction
Yeah but in the bankruptcy setting, this would demonstrate that the trustee didn't get as much as they could.
Does it? If it's public knowledge that Alice would pay $200 and Bob would pay $100 then Alice wouldn't actually bid $200, she'd bid $101 and still win, the same result as that type of auction. If nobody knows what Alice would bid except Alice then it's even worse, because Bob thinks he could win at $60 and would rather pay $60 than $100 and Alice correctly predicts that Bob is going to do that and then wins by bidding $75. And if Bob bids $80 then Alice can still buy it from Bob for $110 but the estate is still getting $80 instead of $101.
Go bank to pseudo security. This is the letter of an argument again ingnoring the spirit of the judgment/law/...
The spirit is that a person owes families he defamed billions of dollars and that person doesn't like who they need to sell their assets to to make that money. I don't even know how and why the details of how this money is recouped is important. If I go bankrupt and need to sell my house, I sure can't stop it from being sold to Hitler or something absurd like that.
Well they are the creditors, so they put their credit up against the value of the thing. It's no different than what a bank does when it bids on a house it put up for auction after a mortgagee default. Here the only difference is that the bidding was blind, which the judge took issue with.
I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the technicalities of the ruling. Go away
Its a classic maximisation problem something the overblown ai skating community should understand nothing to do with feelings or secret agreements because of that. Should be allowed to buy back goes own stuff minus debt no, but go fix the system if you don't like that...
How would it do that? You need to leave a little on the table for the deal to work.
Because they'd be paying a dollar more than the second highest bid, not the amount of the highest bid. Frankly, I'm not sure how that could not be more clear.
They wouldn't have made that bid if the rules were different! A vickrey auction has a lot of support as getting revenue.
So?
So a bid of $200 in a Vickrey auction that results in a $101 sale price doesn't imply that you could have otherwise gotten $200, because in a different type of auction the bidder wouldn't have bid that much.
Well it does imply that they did value it at $200 so I'm not sure what you aren't getting because it's very plain.
> If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer [..]
Isn't that what you want to happen?
All the auctions I've ever participated have repeated this very process until none of the buyers are prepared to raise their bid, at which point it appears the seller has got the highest price anyone will offer.
What am I missing?
In theory, a Second-price sealed-bid auction will produce the same price as an Open ascending-bid auction. Every bidder will offer the true value of the item to them, and the item will go to the highest bidder at the second-highest price.
But some people might think, due to human nature, that one auction or the other gets higher prices. Maybe an open bid auction gets lower bids, because interested people start lower knowing they can bid again, then back out when they see there's a lot of competition. Maybe sealed-bid auctions work better for large organisations, as getting board approval and CFO sign-off on a multi-million-dollar expenditure takes a few days. Or maybe an open bid auction gets bidders het up and excited because they're in second place and surely no matter what you've bid, you'd always bid 5% more to win - right?
None of which is backed by theory, but if it feels true to the judge - who's to say?
IMHO the main value of buying infowars, to The Onion, was the publicity and headlines. Those are harvested now. If the auction was repeated I can't imagine The Onion upping their bid.
> who's to say?
Surely we could find a professional, whose job it is to liquidate assets after a court decision, that the judge would trust?
If this existed, it should have a name that emphasizes the trust aspect.
The article suggests that this is is a first price sealed bid auction instead of a second price sealed bid auction. Skipping over the more complex nature of the Onion bid, the linked articles states "The total value of The Onion’s bid was $7 million" and "First United American Companies had a higher bid, offering $3.5 million in cash".
In some parts of the world, they auction houses in this exact manner. You show up, post a very large amount of money to prove you're serious, then everyone bids in person like an art auction.
Here in Canada, when the market is hot there are lots of auctions withe multiple buyers competing for a house. In my market (Southern Ontario), it is almost always a sealed bid situation, and winning buyers often outbid their rivals by tens of thousands of dollars.
The agents around here are fond of a process engineered to maximize the bids: If there are multiple bids that are all reasonable, they will tell the lowballs to go home, while telling those remaining how many bids are in, and offering everyone a chance to "sweeten up" before a final decision is made.
I personally would never buy a home through such a process, which tells you that I absolutely would love to sell my home in exactly this fashion should the market be hot whenever that happens.
Now that being said, I cannot say for certain whether the frenzy of shouting bids while staring your opponents in the eye will produce more money or the sealed bids will produce more money.
sealed bidding entices bidders who really want something to overbid to ensure they win. It is a common strategy to maximize offers
They could do an open run-off round of bids until they have two potential buyers, and then switch to secret ballot to get each party's highest bid I suppose?
NYT reporting has been trash for at least 10 years. Anyway Matt Levine, who has as good an opinion on this kind of thing as any columnist, sees it as mostly a technicality, and believes Onion can just submit their bid again. Of course, Elon also now has an outside interest, and can outbid anyone via proxy or otherwise.
Matt Levine quote:
> That strikes me as mostly wrong? One, it is not really impossible to value the families’ claims; they have won judgments in court. Two, “whatever the Connecticut Families decide to do with distributions” obviously adds to the value of The Onion’s bid, if what they do with the distributions is give them to other creditors. Three, it is not so much “a text book example of collusion” as it is a pretty standard case of the biggest creditor of a bankruptcy estate using its debt to subsidize its bid for the assets. It’s pretty normal stuff. > > I don’t know? Global Tetrahedron’s bid was “$100,000 more than anyone else will pay,” so it’s not clear how much an auction would have helped. I suppose now they can have another auction and Global Tetrahedron can just bid $100,000 — or $1 — more than whatever FUAC bids, including the families’ waiver, and win the auction again.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-12-11/the-on... (https://archive.ph/uetH6)
Journalists almost never cite and link to sources either. They make it so hard to verify anything.
You're not missing anything. Most US legal reporting complete shit, opting to write about the implications rather than do any legal analysis.
[dead]
Statement from The Onion (via CEO Ben Collins): https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3lcyypa...
And here's the statement from Jones: https://x.com/realalexjones/status/1866752494317003142
I must ask - does Mr Jones really sound like that - as if loud throat is getting hammered while functioning perfectly fine and loud and fast and at the same time pressing hard voice breaks, or is it some kind of voice modulation?
Also, @RealAlexJones says "EXCLUSIVE: Alex Jones Responds Live On Air" → is this about two separate Alex Jones, or the same Mr Jones is talking about himself in the 3rd person?
That's just the title of the video. That's why the first letter of each word is capitalized.
I appreciate that the tweet actually had context about what happens next:
"…continue to seek a path towards purchasing…"
"…back to the drawing board…"
The article could have used those details.
-----
[edit] They've updated the article.
It said that exact thing, but didn't need a number of tweets to say it. Advantage: article.
To save you a click. Ben Collins (CEO The Onion):
We are deeply disappointed in today's decision, but The Onion will continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured.
We will also continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks. It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case.
We appreciate that the court repeatedly recognized The Onion acted in good faith, but are disappointed that everyone was sent back to the drawing board with no winner, and no clear path forward for any bidder.
And for all of those as upset about this as we are, please know we will continue to seek moments of hope. We are undeterred in our mission to make a funnier world.
I am just some guy who doesn't actually know much about this. This being the internet, though:
If I understand, it's pretty routine in real estate foreclosures for a creditor to win the auction simply by bidding the outstanding value of the debt. Thus not needing to actually come up with much or any cash. This gains the ability to use or resell the property however you want.
How is one situation different from the other?
Bankruptcy runs by different rules than foreclosures (which is why people about to be foreclosed on often file bankruptcy). Specifically, junior creditors are protected, and everyone gets a proportionate share of the proceeds.
In a foreclosure, the senior lienholder usually gets the property and the junior lienholders either get nothing or get what’s left over after the senior creditor gets whatever they were owed.
I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
> I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal…
The reason is because there were two civil judgements against Alex Jones to satisfy with the second judgement being about 27x larger than the first. As a result, it is mathematically impossible to run an auction that triggers an outcome large enough to satisfy both judgements proportionally and positively. Many members of the second judgement decided to forego any winnings from this auction so as to satisfy the first judgement positively on the condition they would earn a share of ad revenue from the intellectual property in the future. Their primary motivation was not ad revenue or any other form of income, but instead ensuring the concerned intellectual property rests with an owner not friendly to Alex Jones.
That is the reason the Onion won the auction despite offering the lower of two bids, because the larger bid did not positively satisfy the parties to the first judgement.
> I’m really not sure why the creditors in this case did a shady no bid deal… it seems they would have had an easy time buying out the junior creditors and then getting whatever they want, although I’m also not sure why anyone would want the “infowars.com” domain and a warehouse full of vitamin pills.
The creditors with smaller claims hate the guts of the creditors with bigger claims, and likely wouldn't sell for any amount of money. Also, I am not sure whose claims have been decided to be senior to other claims (seniority of claims has little to do with monetary amount). Not all types of debt are equal.
Bankruptcy is something that happens to the borrower. Foreclosure is something that happens to the property.
Correct, although a foreclosure of a property will be affected if the owner of said property undergoes bankruptcy. (For private individuals, such as Mr Jones, some or all of their primary residential property is exempt from bankruptcy, and the foreclosure itself will be stayed until the bankruptcy is adjudicated, and, generally speaking, foreclosure will be stopped if they resume making mortgage payments, regardless of prior delinquencies.)
A bankruptcy trustee was involved during the whole process (3rd party neutral). While the goal of increasing money to creditors here may work due to the free publicity, it harms the creditors interests who already agreed to the settlement. So you have a third party neutral trustee and the creditors who were harmed agreeing.
With that said bankruptcy judges do reject plans quite often and this is a high profile case.
For an entire week, I thought this was an Onion parody headline, and didn't realize the Onion _actually_ tried to buy Info Wars. We're living in such an entertaining era. Life imitates art.
Not The Onion meets Actually The Onion https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1gr5jz8/the_on...
The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me.
He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered. He's scum of the earth.
That business was taken away from him, and folks think that's too much? What the actual fuck.
It shocking to me too. I can't understand how people are 'both sides-ing' this or just supporting him under some free speech argument. Free speech has limits and a court found Jones went too far and that cost him his business.
People have been arguing the same bogus free speech point in the UK recently because people have been arrested for saying things that are anti-immigration and offensive online.
People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue. If you go around tweeting hateful things about the Royal family and the courts find you guilty, don't be surprised if that costs you your freedom. It's pretty simple.
Alex is legally free to saying whatever he wants, but he had the wrong views on Sandy Hook and his wrong views hurt the families affected, therefore he deserves to lose his business.
> because people have been arrested for saying things that are anti-immigration and offensive online.
What does immigration have to do with this? Nobody has a right to immigrate. Pointing out that there have been a massive influx of immigrants in the UK by any reasonable standard, that the majority of the UK population supports limiting/restricting immigration to at least some extent, that the UK does not have the resources to support the current rate of immigration, that the number of rapes in the UK has quintupled over the past 12 years, and that the rape increase coincides with the increase in immigration are all (1) factually true (2) non-hateful and (3) covered by free speech.
> People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue
That's literally the definition of "free speech". "Free speech" does not have clauses for "hateful" or "truthiness".
Additionally, any normal person who thinks about the problem for more than a few seconds can easily see that even if free speech did have those clauses, deciding whether things are "true" or "hateful" in general is completely impossible - it's not that hard to understand. It's also certainly not something you'd want the government deciding.
The arguments made by free speech advocates are not "bogus" - what's bogus is ignorant statements of yours that get the definition of "free speech" wrong and ignore basic knowledge about reality.
> People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue.
So people don't actually have free speech.
It's really Alex Jones was alleged to pay people to harass Sandy Hook families at all hours of the day. He then proceeded to lie in court and after it become known refused to continue to participate and had a default judgement entered against him.
If I were to follow you around 24/7 for weeks shouting into a microphone is that not illegal?
Reflexive contrarianism runs amok in these parts. It’s pretty pathetic.
To be clear I haven't seen a single comment that could be charitably characterized as "supporting Alex Jones". I see a lot of comments that are pointing out that the judgment against him seems unreasonable given the damage he did to these families.
I see a few instance of people defending his actions as "free speech."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42387916
"View it for what it is: a deliberate attack on free speech. This is essentially legislating from the bench. They can't ban him from speaking but they can make it very VERY expensive to do so, and warn anyone else at the same time."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42385358
"Maybe the “victims” should go after the actual shooter for a billion dollars then.
Instead we have people crying that free speech is the actual evil crime here."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42389350
The people pointing out that the judgment is 'unreasonable' are either intentionally lying or extremely ignorant.
The context is that the judge awarded a default judgment because Alex Jones literally refused to participate in the legal system. He committed overt perjury (and was outright caught on this) and proceeded to just stop complying entirely.
If any of us received a court summons and refused to show up or defend ourselves the court isn't going to shrug and say the case goes away. In a system of law you can't just ignore the law and expect the judge to take pity on you.
Torts are not just about damage, they're also about deterrence. Jones repeatedly demonstrated in the court battle that no deterrence would work on him.
His entire business is built on this kind of defamation -- how much proceeds of this kind of business should he be allowed to keep?
About -200% seems fair to me.
It is unreasonable imo. He deserves to see jail time.
Free speech means protecting speech of people you disagree with.
So what if he claims Sandy Hook was an FBI psy-op. Don't agree with him? Then just walk the other way. The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.
>The amount of vitoral against the theory just goes to prove that perhaps the FBI and ATF knew a lot more than they like to admit.
The vitriol is because the spread of the "theory" led directly to the harassment of Sandy Hook victims by people who believed they were "crisis actors."
Most people possessed of common decency and a moral core would find that objectionable.
Intentionally lying to sell ads at the expense of innocent people being targeted and harassed over years is probably not covered by free speech rights in the US.
And if you want to turn this into an argument about the necessary evils of a society practicing free speech, I'll just say that even if it were "covered", I'm not interested in that "right" existing in that form. Though I'm pretty sure willful lies that result in actual, predictable harm is not protected speech.
Don't even know what your last sentences are about. Are you suggesting a conspiracy of some sort?
It's Hacker News. I hate to say it, but this is all the website is known for at this point. Bring it up in passing conversation with the in-crowd and you'll get laughed out of the room for using "Orange Site" and fraternizing with drug-addled Elon worshipers and "soloprenuers" that beg for recognition for their dogshit SaaS product. The score has been known for years, the political leaning of Hacker News is basically the same as the "curious individuals" that inform themselves via JRE and random X accounts from Russia.
The people using Hacker News are regularly a stone's throw away from the sort of people that use 4chan. Except Hacker News has usernames and karma so it tends to create cults of personality around people that say what people want to hear.
The thing is, this (admittedly common) opinion is as facile as the opinions of progressives who act as though all of reddit is /r/TheDonald. Overall, both are actually very left-leaning websites (in reddit's case, almost overwhelmingly so), they just tolerate the existence of pockets of very right-leaning individuals - because of lofty ideals of "free speech". However, even then, you'll usually see legitimate social conservatism get downvoted pretty heavily, and even fiscal conservatism will garner rapid disagree in most cases.
(That said, to a lot of those people, it doesn't matter if the "majority" are left leaning. And for some of those (e.g. trans people), they're even somewhat justified in that stance, since it doesn't make a difference if the harassment they get from being brought to the attention of "orange site" users comes from the majority or the minority)
Eh? I always figured hackernews was full of silicon valley types who listen to peter thiel podcasts on their way home in their stickshift subaru (or FSD tesla).
There's a few of them, if that's all it was I likely wouldn't be here quite so much.
Consciously or unconsciously, people begin with an unshakable feeling of “my tribe good,” then reverse engineer a justification for whatever issue is being politicized. Even if it involves defending a repugnant conman and slanderer like Jones.
It just goes to show that far too many people have no fundamental values, only political affiliations.
When the right wing Govt was elected in my country suddenly right wing nutjobs appeared out of the woodwork on country/cities subreddits (seen quite sometimes here on hn as well) overnight as if they were just always there and were just dormant waiting for a time to show up in the right climate. No, they were not immediate new inserts from some IT Cell at all. They were always there.
I do not find anything shocking about Jones support in this post. A great social mistake has been thinking that people supporting nefarious stuff or shady, disgusting, and pathetic people do not know any better - but they do. Thing is - that is exactly what they want!
>he built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered
That not what he built his business on. That was one (bad) thing he did.
That is exactly what he built his business on - attacking people with bald face lies and using the generated outrage to sell snake oil.
> He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing *parents whose children were murdered.* He's scum of the earth.
> attacking *people* with bald face lies and using the generated outrage to sell snake oil.
You made a specific claim, were refuted because that specific claim is clearly false, and now you've made a general claim while presenting it as if it's the same as the specific claim. This is not intellectually honest.
The poster suggested that Jones actions on Sandy Hook were an outlier. One 'bad' action. They were not. He built his business on Sandy Hook and similar actions, and that's clearly what my original post intended and I stand by it.
I think it's intellectually dishonest to suggest Jones faced consequences because of one bad action. I have stronger words for it honestly but I'm trying to stick to the rules of this forum.
This whole thread only shows me it's time for me to leave HN. You're welcome to it.
You claimed: "He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered."
This is false, as he obviously didn't build his operation solely on his claims about Sandy Hook as you claimed. The other comment pointed this out, so you changed what you were saying without admitting what you said was inaccurate. Now you are bizarrely claiming that you didn't say what you said, even though everyone can read what you wrote. Alex Jones was sued because of what he said about Sandy Hook, he was not sued for these other actions which were not relevant to the case. Whatever you think about Jones, it doesn't do anyone any good to portray the Sandy Hook case as being about other things.
I meant that he built the business out of attaching sandy hook parents and similar actions. I think that's the obvious reading for anyone who knows anything about Jones.
I sure could have been clearer. But what exactly are you saying? That he didn't build his business this way? Or are you just trying to attack the words I used.
What are you hoping to accomplish by parsing my words technically?
>> Whatever you think about Jones, it doesn't do anyone any good to portray the Sandy Hook case as being about other things.
What do you mean? My whole point is that Sandy Hook is not different from what Jones did every single day, and you don't seem willing to disagree with me. You just seem to want to parse my words.
Why? What exactly is your point here? Why are you arguing this specific turn of phrase? Unless you think that Alex Jones is a voice you want to hear and protect. Why don't you just say that?
You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.
This is a common claim, but it only ever seems to be made by people with a strong ideological commitment who are mad that the opposing commitment isn't banned on the site. In other words, the complaint is that we don't moderate HN based on ideology. Since to do that would contradict HN's reason for existing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), I'm not inclined to start.
The irony is that people with the opposing ideological passion—the ones you refer to as techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists—make exactly the same complaint that you do, just with the ideological bit flipped. They think that HN is (let me see...) full of uber sensitive, far left ideologues [1], not only socialists but delusional anti-socials [2], full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark [3]. Virtually every leftist post is upvoted [4], anything that can be remotely considered right wing is automatically flagged and/or downvoted [5], and only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, because I have destroyed this site! [6]
It's not really ironic, because these perceptions are only opposed to each other on the surface—just one bit is flipped, as I said. The underlying mechanisms have to be the same.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160087
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330143
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41846634
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41851430
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799361
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42076694
I <3 you so much, @dang. Thank you for the reminder to stay curious.
This is a very late reply, but I think it's quite revealing that you seem to be implying that having an ideological stance is (a) optional, and (b) value-neutral. Why yes, people who are opposed politically don't think the other is right, and hope for their views to be promoted at the cost of the other's. That's as trite an observation as I can think of. It's like pointing out that every political ideology supports some violence but disavows violence from others; it's the political analysis of a child, or someone who thinks they are above ideology because their ideology is the dominant worldview of their culture. Ideology has substance and verifiable consequences that can be judged.
But I think you've read into what I'm saying too much in order to defend yourself and the terrible job you do moderating this website; my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences. Speech does have consequences, even if it's polite. But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate than be seen as taking a side, so here we are. That's the charitable interpretation, anyways.
I haven't implied that, and in fact am careful never to imply nor assume it. I'm making an empirical observation about the conditions under which this complaint comes up, and how similar they are.
> my position isn't that those people should be banned for their political views. They should be banned if and when their speech has negative real-world consequences.
That sounds fine in principle, but in practice it just shifts the language from 'what is the correct ideology' to 'what speech has negative consequences'. Since you can easily predict the latter from the former—that is, if you know what a person says about the first, it's easy to predict what they will say about the second—I don't see much difference there.
> But you would rather have liars spreading disinformation and bigots spreading hate
Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
One can be on board with the critique of naive neutrality which you refer to in your first sentence (and which, btw, is so often repeated that, if we're going to call things trite, we should include that one), without agreeing that a community like this must be run by mods who publicly consign themselves to a single ideological box and moderate based on the definitions it dictates. That may be what committed ideologues would like, but the majority of the community would not. It's also incompatible with the intellectual curiosity that the site is trying to organize around, so we don't have the option anyhow, if we want HN to exist for its intended purpose.
But you absolutely are implying that, because you're implying that you're acting without ideological commitment. You're obviously not saying it, but the implication is that I'm ideologically committed (and therefore myopic, foolish, not intellectually curious) and you're either not or able to act as though you're not.
> Same again here: your (or whoever's) definitions of 'disinformation' and 'hate' are functions of your/their ideological view, so this amounts to the complaint that the mods aren't following your/their ideology. It's just a more aggressive way of saying it.
This sounds to me like a slippery slope argument (or perhaps an argument for a strong form of moral relativism): because someone, somewhere might disagree that something is misinformation, it's actually impossible (or maybe just undesirable) to definitively say something is or isn't that. There are certainly gray areas and practical limits (I'd be totally incapable of judging whether any article on chemistry contains disinformation, for example). That's not a reason not to try.
Optimizing the site for "intellectual curiosity", narrowly defined as a _free marketplace of ideas_, is itself a strong ideological commitment. Intellectual curiosity is absolutely good, but restricting misinformation and hate significantly improves the signal to noise ratio of that discussion. I understand the fear that fringe points of view with merit might be drowned out, since historically some things we now broadly regard as true were fringe positions.
But at the same time the quality of discussion here is through the floor when certain topics come up because large volumes of people who know nothing on the subject are simply regurgitating culture war nonsense and abusing the voting system to prevent actual knowledge on the subject from spreading. This site ends up just being another avenue for bad-faith argumentation and outright lies to drown out the truth. This is especially obvious when discussions on some minorities happen: because the people spreading outright lies or repeating culture war talking points are numerous, loud, and _polite_, actual discussion is utterly impossible. The moderation policy serves to provide a shield to bad-faith actors (for example, through "just asking questions"[1]) while silencing those who are actually intellectually curious through inaction.
For a concrete example, some of the most curious and intelligent people I know happen to be transgender. The subject of transgender people is one of the worst topics on this site right now because that group is the scapegoat du jour for the far right. When those people try to argue against commonplace lies and share actual information, they're shut down through the voting system and are outnumbered. They're subject to being called all sorts of horrible, false things... politely and indirectly. As such, they've left. The quality of discussion everywhere goes down, anyone _actually_ curious about the subject only has the loudest but wrong opinions available, and my friends end up feeling isolated and hated. Who benefits from that? Not those of us interested in good discussion. Only the people spreading misinformation for their own political purposes and people who have more emotionally invested in the idea of a free marketplace of ideas than in the truth.
Anyways, I realize your opinion on the matter is unchangeable. I just wish that the site were more honest about its own strong ideological commitments.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Asking_Questions
I feel like we're hitting a point where we'd have to clarify what we mean by some of these phrases or risk talking past each other, and that's too hard to do in this context. (For example we probably mean something different by "ideological commitment".) I'd like to add a few things though—and of course you're also welcome to do that if you want.
One thing is, I personally wouldn't put the HN concept of "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" anywhere near the phrase "free marketplace of ideas". The word "marketplace" has many associations, some of which are inimical to what we want here. Ditto for "free". Neither word belongs to, let's call it, the domain language of HN moderation (and I could even say bad things about "ideas").
For me, "optimizing for intellectual curiosity" has to do with (1) learning from each other (which implies community, and a marketplace is not a community); and above all, (2) avoiding tedious repetition. The problem with political and ideological battle (on HN) is that it falls on the undesirable side of both lines: its endless hammering of talking points is repetitive; and its pitch of high indignation is destructive to openness and curiosity. If this is a 2x2 matrix, that's the bad/bad quadrant—and note that it's the bad/bad quadrant regardless of which ideology generates the content.
Another thing is, this community has lots of transgender members, they're as welcome as anyone, and some who I know of make some of the best contributions to the site. We don't tolerate slurs or abuse, and warn and/or ban accounts that post those. The community also does a good job of flagging them. Some stick around for a while, but people are welcome to (and do) email hn@ycombinator.com when they see them, and we always follow up. The topic, of course, is fraught on HN, just as in society at large, and people inevitably have conflicting ideas about what constitutes a slur or an abuse as opposed to, say, a wrong opinion. But I don't believe the site is as bad as you say it is on this front. If it is, then there are a lot of posts going unflagged and unmoderated that I'm unaware of.
Last thing is, what does 'misinformation' mean if not 'falsehood'? But then you're asking mods to decide what's true vs. what's false and impose those decisions—which strikes me as absurd. How on earth would we do that? We don't have a truth meter [1, 2]. We have our views about what's true vs. false like anyone does, but I'm not so hubristic as to imagine that my views are the correct ones and wield power with them. That is the worst quality I can imagine in a moderator, and the thing the community would most reject. (I'm also not so hubristic as to imagine that I don't do that, unintentionally—at most I can say that I've spent 10 years trying to get better at not doing it, and practice has an effect.)
Eager ideologues of every flavour say "you don't have a misinformation meter? no problem - use mine!" But the power to decide and enforce what counts as misinformation is literally the power to decide what's true and thereby control the site. Now I'm repeating what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42418981 and we're in a cycle.
Moderation, at least as I understand it on HN, simply can't work on such principles (deciding contentious questions by decree). It needs principles on a different level that can foster the kind of community and discussion that has a chance of remaining curious, and then maybe the community can do the job of figuring out what's true vs. false together.
That doesn't mean I'm reducing this to relativism and I suspect if we were to look at a list of borderline posts together, we'd end up agreeing about many. Maybe most. I don't want culture war talking points, for example, or just-asking-questions baiting, any more than you do. But I want grounds for saying "we don't want that here" other than "you are wrong according to my ideology"—and indeed, I don't want culture war talking points or just-asking-questions baiting in any direction. It's not as if it's ok for curiosity one way and then not ok if you flip an ideological bit.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38787789
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The top comment on this very thread at the time I write this is clear bad-faith disinformation. Life is a Cabaret, but the Cabaret is not life. The tone here has changed for the worse, especially since the election, and I cannot keep pretending.
Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385079? I have zero idea what the technicalities of the bankruptcy judgment are or should be, but what I do know after an embarrassing number of years doing this job is:
(1) there's no such thing as "clear bad-faith" - to decide that would require knowing someone else's inner state. We don't have access to that about each other, and people are far too quick to draw conclusions about it—thousands of times too quick;
(2) usually the person who seems to be in bad faith just has a different working set of information and a very different background than you; they may be wrong of course, but that's not a crime or sin. We're all wrong anyhow.
(3) the only response to "disinformation" that works (or has a hope of working) is to answer false claims with true ones and bad arguments with better arguments.
I can also tell you that HN hasn't much changed since the election. Or if it has, I haven't noticed, or seen data suggesting it. People have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.
> people have often felt over the years like HN has changed since $X, but at most there are fluctuations that revert to the mean. Whatever the real trends there are, they're longer-term than that, and determined by fundamentals.
I think it is generally agreed upon that the volume of shared misinformation and individuals believing misinformation has been dramatically increasing over the last decade as preferences in media has shifted.
It would be interesting if the population of HN wasn't following this trend.
Oh - no doubt HN is not immune from macro trends, and I didn't mean to imply that it was!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I just mean that whatever macro trends we're subject to, they're longer-term than discrete events like an election.
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The two sibling commenters spend hours per week on HN and haven't seen this. I spend an hour or so a week looking for this --- you can see it in my comment history --- over and above the probable hours per day I spend on HN (I am on HN professionally).
It's an open-access site, so if you go looking for this stuff, you will absolutely find it. But it tends, strongly, to come from throwaway accounts, and is virtually always flagged off the site. I used to point this stuff out to Dan, but have mostly stopped, because by the time he sees the email it's already dead.
So, no, sorry, I don't think the "festering" charge will stick.
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I spend many hours per week on HN, for many years, and haven't seen even one instance of what you mention.
I also spend many hours per week and haven't seen something like this in months. I don't think you're being honest, especially because you're on a new account and likely are an alt of another poster here. You're definitely stretching the definitions of "plenty" and "at every opportunity" at the very least, if not outright misrepresenting the situation as more common than it actually is.
If the comments made are downvoted or flagged, then your claim is also dishonest, because contrary to your claims, nothing is "festering" because its getting penalized and hidden and banned.
I appreciate the substance of your reply, but please don't tell people that you think they're being dishonest (even when you do think that) - it weakens your comment and breaks the site guidelines. If you stick to your substantive points, your posts will be more effective and you won't run the risk of misinterpreting someone else's intent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah, you're right, I should have stuck to the facts (lack of evidence rather than ascribing malicious intent) - my bad.
> Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content
My least favorite thing about reading HN, by far. Glad someone else said it.
I don't want to pick on you personally (so I apologize if it feels that way), but I also don't want to leave this unresponded to when we've had to ask you so many times to stop breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40910766).
I think most HN readers are glad that we ask users not to personally attack others (questioning whether they can read, calling them morons and rubes, telling them to grow up, that they should be ashamed, are out of touch with reality, and so on), —or that we ask commenters not to post that women are asking for too much, that European capital rightfully belongs to the United States, and so on.
Is that "moderation based entirely on tone, not content"? I don't think so; I think that distinction is unsupportable. But whether it is or not, it's clear that we can't have people attacking each other like this, and I'm pretty confident that the community agrees.
Of course it's based on tone. You repeatedly let users antagonize one other, until someone breaks guidelines, you advocated for a startup that was named "fucking awesome," after the concept that they were taking advantage of labor arbitrage, you seem to ignore the realities of mainstream sentiments when they are controversial in order to make your job as a message board janitor easier, and you pick and choose when to ignore hyperbole.
All a reader has to do is observe your behavior, and it's clear what kind of person you are. You make it obvious by your retelling of your personal judgement of my commentaries here. I didn't realize you were St. Peter, Dan.
So Dan, if you don't want people to think you're an asshole, don't be an asshole. But don't tell me Hacker News janitorial moderation isn't based on tone when the guidelines themselves dictate it.
You're bullshitting every reader here and you're showing every user that you're comfortable opening up your admin tools and regurgitating pinned comments without context to stick it to me, and any other reader who dares question your methodology.
Oh and by the way, thank you for privately downweighting my account and numerous other people's here when I had previously consistently been a top comment in a number of threads. When it was inconvenient for you and a comment had well over a hundred upvotes, it's so nice that you can hide behind moderation tools and just send that comment straight to the bottom of a thread.
Don't lie. I have what, hundreds? Thousands? Of comments here? You thought a single percent? A tenth of a percent? Were distasteful? I've been here for probably 15 years and yeah, you pick on people personally.
It's supportable, but unlike what moderation tools you have, Hacker News' codebase doesn't allow me to pin your comments unless I want them to end up in my general pool. And unlike you, I'm not paid a salary to pour over people's comments online.
Don't do this. You do this bad faith stuff all the time and have for years. Don't lie to me and everyone else by saying sorry and then acting like an asshole the next few sentences. Oh whoops. Sorry, didn't mean to pick on you. Then reading off everything you can.
Really? You think people are that stupid?
This articulates something I couldn't put my finger on. I think it comes from the internet becoming the main propaganda tool of -- well could be any government -- but for the audience here nation states or actors hostile to the English speaking "west".
The well-spoken troll gets people that are not caught by the meme gifs/jpgs. It requires more work on the propaganda side, but persistence pays off it seems.
Memes alone are not enough to turn most people here, but an account spewing hard-to-disprove nonsense on social media, or someone willing to shill on podcasts tickles the "DYOR" itch.
This feeds back into the comments here and "talking points" are spread.
>The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me
That shouldn't be a surprise considering how many American libertarian techbros are fans of Alex Jones Lite (Joe Rogan).
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About 30% of people are assholes, and birds of a feather flock together.
Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd. I'm not being hyperbolic saying people would be less mad at him if he had done the shooting himself.
And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
Jones continued to inflict harm on families who’d lost children, and profited significantly from it both financially and politically. He defied multiple courts, too, so there was no question of premeditation or incapacity, just repeated decisions to cause harm year after year.
That’s the difference: true crime podcasts don’t cause harm on that scale, and few people are going to defy the authority of the legal system the way he did.
While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones. Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.
It makes sense that Jones would lose the case, but the scale of the judgements was eye watering and is difficult to justify. The scale of the compensation is in a different world to the amount of damage done (intentionally, the bulk is punative). That changes the nature of what is going on.
He's been ignoring the courts. I don't know what you want them to do? I guess they could put him in prison, but I'm guessing that would be considered harsh too.
Again, for the 2nd time, its not what he's done, it's that he's ignoring everyone telling him to stop, including the government. I don't know what you expect the punishment for that to be. If it were you or I we would have had our asses dragged into prison a long time ago. He's only gotten this far because of his money.
Prison would probably be better. I don't think they should let him off the hook, but I'd expect a lot of people lie in court and flashy penalties for Jones aren't going to change that, so there are questions here about consistency of outcome for people going to court. Given that his lawyers were in on it it is questionable whether he does actually understand the risks of his actions, he appears to be getting very bad quality legal support.
He could be go to court every day of his life, lie continuously, fight them every step of the way and it still wouldn't do a level of harm that justify some of the payouts. They are huge, numbers have been tossed around in the range of billions. The engineering value of an entire human life is only around the 10 million mark. And the courts agree with a lot of that because these are punitive damages, so it is very much a judgement call about what is appropriate. It doesn't look like the judges are doing a great job on that front. The punishments are too extreme; from the outside it looks like Jones targeting these people was the best thing that ever happened to them by a wide margin.
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There are countless documents showing his contempt of court, failure to produce discovery, etc.
Actually, the default judgement doesn't go into any specifics about what he failed to produce in discovery.
The Jones lawyers argued that the discovery requests were for documents that don't exist, and that's why they were not produced.
> The Jones lawyers argued that the discovery requests were for documents that don't exist, and that's why they were not produced.
And then they accidentally sent all of the non-existent documents to the plaintiffs, showing Jones had committed perjury. And then they forgot to claim it as privileged in a timely fashion. And then Jones got confronted with the lie in court. And then they got sanctioned for the fuckup. Oops.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-jones-lawyers-acci...
https://apnews.com/article/legal-proceedings-fraud-crime-con...
>And then they accidentally sent all of the non-existent documents to the plaintiffs
That's not what these two linked articles say. The AP articles about this state that the improper conduct was about disclosure of information the plaintiffs had sent the Jones legal team. Nothing to do with discovery that was requested from Jones.
https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Alex-Jones-cellphone-...
> During parts of his testimony stretching over two days in a Texas courtroom, Jones repeatedly told jurors that he does not use email and that he had searched the contents of his phone for messages pertaining to Sandy Hook after he was sued by several family members of the victims for falsely saying the shooting was a hoax.
> Jones said that his phone search, done during the discovery phase of the trial, did not turn up any relevant messages. Texas Judge Maya Guerra Gamble has already ruled in favor of Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis by default, saying that Jones did not comply with the rules of discovery in the case.
Okay, this is a different article.
Nevertheless, this one liner about this topic does not specify what the discovery requests were. If the request was about finding text messages regarding a specific topic, as the term "relevant" implies, then just because text messages from Jones exist (and were improperly disclosed), doesn't speak to whether or not those text messages were relevant in this context or not.
"repeatedly told jurors that he does not use email" is a hard claim to sustain when your emails get handed over later on.
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It’s been proven in court.
You seem to be completely uninformed about the case. Jones has repeatedly defied the court, hidden evidence, refused to comply. He spent years lying about the parents causing them to be harassed constantly. Ruining their already ruined lives. He caused these parents to have to move multiple times to get away from his insane listeners. All the while, privately, Jones knew he was wrong. We know this from his private communications that his own attorneys accidentally turned over. To this day, Jones continues to spout lies about the court and the judge after multiple court orders and contempts of court. No amount of money is enough to undo the damage Jones has done. But taking it all is at least a start. He is a sociopathic cancer and deserves to be in jail.
Call me crazy, but I don't think the government should be able to "tell you to stop talking" about something just because it makes some people upset.
You’re welcome to try to get the laws against defamation repealed but until then there is a specific legal standard which was met in this case. If you think that’s unfair, perhaps start by asking yourself whether his lawyers made the same argument and why it failed.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history. Whether the public endorses that harassment is more a question of how effective the reporters are than anything else.
Do you have any examples supporting the equivalence you’re claiming? The high judgements were caused by his defiance of earlier judgements so that pattern is really what we’re looking for.
Not OP, but Fox Settled the dominion lawsuit for $725M [1]. So this type of harassment means big judgments against you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...
How was that harassment? They directed a baseless smear campaign which posed a significant risk to Dominion’s business. Unless we’re defining “harassment” as “accountability”, that seems fair.
You're right, harassment might not be the right term when applied to a corporate entity. Either way these were both defamation suits.
I think the more important aspect is that both of these were cases where someone knowingly promulgated false information fully aware that their story was not supported by the facts. Real journalists don’t tend to do that both because it’s unethical and because it can be financially ruinous.
The situation is different in cases where the truth isn’t clear or where supporting evidence turns out to be fake because in those cases a real journalistic organization will retract or update their story. Had either of them been willing to do so, they almost certainly wouldn’t have even been sued. The Sandy Hook settlement was so large because it was obvious that Jones simply wasn’t going to leave the victims alone.
You can see dominion machines hacked live at DEFCON voting village.
Which wasn't the statements made by employees of Fox News. Perhaps if they had made such a statement they wouldn't have paid out several tons of money.
First, that’s not the same as what fox news alleged - if they’d simply run a “hacker x reported being able to alter the software” story they’d have been in the clear legally.
Second, elections are systems, not individual voting machines. Someone being able to tamper with unlimited physical access is not the same as being able to do so in an actual election (e.g. your bank’s PC probably aren’t perfect either but you can’t just sit down and start hacking them), and that’s only a small part of the actual system - as a simple example, if someone could make it record a vote for a different candidate than you tapped, it’d be caught by your review of the paper ballot which is actually counted. If they messed with the counting system, a hand recount would show huge discrepancies.
The underlying thing to remember here is that nobody seriously believed there was a problem. They started backwards from the desire to pretend Trump didn’t lose and repeated conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory as needed to say that outcome was real. That’s why they lost the lawsuit because it was clear that it was essentially political advertising pretending to be news, with complete disregard for the truth. That also forced the lawsuit since left unchallenged the smear campaign would have harmed Dominion’s business, whereas if there’d been anything factual the company would have been compelled to fix a real problem.
> I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones
They're telling him to stop. That's what the judgement really is. He refused to defend himself in court and he's been told that he needs to stop. And you need to stop carrying water for him unless you can point to a single specific thing that the court did to him that was not fair, and making vague and uninformed statements about the big picture result doesn't count.
> While that is terrible, I don't know if you can argue it is terrible to the tune of what they've done to Jones.
As a single human being, he's literally not capable of suffering as much as the bereaved relatives of a classroom full of murdered children, shortly afterwards made the targets often by name and photo of the most insane people in the country.
> Every major media outlet has some instances of, effectively, targeted harassment in their history.
Is this even an argument? They get sued all the time, and lose. They haven't ever viciously and endlessly gone after the parents of a classroom full of dead children. They did go after Richard Jewell and Steven J. Hatfill, though.
My understanding is he didn't lose the case on the merits. During discovery he was required to hand over documents from his Google account, but Google had locked his account and he couldn't get access. The judge then ruled he was in default for failing to produce.
This is obviously a massive abuse of the justice system, violating the maxim that the law does not compel the impossible. But, since the prevailing opinion (including both judge and jury) observably is "enh, fuck that guy" nobody much cares. However the shoe is going to be on the other foot sooner or later. It may be that hounding Alex Jones wasn't worth the precedent (making this style of lawfare acceptable, not an actual legal precedent) that this case sets.
I can easily imagine a case where, say, X blocks discovery in a similar way to achieve a similar outcome for someone on the left. Do we want this to be how we do things?
This is not at all what happened. I can't speak to his Google account, but Jones failed to produce text messages from his phone referencing Sandy Hook, claiming they didn't exist. Then his lawyers mistakenly sent a copy of the entire contents of his phone to the prosecution, showing that the text messages did in fact exist, and would have been found for a simple keyword search for "Sandy Hook," demonstrating that they were trying to conceal these messages from the court.
Jones lied under oath that he did not have the messages he had been ordered to provide but then accidentally turned them over, which came out quite dramatically in court:
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-62416324
Any time someone tells something is “obviously a massive abuse of the justice system”, ask them for details. Many people lie for political reasons knowing that their followers will not check the facts, but those claims usually fall apart as soon as you do. Lying to a judge or doing something you were ordered not to do is going to get you in trouble no matter what else is going on.
In the case of discovery about Google, note that there were two separate problems:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/alex-jones-and-infowars-were...
The first was that he lied about a spreadsheet not existing, and then the defense got evidence that it did - since that behavior was habitual, a judge is going to punish it more harshly than an isolated mistake which is promptly corrected.
The second problem was that he was trying to use the defense that he didn’t profit from Sandy Hook stories while not providing data which could have been used to test that claim. The judge didn’t jail him for that, but he wasn’t allowed to make an unverified “trust me bro” claim.
When was the last time he was profiting from Sandy Hook conspiracies? I heard him apologize for it years ago and say he doesn't believe it.
And true crime podcasts definitely do cause harm, the fans of those shows love playing vigilante detective, stalking and harassing people close to the case to get information. I remember a few years ago there was an incident where they were protesting outside of some guy's house because he was a suspect in his girlfriend's disappearance, so he couldn't even go outside. True crime is an entire industry monetizing tragedies in realtime on a scale the Sandy Hook conspiracies never came anywhere close to.
With someone like Alex Jones, the statement 'I heard him apologize for it' is pretty much meaningless as he demonstrably changes his stance constantly to fit the most useful minute-to-minute narrative for himself.
You basically need to look at the long-term complete picture of how he characterizes his role (I'd suggest https://knowledgefight.com/ as a great source for this) in relation to Sandy Hook.
I cannot recall a specific instance of him apologizing, but I'm convinced he has at one point or another done so. But the number of times he's minimized, ignored, mischaracterized or outright lied about his involvement and impact on the Sandy Hook victims far, far, (FAR) outweighs the actual times he's ever admitted fault and/or apologized.
The deposition of his father clearly laid out that they saw spikes in sales when the sandy hook conspiracy was mentioned and actively sought to replicate it.
This doesn't answer the question about when this was occurring.
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How about having people threatening to rape and murder your family because they're convinced your lying and know where you live so you constantly have to move and try to hide your whereabouts.
https://apnews.com/article/shootings-school-connecticut-alex...
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The crime was defamation and there was an entire court case about it which was upheld on appeal. Alex got his day(s) in court and he lost and now is in the finding out phase of fucking around. The people who harassed these families did so only because of the lies perpetuated by Alex Jones. He knew this to be the case and doubled and tripled down on it.
If I figured out who you were, told millions of people your name, where you lived, and lies about how you did something horrible and they started harassing and threatening you would you actually just think I'm exercising my free speech right just because I never sent those threats myself?
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> Did they chase down their harassers?
Yes. You seem to have not bothered to do any research on something you have so much to say about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...
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This was extensively covered in multiple court cases which are public record. Why don’t you familiarize yourself with them and come back go this thread once you have a better understanding of what it’s about?
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That is your job: you’re questioning the court cases which have very well documented public records, you need to say which specific case was wrong and explain why you disagree.
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No, it was the court's job. and they did it. if you disagree with the decision, then you need to come up with specifics of where they got it wrong.
The court gave a default judgement and nothing went to trial, so the court certainly did NOT prove what you're claiming.
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> Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is the Jones/Sandy Hook case-- like the Fox/Dominion case-- was an outlier because there is nearly never that amount of evidence to be able to pass the high bar for defamation.
So I think it's the other way around-- Jones was comically brazen in the claims he made. Hence the huge amounts in the Jones cases. (And if the podcasters are as brazen, go tell the real living people about their open-and-shut defamation cases and collect a nice finders fee for yourself. :)
Edit: clarification
Jones was also completely hostile to the courts and legal process. That will get you a larger punishment than someone who did the same actions but respected the court.
I watched some of his videos at the time and to me it seemed mostly like the exact same content that he always does. Very much not brazen claims of facts, just musing and speculating that it's all fake and the parents are smiling so they might be actors. That's it. And the entire time he was emphasizing that he doesn't know for sure and it's all theory.
he specifically called out parents by name, constantly made claims that they were obviously crisis actors, showed pictures of the parents, and did nothing when his listeners started harassing the parents daily.
You probably mean parents who went on live television to give interviews? Well obviously he can show "pictures" of people who were on TV with their name.
The sentence you're claiming isn't hyperbolic is hyperbolic. While you can absolutely reasonably disagree with the judgement, I don't believe you can reasonably use a phrase like "seems like a nut" to summarize his part in this, if you're at all familiar with it and are being honest. "Immoral" would be the absolute minimum descriptor one could employ, even in the context of cold objectivity.
And why should we compare this to the podcast you're describing? They're two completely different kinds of immorality, and are not teams I must pick from.
As a CT native, you'll never coax an ounce of sympathy for Jones from me. He made his bed, doubled down, and faced justice. The system worked at least one time.
Nancy Grace comes to mind, who has far more reach being on national television. She made claims about people who were later found to be guilty. Her speculation pushed harassment.
Alex Jones has far more listeners than Nancy Grace has ever had. He was pulling down 8 figures selling fake boner pills and tin foil hats on his merch website.
I'm unable to find a number about how many people listened to him around the time period, but still arguably, she was a very well known public figure, even if some people didn't watch her. My mom would watch her show religiously.
later found to be NOT Guilty* I typod.
Let’s talk about scale: Jones has to pay ~5x what Boeing did.
Boeing killed 346 people
https://apnews.com/article/boeing-guilty-plea-crashes-245a38...
Boeing killed people while making a not-good-enough design for a highly complex airplane system. And even though it killed 346 ppl, it continues to get millions people safely from point to point safely.
It's negligent and they need to change, but it's pretty forgivable.
Jones went on a mic and ripped false info, enriching no one but himself and grieving these families repeatedly.
This is misrepresentation, they didn't just happen to make a mistake in a complex situation. The crime was to know about the mistake and still not fix it - on purpose. The crime was to know that they should be giving people training on this system for safety reasons but they didn't anyway. Afaik it is an additional misrepresentation that the same system is now continuing on to fly. It is not, they fixed it and patched it.
Some of the issues were reported and a decision maker thought "we can get by without this". Pretty much the same reason the Challenger exploded. With a large company, there's gonna be reports about all sorts of stuff all the time, and you have to sort through the noise. They failed to do that here.
But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?
Crashing airplanes is VERY predictably bad for the stock price.
>But is there any shred of doubt that no one, including the greediest most-souless bureaucrat, actually tried to make an airplane crash and kill people?
This is not taking into account how humans are. People raise their children really badly all the time even though they know what they are doing is bad but they just don't care in the moment. Who wants a bad child? But they still make all the mistakes and end up producing bad children. Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.
> Incompetence and malice are often nearly identical.
That is not the basis for our system of law. Intention (mens rea) matters greatly. Hence anyone who understands law shouldn't be surprised at comparing outcomes between the boeing case and the jones case.
You can disagree with it, but you really shouldn't be surprised.
one is punished more harshly
There is lot of evidence that the faults in Boeing have been internally reported multiple times and neglected.
Who deserves stronger punishment: a man who makes an error while driving and kills a family by accident?
Or a man who deliberately runs a person down (but his target survived), and intends to continue doing so?
His wealth is primarily the proceeds of slander and fraud. He should not have any of it.
Unfortunately, slander and fraud are really hard to enforce. In a just system he'd have never earned that money in the first place.
Fortunately, his legal defense was comedically incompetent.
So I'll take "all his money goes to his most-harmed victims" as a compromise.
> And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
Can you cite any data on that at all? I’m aware of the genre of podcast you’re referring to but I’ve never been aware of it even remotely being the most popular genre.
it's #3 after comedy and news
https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...
True Crime as a whole may be.
That says nothing about "women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible" even existing at all. (Although I'm sure there's some examples of it somewhere.)
To conflate "true crime" and what the OP was referring to strikes me as pretty dishonest.
Popping open Podcast Addict, the top 10 podcasts right now are:
1. No Such Thing As A Fish; 2. My Brother, My Brother And Me; 3. Planet Money; 4. Revolutions; 5. 99% Invisible; 6. Stuff You Should Know; 7. The Adventure Zone; 8. This American Life; 9. Freakinomics Radio; 10. The Rest Is History
I had to scroll to #32 to find Casefile which sorta fits your criteria, except it's hosted by a dude and I think he generally discusses older cases.
#3 after comedy and news, ahead of sports.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/786938/top-podcast-genre...
Yeah OP is out of their mind on this point. Even spotify doesn't have many true crime podcasts in their top 50.
> And it's especially rich in a time where the most popular podcast genre is women commenting on brutal murder cases as they're fresh and being investigated, and throwing out their pet theories about real living people being responsible. What's the difference?
I am totally fine with convicting those for slander too. It is a pretty disgusting market.
I feel like your first paragraph has some slight sense, but then you demolish it with the second paragraph which just shows that you actually have no idea who Alex Jones is or what he has done
I don't agree with Jones' political positions, but as someone who was not born in America, I think I can see the issue in a less passionate and partisan way. For me it is clear that the this judgment had a gigantic political vector.
I fully agree on the guilty verdict, but the sentence, frankly, was meant as a political message for Jones and everyone else on his side of the political spectrum: Stop talking the things you talk, because we are coming for you, and we get you, you won't like it.
As someone who was born in a corrupt small town in a corrupt banana republic, and was somewhat familiar with this kind of thing, it was pretty easy to see it for what it was.
Does that sound as worrisome when you remember that his “talk” was repeatedly accusing parents of faking their own dead children, to the point that many of them were receiving violent threats from his listeners? Nobody went after him because he had weird views on tax policy or international relations, it was because he refused to leave suffering families alone.
This is also a good time to consider what you are saying by calling it a “political vector”. Lying about a mass shooting snd harassment aren’t traditionally a partisan position so by using that framing you’re implicitly saying they belong to his party.
> Jones seems like a nut, but the way he's being taken to the cleaners and sued for comical amounts of money are just absurd.
I'm normally extremely sympathetic to this argument, but not only was this a conspiracy theory about dead children, but it implicated the bereaved, devastated parents and all of the relatives of those children. It's so many people that you can't really make up for it, ever. There's no number of dollars or good deeds that will get him into paradise.
The fact that he still operates in much the same way as before makes me think he's blessed by intelligence agencies to use as pretense for what they want to do or as distraction from what they are doing.
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> First United American Companies
The second-highest bidder was....an insurance company? Am I misunderstanding?
It's a shell company made to have an acronym that sounds like "eff you AC".
AC?
American Companies?
No, it's a set of straw buyers for Alex Jones.
The second highest bidder was Alex Jones
Who importantly, supposedly doesn’t have any money, because he doesn’t want to pay the families of the victims what he owns them.
and is arguing that the problem with the sale is that the people he owes money don't have any money because he hasn't paid them.
Isn't Jones being forced to give up his site to pay off the debts, if I remember correctly?
I am also confused on why it took a whole month for them to reject the sale when it seems to have been accepted for weeks.
I really don't understand how a judgement this large can be reasonable in a case where nobody has had his house burned down.
A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments.
I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't fine somebody the value of an entire town unless he's done destruction of that order, or at least a fraction of that order.
Stealing from an earlier comment of mine [1] in case you want to read the comments.
Alex Jones declared in court that his show reaches about a hundred million people. If that's true then he's paying $10 for every person who heard him defaming the families of dead children.
This would be the same principle as those fines in Nordic countries sometimes that depend on how rich someone is. If you can influence one hundred million people and use that power in a criminally irresponsible way, you get a proportionate fine.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33182728
Yeah, we don't have that in Sweden except for criminal acts, and then the fines are a certain number of days of your income as a substitute for imprisonment.
In civil cases our judgements are usually not enormous.
I don't feel that your reasoning above makes the judgement more reasonable. Maybe he does reach that many people, but he obviously makes nowhere near that amount of money and it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
> it's out of line with other defamation judgements.
This point made me curious so I quickly looked around. Fox News paid a $787.5 million settlement [1] for making false claims about Dominion. Given that this happened as the trial was about to start, it's reasonable to assume that Fox News expected to lose even more if the issue went to trial. And that's for a party that arguably would have followed court orders, something Alex Jones refused to do.
Next in line is Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered to pay $150 million for defaming two election workers [2]. If Alex Jones defamed 12 families then it comes out roughly the same.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/18/media/fox-dominion-settle...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/rudy-giuliani-def...
All these cited claims seem political and extreme to me. I can't find a non-political example where the judgement this extreme.
Depp v Herd defamation was around $10m.
The acts of defamation were extreme, clear cut, repetitive and devoid of remorse. I for one like knowing that if someone ruins my reputation with cruel lies in such a malicious and relentless way that they may face extreme consequences.
There was a single victim in Depp vs Herd.
Those are also extreme though.
> Yeah, we don't have that in Sweden except for criminal acts
Sweden isn't the only Nordic country.
Just look up speeding tickets in Finland and Norway.
How about in a case where libel was relentlessly thrown at families over the course of years, on one of the internets largest and most engaged audiences, leading to harassment, threats, and assault? What should the judgment be for that?
This is a "millions of dollars" lawsuit. Not a 10 billion dollar lawsuit. Alex Jones owes what Reddit as a platform is worth. That is insane.
> Reddit as a platform is worth
RDDT market cap today is 29.1B.
But evaluations of the platform's worth are 15 billion dollars, IIRC
The judgement against Jones is $1.5B
Good reason to listen to courts the first time!
You just repeated the thing he said was not worth $1 billion dollars, and then said "but isn't that worth a billion dollars?!"
I emphasized that it wasn’t just over words said, but the frequency of, audience size, and actual real world harm that’s taken place as a result. And as other commenters have pointed out, he acted in contempt of the court on several occasions
Have the families needed to engage private security? I wonder what their bills have been.
Several had to move..
The same way that big media organizations get away with this in court.
"This content is entertainment and there's no way that any reasonable person could construe this information as facts." If MSNBC, CNN and Fox News can get away with this argument every time they are sued, I don't see how InfoWars doesn't.
But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
> But then again, court cases aren't about facts or truth.
My sibling in Christ, Jones is paying because he fucked around with courts. He was told to stop by court, and he didn't. He had a chance to defend himself, and he passed on it.
It's very simple. InfoWars did not defend itself in court. Fox news would have. CNN would have. Is it the court's job to defend every defendent?
The amount of comments opining here without knowing a smidge of the details of the case is sickening.
That's not true either though. The default judgment was for not complying with the discovery process to the satisfaction of the court. Other options like perjury charges were available to the court, but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.
Also in many cases courts will allow you to walk back from the circumstances that ended up with a person in default and to proceed with a fair trial. I even have direct experience with this in a foreclosure/foreign-judgments case.
The court could have allowed Jones to correct the financial and web-analytics records and proceed, but it didn't.
I'm not going to dig up the transcripts, but I was following this pretty closely when it happened. If memory serves right, Jones was given several chances to comply with discovery requests and was constantly attempting to misdirect and otherwise disrupt the proceedings. It's not like the court balked at the first weird thing the defense did and immediately entered into a default judgement. I believe the default judgement is the only thing that makes any sense in this case. The courts aren't there to play games with people like Jones.
edit: I dug up the judgement anyways. Take a look and tell me if any of this isn't reasonable. How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21074211-alex-jones-...
> The Court now finds that a default judgment on liability should be granted. The Court finds that Defendants’ discovery conduct in this case has shown flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules. The Court finds Defendants’ conduct is greatly aggravated by the consistent pattern of discovery abuse throughout the other Sandy Hook cases pending before this Court. Prior to the discovery abuse in this case, Defendants also violated this Court’s discovery orders in Lewis v. Jones, et al. ... and Heslin v. Jones, et al. .... After next violating the October 18, 2019 discovery order in this case, Defendants also failed to timely answer discovery in Pozner v. Jones, et al. ..., another Sandy Hook lawsuit, as well as Fontaine v. InfoWars, LLC, et al. ..., a similar lawsuit involving Defendants’ publications
Parties play games in cases of this nature all the time. Court battles like this can be bitter.
Perjury is a criminal charge. Contempt is an option to. Judges use the lever of jail time to deal with situations like this all the time (again, direct experience here -- a surrogate court judge put two 70+ year old ladies in Rikers for a month for failing to comply with the court repeatedly over years). Going to default was exceptional behavior that nobody shed a tear for because it's Alex Jones.
Edit: To answer your question > How many more chances do you think Jones deserves here?
If you're looking to make a political statement, sure none. If you're looking to have a fair trial, there's still steps A, B and C.
Even the fact that he had to fight all those cases for the same thing separately is a deliberate step to fuck him. Then the court treating giving the same data in each trial as a separate offense is certainly cherry-picking.
I'm not really complaining though because the concept of a fair trial does not exist. Civil or criminal. Do whatever you can not to end up in court. It always boils down to who has the most resources and the appetite for battle. Some pockets (like the state's) are near-infinite.
>given several chances to comply with discovery requests
The Jones side claims that these discovery requests were for documents that don't exist. The linked judgement provides no detail on what the specific discovery requests were that went unanswered.
Do you know what the discovery requests were for specifically?
No, I do not know.
But I know that "that document doesn't exist" is a valid response to a discovery request. Silence is not a valid response, even if the document doesn't exist.
(If one side falsely claims the document doesn't exist, the other side then can present evidence to the judge that the document does in fact exist, and that the first side is withholding evidence. If you play that game and get caught, various bad things can happen to you. The judge can look more skeptically at everything you say thereafter, the judge can rule that the other side is entitled to assuming the contents of the document are whatever would be most damaging to your side's case, you or your lawyers can be fined, and your lawyers can be disbarred. Judges deal with this kind of stuff all the time; detecting and blocking such games is a major part of what they do.)
The judgement document does not go into any detail therefore we don't know whether the Jones team responded with "these documents don't exist" or not. If that was their position, why wouldn't they have responded to that effect? There would be no motivation to do otherwise.
The rest of your post is speculation.
skulk updated their post upthread to include an actual quote from the judgment. That says quite enough. It doesn't have to list specifics of a repeated, flagrant, bad-faith pattern of attempts to disrupt discovery; the rest of the record of the case will do so, in detail after detail after detail.
>the rest of the record of the case
Is that not available somewhere? You'd think it would be presented in detail, since this is the key reason for the default judgement.
I haven't really tried since the SCO v. IBM days. But for a federal case, you used to be able to go to the courthouse and ask to look at the case file. You could make copies of anything you want (at their rates per page). Or you could use PACER to view it, if you had an account.
I suspect things are more on line these days rather than less, but I haven't tried lately. If nothing else, you should still be able to see everything on PACER. (If they are online instead of in PACER, there may be a delay time - three months, maybe? But for this case, that shouldn't matter.)
For state courts... I don't know.
Wanted a separate post for this comment --
I have never, ever seen a judge use contempt or a default judgment (against someone represented in court) without directly threatening to use that power first.
>but the court chose the nuclear option to default against Jones.
Institution that is a fundamental part of the establishment and status quo jumps at the chance to shit all over someone who's shtick is undermining public trust in the establishment and status quo. Water is wet. More news at 11.
I don't in the slightest bit disagree, just pointing out that they had discretion and it was still a choice.
Yeah, I think the part that makes this so controversial isn't that they exercised their discretion to screw him, which is absolutely expected, but that the court chose a total amount so large as to be newsworthy and garner sympathy for Jones and make people question the actions of the court by itself. The idea that some singular kook running a talk show could get a judgement that we rarely ever see levied upon major corporations that pour far more man hours into far more definable evil makes people who've never heard of the guy ask WTF.
Not a billion dollars anyway.
But 500k per person maybe, if it really heinous?
If that's the case, I sure hope nobody finds my post history from my teen years, or the history of anyone who was a rebellious teen on the internet in the 2000s.
That's why we have courts and juries, to make these evaluations. Why should your number should be used over theirs?
Because it's obviously crazy. 1 billion dollars is the 588 people's entire life income.
It's just excessive.
Alex jones sold something like $165M in supplements in the 3 years preceding this case… this is somehow the opposite of people complaining that judgements against FB are too small based on the Revenue.
The people who saw all the information and heard from the parties involved made that decision. You are saying they are wrong based on a feeling.
It was a default judgement. No trial took place and there was no ability for the jury to see evidence from both sides. The monetary amount was absolutely based on feelings.
They heard testimony, including Jones'. The fact that they weren't able to see evidence from the other side is because they refused to give any.
So you're saying the legal system should hinge on the judgement of what random people believe is "crazy" rather than judges, juries, laws, etc. One opinion should outweigh everyone and everything else?
Look up "nuclear verdicts". The unreasonably large dollar amount is intentional and not meant to reflect the real value of harm caused.
Yes, but a billion dollars. It's 30x the sale price of Minalyzer, a very cool Swedish firm which was bought by Veracio.
It's a level where, when it is an international case, it makes sense for states to get involved with diplomatic pressure. Surely your legal system must be more reasonable than this, because if it's like this, how can it function?
It wasn't a billion dollars for a single thing, it was awards to 15 different defendants, ranging from ~30-120 million each.
More importantly, you're missing that this was a default judgment - Jones didn't defend himself, so the award is kind of the theoretical maximum. The results aren't comparable to regular court cases where both sides make their case.
Yes, but it's still the value of a whole town.
A legal system must be robust even to weird or peculiar people who refuse to work with its rules and still produce reasonable results.
Why should the system accommodate people who refuse to defend themselves?
I understand that in a system like Russia where dissidents face made-up charges and their attorneys are harassed by the state. But Alex Jones isn’t in that kind of position at all. He has no problem getting legal representation.
The default judgment basically means he admitted guilt by his refusal. That was his choice.
Because such a system creates absurdities.
There are always going to be crazy people and a system must be able to deal with them.
The system is dealing with them: By imposing the maximum possible judgment.
This is dealing with them. It's just not dealing with them in a way that you like.
Nonsense - a legal system must apply the law. Also, Jones wasn't "weird or peculiar" - he repeatedly disobeyed and misled the court.
This is like a soccer match where one team won by fifty goals, because the other team repeatedly committed fouls and then left the pitch, and you're arguing that the referee should disallow some of the goals because you feel in your gut that fifty is too many.
It must give reasonable results, and a 1 billion judgement against individual over something like this is not.
That procedure or rules have been followed is no reason to accept an absurd outcome. An absurd outcome is rather a reason to reject a set of rules or procedures.
And this absurd outcome is partially due to a flagrant disregard for the sets of rules and procedures that came before this case.
The Knowledge Fight podcast covers this case in its entirety and it's clear that Infowars et al. has toed the line of criminal to delay and deny justice to the victims. The legal system hit the end of the road and said "everything owed to the victims or everything Infowars has" and this is the result.
But the ruling was for compensatory damages - that is, the compensate the victims. It wasn't a punitive damages - which would make more sense - basically "You don't get to have your infowars any more".
Compensatory damages is making the claim that the sandy hook families actually suffered $1B in damages.
Because damages are easy to calculate - how much money did Jones make from intentionally lying about the victim? That money is the result of him selling their repuation without their consent - the market decided what the value of that act was.
Sooooooooo, if release a YouTube video defaming someone, and only made $0.35 off ad revenue, I only did $0.35 in damage?
Definitely how that works.
If I burn down somebody's house and sell tickets to watch, the damages are easy to calculate! It's just my ticket revenue! THE MARKET DECIDED!
Gotta give you some credit though, you beat out some real competition for dumbest take in the thread.
Well partly true... The part where no one wants to watch your videos seems extremely reasonable.
Unfortunately you veer way out of reasonableness when you compare the crime of arson with the civil law of defamation. Criminal law and civil law are very different things... So much so that im not even sure what you're trying to get at with your analogy.
You do seem upset about it though, and that does make sense... I'd imagine the world would be scary without even a basic understanding of the rules that you're held to. Fortunately this information is readily available... Some review material for junior high civics classes will cover most of what you need to know, and should only take you an hour or two to go through.
It was a Moscow Trials things. Not that Jones was not guilty of this specific crime, he was, but the goal was never punishing him just for that.
Same reason Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for conspiracy charges and CCE. Unusually harsh for those convictions and a first time offender. The point is, as cliche as it sounds, to send a message.
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Sorry, should law not be punitive?
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By his own admission, Jones spent years spreading malicious lies about these people. Some people have had to go in to hiding because his unhinged followers started tracking these people down.
As soon as you say "I think more gun control might be a good thing to prevent children from being murdered" you get threatened, bullied, and harassed by a lunatic unhinged fringe stoked up by dirty malicious lies. Is this free speech? Of course not.
He has worked for years to shut people up by creating a hostile anger-filled environment where any normal person is afraid to go against him. Alex Jones hates free speech.
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Defamation is free speech now?
It's not, as defamation should have legal consequences. A one billion dollar payout verdict is just orders of magnitude off in terms of proportionality.
Unfortunately, Alex Jones the person and the nature of Sandy Hook means that most people won't be able to look at this situation with any sort of sanity. The verdict could have been 100 trillion and people would have said it was deserved.
I'm not sure that is the argument that you think it is. If a jury awarded it after seeing all the evidence and the majority of people agree with it, wouldn't that indicate that it is fair? What criteria do you have that overrides the vast majority of people's sense of fairness?
A jury isn't involved in a default judgement afaik
They come up with damages.
No defamation was ever proven in court. It was a default judgement.
Allowing a default judgement in a civil case is equivalent to pleading guilty in a criminal case
I think you'd feel differently if some person with a huge following spread lies about you and your family and those lies resulted in thousands of people threatening and harassing your family.
As has been noted in other threads on this page: free speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you want without consequence. It specifically does NOT mean you cannot get sued for saying something that demonstrably causes immense harm to someone.
But a billion dollars. The order of magnitude isn't 'immense stress to an individual', it's on the order of burning down tens or hundreds of houses.
Right the problem here is the targeted, selective enforcement -- really, overenforcement -- of laws. Nobody would argue that people hit with $100 million judgments for copyright violations while torrenting music actually had copyright on that music. They didn't. But the point of the eye watering judgments was to send a message. Same here.
>Nobody would argue that people hit with $100 million judgments for copyright violations while torrenting music actually had copyright on that music
I don't understand the above, but they've actually made this judgement, and it's much too large. A firm worth as little as 30 million can be an incredible innovative company, supported by a government and serious effort, and here we have people just handing out a 1 billion dollar fine over something where nothing even close to that value has been destroyed.
It's as I said in my initial comment, the value of a whole town.
The goal of punitive damages is to prevent the person from engaging in the illegal activity again.
If Jones stops spreading lies about this people, then perhaps you have an argument, and a smaller punitive judgement would be enough. But if he keeps going, then we can only conclude that the judgement wasn't enough.
They know Alex Jones has money. They're coming after his money. I think it's as simple as that. And I wouldn't be surprised if the judge simply doesn't like the guy.
>the judge simply doesn't like the guy
That doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the US justice system.
I don't have a lot of confidence in the US justice system :)
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> It wasn't $1 bn USD worth of damages done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages is very much a normal thing.
> He has been charged the equivalent of the GDP of Samoa
He probably did more human damage than all of Samoa's citizens combined.
He lead a mob of his audience to threaten families that just had a child in their family murdered based on lies. There's no price on how horrible that is. Argue all you want, it went through a long process to get to that number so good luck with that.
It is clear that Jones and his relatives have moved money and assets around in order to shield them from the verdict. Now, money that should have been already given to the victims is being used to steal back the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place. The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences. There are no words for the evil going on here. What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
That's not what this judgement says. It actually says the sale did not generate enough money for the creditors and the process should be run again. I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.
The creditors agreed to and supported the Global Tetrahedron plan to purchase Infowars and settle the bankruptcy. Seems like the judge is overstepping given Delaware law on this matter.
The main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate.
So long as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways.
> main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate
Did the judge argue against the single round or the sealed price?
Criticising sealed bids is nonsense. The gold-standard auction (Vickrey, or more accurately, VCG) features sealed bids. If the judge is criticising sealed bids at all, The Onion should appeal.
Criticising a single-round auction, particularly with two bidders, on the other hand, is valid.
> as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways
Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
I have real world experience with a lot of different auction designs being deployed, including many variations of the VCG auction.
The VCG auction is only good in theory. In practice, most people don't know how much they actually value a thing, and when they are trying to play the VCG game they typically underbid and later have deep remorse. That's the most common mistake, but I've seen plenty of other mistakes as well.
In other words, VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes.
In my experience, the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go. Instead, you have to talk yourself into taking a risk on being left holding the bag if you choose to push the price up.
> VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes
May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions? You're describing unsophisticated bidders unwilling to expend search costs. For them, yes, "the seller has an interest in providing participants with as much information as possible about the object’s value" both before bidding starts and during it, the latter due to the impact to bids being less than the overcoming of search costs.
> the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go
Another comment highlights why this doesn't work for high-value items [2]. (They also assume bona fide bids, which isn't a problem if you can filter out shill bids.)
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2020/pop...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389681
> May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions?
It varies. In all cases, the value was below $20,000, in many cases the auction was non-recurring and >$1,000 (for example, specific web domains). I've seen enough smart people fumble a $1,000+ VCG auction that I'd be nervous to assume bidding would be any better at $100 million. I've also seen enough investors fumble $10m+ investment deals (not auctions though) to feel comfortable asserting that a higher value auction does not necessarily imply that the participants will be better at auction theory.
> “It seemed doomed almost from the moment they decided to go to a sealed bid,” Judge Lopez said. “Nobody knows what anybody else is bidding,” he added.
So it sounds like the judge specifically had issues with the use of sealed bids.
The exact form of the auction is really really important though. A Vickery auction is single round and sealed but is critically a second price auction so bidder are incentivized to bid their maximum because they will get the second price which wasn't the case in this auction. Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size.
> Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
The blatant attempts to move assets out of InfoWars during the bankruptcy is an entirely different story but that money may technically come legally from outside the estate.
> exact form of the auction is really really important though
Sure. But nobody uses Vickrey because it's impossible to explain to the public why the highest bid wasn't accepted.
> Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size
Which is exactly what happens in any single-round first-price format. The only thing an open auction does is facilitate collusion. Let me repeat: for a single-round first-price auction, sealed bids are the only way to go.
> that money may technically come legally from outside the estate
It may but it doesn't. Jones saying the judge "ruled in our favour" (emphasis mine) sort of gives away the game.
> nobody uses Vickrey because it's impossible to explain to the public why the highest bid wasn't accepted
Google used to use second-price for all their ads, though I think they've stopped: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/10858748
(Which I think, sadly, supports your claim around them being confusing)
There's a huge one people use all the time without knowing it, eBay is a second price auction too most people just don't use it like one. You can place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment. It just automatically semi-unseals bids as new bids come in so it looks a lot more like a live outcry auction.
> eBay is a second price auction too most people just don't use it like one. You can place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment. It just automatically semi-unseals bids as new bids come in so it looks a lot more like a live outcry auction.
This sounds small, but it's a huge difference. Let's I know that some widget is actually extremely valuable, and would be willing to pay up to $1,000. You don't know this, and are willing to pay $80. In a true second-price auction I put in $1000, you put in $80, the bids are unsealed and I pay $80.
But with the e-bay system, if I put in $1,000 at the beginning I've partially tipped my hand by bidding it up to $80. You started with some uncertainty about the value of the object, but knowing that I agree it's worth at least $80 pushes you in the direction of thinking it's worth more. This is a major advantage of sniping: by putting your bid in only at the last minute you keep others from reacting to your bid by changing theirs, and so convert the auction into something much closer to a true second-price auction.
Yes it different but it does work to increase the bid which is the goal of an auction, discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time. The fact that it's worse of you as a bidder hoping to get a deal is actually good for it as an auction design.
There's also some assumptions built into these analyses that there's at least two people who have a reasonable perception of the value of an item. Things get massively more difficult to analyze when you start including changes in perceived value.
> fact that it's worse of you as a bidder hoping to get a deal is actually good for it as an auction design
The point is, in the above example, you wouldn't bid $1,000. So I will bid $50. Then $60. Then $70. Then $80. Then $90. And then, seeing the price has changed, I will stop. And wait. I am willing to pay $1,000. But it doesn't ever make sense for me to bid that.
Even in the eBay example you're betting against their being a third party that will attempt to come in with a late bid so the auction closes before you can respond. If you want the item it's still optimal to bid your maximum and allow the second price mechanism to function, if you bid $1000 and there's only one other bid of $80 (and the price increment is $10 or 12.5%) you get the item for $90 either way no matter if you bid that manually or if you placed a maximum bid. That's how a semi-sealed second price auction works (at least as eBay implements it) the next minimum bid is revealed as new bids come in that are responding like it's a live cry out auction. If there are multiple max bids it's just set to the highest second price plus the bid increment and the max bid is still hidden.
That's the beauty of the eBay system it works for people to interact in two ways, as a more boring sealed second bid system and as a live cry auction. The biggest point it falls apart is you need a certain number of people to understand the system to act rationally about it. If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one.
> you're betting against their being a third party that will attempt to come in with a late bid so the auction closes before you can respond
Yes. It's why people use bots, e.g. [1].
For low-value products, particularly amidst repeat auctions, the incentive to do so is small enough that one can mostly ignore it. For a high-stakes auction, you're just devolving the game into a high-frequency race.
> If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one
The point is it really only works as an English auction. The "sealed" bid is for convenience. (It's not really a sealed or even semi-sealed bid, it's just a dumb auto-bidding bot.) Run a major auction with this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
[1] https://www.gixen.com/main/index.php
You can use bots or you can bid your true maximum and receive the best price available below it. You can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is. If all the sniping bidder are above the sealed bidders then the auction still functions to discover higher prices just not as efficiently.
> this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
Sure but no one does, the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism. Major auctions don't need to make that accommodation, the audience can be relied on to read and think about the auction structure which is unfortunately not an option you can really take for a mass market tool.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Of course you can. You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit. The only case where the auction is efficient is if the automatic bidder is the highest and someone else bids up to their maximum.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Correct. But eBay doesn't have sealed bids. You can absolutely snipe an auto-bidder; this is like the first high-speed algorithm that was ever developed in the real markets.
> no one does
Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
> the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism
...yes. The eBay model is a compromise that works for unsophisticated bidders and low-value auctions. eBay's model is a known-flawed model that does not "discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time" [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42389361
> You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit.
That's not sniping. Inherent to last second sniping is you get a limited amount of chances to boost your bids, in the best case you're taking one shot at the bid to place it at the last millisecond eBay will accept your bid. You're trying to get the last bid in on an auction so no one has a chance to respond. Incrementally bidding up to find the ceiling is directly opposed to the goal of having a sniping bot.
> Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
That was talking about other auction runners using the eBay model for extremely high value items because of the complexity of execution, not about people using bots. I know people use bots it's just that to win they have to beat the bid placed by people using the second price functionality. I'm not denying their existence just questioning how effectively they actually distort the auction structure.
If a lot of different people (using different bots to avoid GIXEN's automatic mini auction) all place their maximum bids at the last second the winner is still the person with the max bid be that a bot user or a pre bidder.
The winning strategy to win that bidding war is still to place your maximum bid in the bot and if everyone does that it's just a normal sealed second price auction. The bot strategy just relies on there not being enough interest in every item and finding one where you can bid less than your maximum and still win which is also true of a pure sealed second price auction. I'm just not seeing where the strategy and outcome differ by including bots if there are second price bidders in the mix bidding their true max.
most people just don't use ... place a huge maximum bid and will only pay the second highest bid plus an increment
The reason people don't do this on eBay is because sellers can have a friend bid on the item to raise the second-place bid more than you're willing to pay (shill bidding). The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay. Bidding a higher amount leaves you vulnerable to these shill bidding tactics.
> The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay.
Of course... why would you ever bid more than you're willing to pay? Huge doesn't mean more than your maximum.
Also those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment. If they fail they can not pay out but the seller is out their time and any listing fees (depending on the eBay era we're talking about). Conceivably you're still willing to pay your maximum bid the second time an item is available in most circumstances.
Even shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item. The goal of the auction is to benefit the seller not the buyer's ability to get a deal. It would probably be fixable by making the bid more binding but that's a separate issue you're still paying at max your nominal maximum price if you win.
> those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment
Yes. That or you use one shill to uncloak the max and then another to bid just below it. Worst case, as you said, you're only out your listing fee.
> shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item
Which is why for high-value items in a system subject to shill bids, bona fide bidders don't put their actual maximum price into an unsealed (or semi-sealed) system. Which lowers the auction price.
Klemperer wrote an approachable intro to auction theory.
multi-round or not, they should still be equivalent in expected revenue to VCG - no?
> multi-round or not, they should still be equivalent in expected revenue to VCG - no
VCG is second price, so we're already in a sub-optimal regime with a first-price format. (All while illustrating why Vickrey auctions don't work with unsophisictated observers. Could you imagine the shitshow if The Onion won and then didn't have to pay their bid, but Jones's?)
Given first price, I don't think the number of rounds is revenue equivalent.
i agree that if we are doing first price it is suboptimal auction
I thought the other reason was that some creditors were trying to use their debt forgiveness as a credit to purchase inforwars. Which obviously doesn't make sense in a bankruptcy, since the whole point is the creditors are not going to get paid back 100%.
> Which obviously doesn't make sense in a bankruptcy, since the whole point is the creditors are not going to get paid back 100%
The creditors already own the asset. The estate is selling, not Alex Jones.
If you asked every creditor which bid they preferred, which do you think they'd choose? The creditors forgoing their claims obviously prefer one. As for the rest, they'll choose the one that pays them more: The Onion's bid.
This isn't how bankruptcy works in practice, but it's a good shorthand for what the correct answer should be.
The Onion's bid is the one where the creditors are applying their debt. The competing offer is more cash.
The whole point of bankruptcy is that the creditors do not get to vote and the solution that makes the majority happy isn't the best one. In an ideal bankruptcy everyone recovers the same percentage of their debt.
> The creditors already own the asset.
The parent comment, quoted above is misinformation.
> The parent comment, quoted above is misinformation
What?
They quoted the relevant portion. The creditors do not own infowars already. A court appointed trustee is liquidating it, the owner has not changed (and will not until it officially sells).
Certain creditors giving up some of their claim can shift more money to other creditors effectively increasing the amount paid out by the estate, thereby satisfying more creditors so it's completely kosher just slightly odd. It's unusual because most companies are just companies and the creditors have less/no emotional investment in anything other than receiving the maximum amount of money from the bankruptcy.
I don't see what emotions have to do with it. If a business has a claim for $28 million in debt against a bankrupt company with near zero cash, I could easily see them saying "we'll bid the full $28 million for the asset X". Presumably the asset X has some non-zero value. Even if comically low (like a single small office building), collecting the value of that asset is much better than $0.
Emotions come into it where some creditors are willing to forgo their portion of the sale proceeds for a particular outcome. That counts as the bid satisfying some portion of the debt and now other creditors potentially get more money from the bankruptcy. The law allows for this, banks do it all the time on foreclosure auctions splashing the bids with their outstanding loan amount making it unprofitable for others to bid and winning the house they can then sell in a regular manner.
The issue is when $50 million is owed and some of the debtors offer to give up their $28 million dollar claim for the building. But then there is no cash for the other debtors with a $22 million dollar claim.
As opposed to selling the building for $1 million cash and everyone getting 2% of what they are owed.
A lot of economic and legal theory beg to differ!
Beg to differ about what and how?
Why does the judge care about maximizing the value for a convicted criminal?
It's the value that goes to the creditors in the bankruptcy and is the legal requirement for the bankruptcy process. Jones gets none of this money he doesn't own InfoWars since he entered the bankruptcy process.
Delaware judges seem to have a penchant for that lately. Certainly not a good look.
Also, as a Trump appointee, and given the relationship between Trump and Jones, the judge should recuse themselves.
If this case were an article in The Onion, it'd seem too unrealistic to be funny. Well done, Global Tetrahedron!
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What's a BLM case? Do you have an example?
If the judge has a one degree of separation personal relationship with the party, then yes, they should.
If the relationship is demonstrated to be as close as the Jones-Trump-Judge in this one, sure.
Recusal is evaluated case-by-case so an all-for-everything situation, like you've described, is unwarranted.
Indeed - is there a history of democrat-nominated judges acting in corrupt manner enriching the politicians that nominated them? We're not comparing apples to apples here. One team is playing by the rules, and one team has burned the rule book, eaten the ashes, then shit out the ashes, then ate the shit again.
> Seems like the judge is overstepping given Delaware law on this matter.
What does Delaware have to do with it? If DE had any jurisdiction, what law would have been broken?
https://www.dailydac.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/0859-Win...
Bankruptcy law is federal law, Delaware law has nothing to do with it.
They typically file in the United States Court for the District of Delaware, a federal court located in Delaware. Delaware law plays a significant part in these cases even though they’re in Fed court. Corporate charters, filings, fiduciary duties, property rights, choice of laws, etc etc etc are all determined by Delaware law and used in the federal court.
Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
So, Delaware law does in fact have nearly everything to do with it.
> Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
Federal bankruptcy law sets the substantive as well as procedural rules for bankruptcy, and its substantive provisions trump any state law, but, OTOH, state law has some role both in determining what the set of claims going in to bankruptcy are and, to the extent permitted in federal bankruptcy law, setting things like allowable personal exemptions, etc.
Yep! This is all correct. The point remains, however, that Delaware law does have a substantial amount to do with bankruptcy proceedings in Delaware, which is really the point I was responding to.
I may have been wrong to say "nothing" but from what I understand Delaware law has very little to do with it and I don't see how it would be relevant to this particular ruling, but I am always open to learning more as I find the topic of law quite interesting.
This bankruptcy was filed in Texas.
How would the corporate charter affect the fairness of how the auction was conducted?
I don’t know in this case specifically. In the typical case though I’ve seen corporate charters enhance fiduciary duties, I’ve seen them specify auction procedures, I’ve seen them give certain classes certain rights, and most importantly for this case I’ve seen them define corporate governance during the auction sale.
So potentially has massive implications for the auction and its fairness.
There are (AFAIK) no Federally-incorporated firms though
Talk to Elon about Delaware judges overstepping...
Taking the judges decision at face value here is fundamentally the problem - because it relies largely on Alex Jones as an arbiter of reality.
The judge seems to take Jones, the guy who lost the auction, as the arbiter of what happened. That is a problem and not just because of the strong potential for bias, and not just because the trustee would be a more obvious source of truth - because he ran the auction. Its a problem at a deeper level because the judge seems set on taking Alex Jones as a good faith actor. Every step in the court process has shown that not to be true. We aren't here randomly and this bankruptcy doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Even setting aside that nonsense. THe judge seems confused on the difference between money and value. Thats the type of thing an undergrad gets wrong.
The actual issue is that the winning bid was $7m- $1.75m cash + $5.25m in debt forgiveness. The question is whether that bid is higher than the competing $3.5m all-cash bid.
That $5.25m debt forgiveness would have to be valued at $1.75m or more for the winning bid to actually be higher, but if other creditors are assuming that they will have losses of higher than 66% then the $3.5m all-cash bid would actually be better for other creditors.
Will he keep running do overs until he gets the outcome he wants?
From what the internet says, it didn’t go to the highest bidder.
Put simply, the internet is wrong.
FUAC's offer was all cash. The Onion offered less cash, but offered other incentives (AIUI, a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future). Saying that The Onion's bid was lower requires you to put a dollar value on those other incentives. The fact that the two creditors (read: victims' families) that would benefit from those incentives were willing to sacrifice some of the debt they were owed so they could benefit from those incentives suggests that at least _they_ think those incentives were worth more than the cash upfront, and the amount of debt they were willing to sacrifice gives you an implicit baseline for that dollar value.
Given the site we're on: it's like saying that an offer with a lower base salary but higher equity is automatically a worse offer than a bigger salary with no stock.
> a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future
What is that realistically? They said they will turn it into gun safety information. How does a gun safety information site make money out of an audience of people expecting a guy shouting about conspiracy theories?
I don't know what it is. It's an investment, it carries risks with it. That said, if I were one of the Sandy Hook families, turning Infowars into a gun safety site would hold more value than any money you could pay me. Classic case of "maximising shareholder value" not being the same as "maximising revenue".
What that is realistically is irrelevant to the value to the bankruptcy estate - the value to the estate is the amount of debt those creditors are willing to forgive in return for those risks.
The idea that Global Tetrahedron would generate revenue from InfoWars is a farce. Jones is InfoWars. Any market value assigned to InfoWars without Jones explicitly involvement is a farce. Even a non bankruptcy sale of InfoWars would require him to participate in the business for an extended period of time. Even then, it'd just be some investor bankrolling Jones.
That might or might not be true. If Infowars is _that_ worthless without Jones, then _any_ offer is a farce and the whole auction is pointless.
> If Infowars is _that_ worthless without Jones, then _any_ offer is a farce
That doesn't make sense. A genuine offer for an unprofitable thing could be made. That's not farcical, just a bad investment.
Yes, that's precisely what I mean. It might or might not be a bad bet, but the Sandy Hook families are just as entitled to take that bet as anybody else. The idea that it's farcical to entertain any offer that doesn't involve putting Jones back in charge leads you down a really weird road.
Now that you say it that way, it does make some kind of sense.
That seems true for any attempt to continue using the IP for the same thing. Turning it into a parody of that thing might have an audience (and therefore produce ad revenue), would not seem to need Jones involved, and be something for which Global Tetrahedron seems well resourced.
I thought that too, but Global Tetrahedron could just found 'InfooWars' as a satire site without Jones estate involvement at all.
It's complicated - it went to the bidder that would result in the two largest debtors being the happiest with the outcome but that bidder didn't bid the most money in a regular manner.
The structure of the bid was quite complex but essentially the largest debtor agreed to enlarge the share the second largest debtor would receive by supplementing it from their own share due to the awards in the two court cases being so drastically different (basically the largest debtor decided to decrease their own share in that specific bid to supplement the second largest debtor) - this bid was the one that the primary debtor prefers and would award a lot more value to the secondary debtor than the bid that was, on paper, larger.
There are some good detailed analyses of the arrangement out there that would give you a much better understanding than I can communicate second-hand - I'd suggest the overview by LegalEagle[1], personally.
1. https://youtu.be/GmDNz7irGgw
> went to the bidder that would result in the two largest debtors being the happiest with the outcome but that bidder didn't bid the most money in a regular manner
The creditors own the asset. If every dollar the creditors are owed voted, which bid would they choose?
The onion bid - by far. If the bid was chosen by creditors weighted by owed value the Connecticut families would solely dictate the terms as they are owed more than 90% of the value resulting from this auction.
> The creditors own the asset
If this is the case, dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no? They are assigning value and signaling accordingly.
> dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no?
Sure. I’m trying to approximate a metric that gives their weighted interest. My point is the owners of the asset are selling it, and it seems their interests are obviously maximised by one bid.
Just navel gazing here maybe there is case precedent or law here.
The debtor generally deserves their case to be discharged resolved liquidated closed and done forever.
Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this. Alex Jones himself could convert his case to a chapter 13 and set up a “repayment” plan based on his own anticipated/potential earnings from his own business. It would possibly even be higher, infowars intended audience is probably more profitable than people laughing at infowars on Ben Collins bluesky feed.
The people who got a personal judgment aren’t made whole by a promise of future restitution by someone purchasing his business assets.
What if the onion went bankrupt next year and said oh we’re not going to pay that anymore?
That would be an interesting case to test: a person being relieved from a fraud or criminal tort, as it’s handed off to a third party buying their business, who themselves didn’t commit fraud or a criminal tort and merely became insolvent which is dischargeable.
In the case where the “creditors” own the asset to settle their claim, that’s another story, whether they make $1 or a billion dollars disposing of it is no longer the debtors problem
In the same way that returning my smashed up uninsured car to a secured lender doesn’t make them whole for my discharged loan either.
>Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this.
Sure it does, the Onion would be paying the royalties, Alex Jones already doesn't own it, it's essentially owned by an estate that is selling it off to cover Alex Jones' debts.
That’s a lot of text to say “yes, it didn’t go to the highest bidder.“
That's incorrect - it's a lot of text to say it went to the second highest bidder. The onion bid was the one that provided more value to the creditors.
From what I've read, it's not incorrect. Orthogonal valuations are not part of the bid value. This is why The Onion was second (the winner). It was not the highest bid (the considered part). The end.
The Judge has decided that's unfair, likely due to some bias (intellectual, political, etc.)
Yep so that Elon can step in and buy it
This is the comment I was looking for. He said he was going to intervene and something to the effect of “fix it.” This seems like a logical outcome of that statement.
You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid, I'm kind of okay with that. Just kind of. His fix will not go to Jones. Jones is not going away however this ends. Just the brand. He can create a new brand.
>You know, if Elon buys it at the same levels of inflated values he did for Twitter so that the creditors get paid,
He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's literally where all news gets broken. All of it. And he's using it to influence global politics.
Inflated values was Musk's own words, not mine. To the point, he was forced by a court to honor his original higher price than what he wanted to pay after re-evaluating it. Not sure why you're quibbling over the fact that everyone thinks Musk paid an inflated price.
>Not sure why you're quibbling over the fact that everyone thinks Musk paid an inflated price.
Not everyone thinks this. Are you talking about the financial geniuses in the comments?
>To the point, he was forced by a court to honor his original higher price than what he wanted to pay after re-evaluating it.
What's your point? The original comment was to imply "Haha! Elon overpaid for Twitter!". The company is worth more than $44B. Not sure why you're quibbling about being able to buy at the absolute rock bottom price, even when he got and will continue to get value from the purchase.
> He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you.
It's indisputable that Twitter was worth $44B at the time of the sale because by definition the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree to perform the transaction.
What's also indisputable is that even Elon Musk was refusing to pay that much for Twitter and tried to back down until he was sued to force him to put his money where his mouth was.
>It's indisputable that Twitter was worth $44B at the time of the sale because by definition the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree to perform the transaction.
I know you think this is some kind of deep philosophical insight, but there's an entire industry built around getting value from an asset beyond the price paid. We don't live in a world of perfect information.
without jones then what good is the brand?
Jones will create his own new brand once this is settled.
So it is more of a question to the bankruptcy court itself, as I would agree that there's no value in Infowars without Jones. So my opening bid to the court is $1.
I doubt elon will want it
Will the losing bidders drop out, or not? In a sealed bid you have to guess what others will bid - you want to bid $1 more than your competitors (or if you will lose the bid make your competitor pay as much as possible). The judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding.
Who is right I don't know.
> judge is saying because the bids were seals losing bidders had no clue what their correct bid is and some are likely to have bid less than they would have in open bidding. Who is right I don't know.
Sealed-bid auctions are incredibly common across markets [1]. Real estate. Corporate mergers.
Note, too, that an English auction is revenue equivalent to a second-price sealed-bid auction [2], and here we had a first-price sealed-bid auction with two bidders.
There may be valid reasons to challenge this auction. Sealed bids is absolutely, definitively not one.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti...
[2] https://www.sfu.ca/~idudnyk/Auctions_Part2_Revenue_Equivalen...
I am not disagreeing with anything you have said here. Sealed-bid is common. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't. It is debatable if it is better or not.
> It is debatable if it is better or not
No, it really isn’t. Not with two bidders. The moment the first party announces their bid you have perfect collusion (if the second party, rationally, runs out the clock) or a stalled auction (if running out the clock is impossible, thereby always allowing someone to always claim they’ll bid better).
you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold. Repeating the auction just seems pointless, but another avenue could be for the assets to not be sold, and the claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business. Then over time they can potentially see a better recovery than what they are getting from a sale.
> you need a lot more than 2 bidders for the theory to hold
Wrong. Vickrey auctions are well studied in single-item auctions even with two bidders [1]. (They perform between 4/3 and 2 compared to an optimal omniscient auction. Not solved. But not unstudied.)
> claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business
This is Chapter 7. The bankruptcy estate already legally owns the asset, not Jones.
[1] https://www.timroughgarden.org/papers/bk.pdf Examples 4.6 and 5.2
The trustee gets something like 3% over $1million in liquidated assets.
Call it 52,000 from the onion sale.
well now someone says I could have bought it for 10 million.
trustee now gets $300,000. They’re not going to get in the way.
Why do you think this is relevant? (Everyone is ostensibly trying to maximise the price.)
You can test this in boardgames about auctioning: See Modern Art, a game about profiting from art, where you have multiple forma of bidding. Part of the game is to figure out when each auction will provide the most money.
Blind bidding doesn't let people improve their bid, but it also lets someone bid much higher than the second best bid, so it can be extremely profitable in some situations. Compare to a version of said auction where you bid only once, but where the winner will only pay the second best bid plus one.
Uncertainty makes bids go up. Introducing the possibility that perhaps there might be a second round after a bid turned out to be too low reduces uncertainty.
Imagine game theory dynamics in poker if an unhappy player could say "well, come to think of it, I guess I did not really want to see, I'd rather fold"
In a single round sealed bid auction, it’s equally likely that a winner will have bid more than they would have in open bidding since they only get one shot to name a price.
Maybe. Some will do this. Some will try for a deal in hopes that nobody else is bidding.
Elon is going to be the highest bidder if they run the process again.
Maybe Alex Jones will also get a nice contract to sell his vitamins to the US armed forces.
> I think the Judge maybe naive in thinking that re-running an auction will generate more money (normally it will generate less, as the losing bidders will drop out) but he did not agree with Jones' claims.
What evidence are you basing this on?
I no longer remember the title of the paper but it was on the Gordon-Brown-era spectrum auctions. Basically if bidders can obtain information about each others preferences other than via the auction - or in some cases even via the auction - the expected price is lower. I think it applies when a limited number of bidders are interested. If Elon is interested then all bets are off :-)
This seems to me like a victim of attempted murder suing the assailant into bankruptcy, where one of the assailant's main assets is a really expensive gun, and the assailant is still saying how much they'd like to kill the victim with that gun.
Surely there must be a legally viable way to resolve such a bankruptcy that doesn't involve the assailant buying back the gun with funds raised from friends.
You speak practically. Unfortunately the courts do not, and as a result, the courts are suffering a deficit of trust and confidence, nationally.[1] The problems transcend one case and unfortunately they do not point clearly to one answer or a single set of answers. Is it the system? Is it the laws? Is it the people? Why do we get bizarre elevation of form, and results wholly devoid of justice?
[1] https://www.mass.gov/news/supreme-judicial-court-chief-justi...
> What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
I mean, I’m not advocating it, but we saw the decision of a guy who made the news over the past week with a healthcare exec.
"no consequences."
This is basically going to be the United States for the immediate future, if you're connected to the right people.
Downvote all you want, but we see it with our own eyes.
When has it been otherwise? See also: Hunter Biden.
The only reason Biden pardoned his son was that Trump explicitly said he was going to use the DoJ for a punitive witch-hunt. No father would ever subject their child to that.
If Harris had won, Biden would not have pardoned Hunter. Likely Harris would've pardoned him in a year or two after he'd seen prison.
It's never 0 or 100. But it does ebb and flow, and boy is it about to flow.
Comparing one guy who was in the hot seat only because of his surname to the incoming shit storm is risible.
Can you point us to videos of other people doing lots of federal drug & gun crimes who get away with it?
They rejected a plea deal. That almost never happens. He was 100% guilty of some things, but they wanted to drag out the whole process for publicity rather than to actually do some semblance of 'justice'.
And some of these incoming people threatened to keep going after him just to inflict pain on his father.
These are no longer the party of Romney and McCain. "The cruelty is the point".
> They rejected a plea deal. That almost never happens
They rejected it because it was worded to absolve him of all crimes, not just those charged, and the judge found the parties did not agree on which interpretation was correct so there was no agreement. It is completely appropriate for the court to want to know exactly what the plea agreement covers and to make sure both sides actually agree on the meaning of it. They could have ended it by coming up with a simple, normal plea agreement that doesn't have that strange ambiguity.
If anything, that looks more like an attempt to do a backdoor non-pardon pardon than some kind of persecution. It was only "dragged out" because Biden's DoJ did not agree in court with Hunter Biden's lawyers on what they had actually agreed to.
And despite the "they" in your sentence seeming to refer to Republicans in some capacity, from start to finish, the Hunter Biden prosecution was done by Joe Biden's Department of Justice. You may complain that the judge was appointed by Trump, but the charges couldn't have been brought to begin with without Biden's DoJ authorizing it.
> Comparing one guy who was in the hot seat only because of his surname
There exists boatloads of concrete evidence Hunter Biden was guilty of several categories of crimes, related to drugs, corruption, illegal firearms and child prostitutes.
There’s a reason he had to be pardoned by Joe, right? He essentially created a “the full laptop” pardon, complete unprecedented.
Any other person guilty of half these things would be in for life.
You got it backwards. He didn’t get a shit storm due to his last name. He got a free pass due to it.
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> The Hunter Biden pardon literally set historical precedent.
It followed a long-established historical precedent.
Clinton pardoned his brother (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers...). The Bushes pardoned their Iran Contra cronies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby_clemency_controv...). Trump pardoned his son-in-law's father (and now appointed him to be the French ambassador; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-charles-kushner-nominatio...). Pardons have always garnered controversy.
I promise this is an honest question: has ANY president since the civil war reconciliation blanket pardoned someone for an entire decade for all known and unknown federal crimes?
There's a pretty big obvious example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon
> Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.
That is damn close. This one is quite interesting in and of its twice as long and concerns someone who doesn't have the kind of immunity presidents have recently been under scrutiny for possibly having.
Another interesting thing I found about Hunter's pardon was that the president openly said isolated prosecutions of lying on the 4473 are unfairly targeted, but then baffling only pardoned his son for it.
Not quite a decade, and not as broad in terms of what crimes are covered, but much bigger in terms of scope:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_4483
Ford. For Nixon.
Biden wouldn't have to preemptively pardon anyone if there were not about to be a shit ton of sham prosecutions.
If you think prosecutions are shams for the elite, wait until you see what they look like against the plebs.
How could you possibly claim that Jone's has faced no consequences when the best case scenario is him spending $10-100MM to buy back his business from his creditors?
> The end effect will probably be even more subscribers and money for Jones
That seems a very foreseeable outcome.
Can’t blame him, that monetary judgement is ridiculous and should be capped.
Why should it be capped? Was the harm dealt to the victims capped at all?
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Would you mind elaborating?
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> Instead we have people crying that free speech is the actual evil crime here.
Is this a satire comment? I hope so or else you need to do some reading on what "free speech" actually means. It doesn't let you defame someone, for example, by telling them they were crisis actors in a mass killing of school children.
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> mere defamation
I think what Alex Jones did is more than mere defamation.
Repeatedly lying about the reality of a school mass shooting, over years, in such a way that he caused threats to be made against the families of victims?
Incitement to credible threats of violence, and especially continuing to do so even after you're aware that's what your listeners are doing, deserves severe consequences.
I haven’t been following closely - I wonder if the people who made the death threats were charged? I haven’t heard anything about that.
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For those who are curious:
https://thepostmillennial.com/new-former-fbi-current-cia-say...
> in such a way that he caused threats
In such a way that somebody else decided on their own do something...
I don't know about the US, but incitement to violence is a crime in other countries.
It has fairly strict criteria which Mr. Jones emphatically did not meet. It's referred to as the Brandenburg test, or the "imminent lawless action" test, you can read more here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
Nothing he said could be construed as a call to violence by any sane and sober person. So it's moot anyway.
>Incitement to credible threats of violence
Incitement means means explicitly encouraging. Just because someone people made threats of violence to the families because they believed what Alex Jones said about the shootings, doesn't mean that saying "The shootings were faked" is incitement. If Jones had explicitly said "the families deserve to suffer violent consequences for helping fake the shootings", that would be incitement.
That's why he wasn't convicted of incitement, he was convicted of defamation.
Because accuracy is important when discussing legal terms - he wasn't convicted. Defamation is a civil offense, and not a crime. He lost a lawsuit, he did not become a convict.
Watch the Behind the Bastards podcast on Alex Jones or read some of the testimony from his various cases. The amount of evidence burying him is incontrovertible. His actions before during and after are incontrovertible.
There’s a reason even the right wing hardliners abandoned this guy.
Alex has not been abandoned. Tucker Carlson is a frequent guest on his show, and they toured together recently.
More to the point he has Roger Stone and Steve Bannon on the show constantly, who in turn have direct access to Trump.
Alex is firmly within the mainstream of the right wing.
> Incitement means means explicitly encouraging.
He was literally, as in literally, comparing the families of the victims to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
I don’t know about you, but if someone has been screaming at me for years that I need to be ready for armed conflict with “the enemy” and then points to someone screaming “that guy’s Hitler”, I would definitely take that as explicit encouragement. But obviously it’s all “just comedy” right?
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And they should also stop doing it.
Sometimes it's pretty accurate though.
Sometimes meaning "practically never"?
I mean...they literally have people waving Nazi flags among their ranks and don't denounce them.
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No it's not, but thank you for this insightful comment.
Anyone defending Alex Jones in this case is either ignorant, a fool, or an absolute garbage human being.
I am going to pick ignorant in this case.
> “Folks, we got to get private investigators up to Sandy Hook right now. Because I’m telling you this — this stinks to highest heaven.”
> “Why did Hitler blow up the Reichstag — to get control! Why do governments stage these things — to get our guns! Why can’t people get that through their head?”
Blanket statements like this are worse than useless. It's a nuanced discussion of damages, not a conversation of whether Alex Jones was right or wrong.
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The only thing improper about the process was that Jones tried to screw around with it instead of actually cooperating with the legal system. The judge rightfully came down on him like a ton of bricks for his behavior. Follow court orders and provide evidence when it’s required. If you don’t, you’re going to lose your case.
"steal someone's stuff through improper processes"
How is a bankruptcy case "stealing stuff through improper process"?
The trustee here did not follow acceptable processes. Sorry I thought that was clear from the article.
In the article they quote the judge saying "nobody did anything wrong". And the judgemental was to get more money from the sale. Absolutely 0 about Jones keeping anything.
OK if nobody did anything wrong then why is the sale cancelled? Obviously something stinks here. I also never said AJ would keep anything. The property has to be disposed of correctly according to established procedures put in place to protect everyone.
Taking the man's source of income is absolutely a way to get paid. He can work a day job like anyone else.
No, it's not. He will not be paying that. He might have paid a smaller yet still large amount, but he's certainly not going to work in McDonalds to pay off $1 billion dollars. He has the same legal rights as anyone else to not be a debt slave.
I don’t think they’ll throw him in jail if he sells off all his assets, pays everything he can, but refuses to work a job so he can pay more.
Being liable for an amount more than you have means the people you owe won’t be able to get the full amount, but it doesn’t mean you get to keep all your stuff and pay them nothing.
It's called garnishment [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garnishment
Garnishment is taking a portion of income, not taking the actual source of it. No business means no income, no income means no garnishment. I love how you cite Wikipedia as if grown adults here have never heard of garnishment. Then again education really is going downhill these days I guess.
Taking away some amount of wages is very much a thing, as everyone who ever divorced can tell you. You better not ask how math works there, because it’s not fun.
As I said to someone else, taking some feasible payment from income is different from rendering someone unemployed. If you took a construction worker's tools, a taxi drivers car, or anything like that, then you put them out of business and render them incapable of paying. As far as divorce or child support, the same principle applies (or ought to). If the worker cannot sustain himself and his necessary expenses, he will become unemployed and incapable of paying.
Well, the catch is, you may not like what the judge decides is feasible. At least in the divorce cases the interests of the parties have to be balanced, here they don't have to be.
This happens all the time. It's super super common, not even accounting for pre trial detention leading to job loss for innocent people.
We should fix that system, but like, why is Alex Jones the one to get hung up on?
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He can't pay his debts. What alternative to bankruptcy do you propose?
I'm not arguing against bankruptcy. I'm saying that bankruptcy is a structured process that is supposed to generate monetary outcomes for everyone. Selling off assets in a non-competitive process is basically a criminal move, especially if you collude with one of the bidders who is also a creditor.
Bankruptcy itself aside, the judgement against Alex Jones here is huge. I haven't looked it up but I'm sure it broke records. The plaintiffs' initial demands of trillions of dollars were absolutely insane. They could have actually gotten more money with a lower judgement that allowed him to pay over time. But clearly restitution is not the objective.
> Selling off assets in a non-competitive process is basically a criminal move, especially if you collude with one of the bidders who is also a creditor.
Not sure why the bankruptcy trustee working with the companies largest creditors, so large, that a simple proportionate would result in them claiming pretty much the entire possible payout, can be considered collusion.
The only people who can possibly be harmed are the creditors themselves. If they want to strike a deal that results in more equitable outcome, but with less total cash, that’s their business. Remember Alex Jones is on the hook for close to a billon dollars, and that sum has already been through various appeals and due process already, it’s no longer up for debate. The only question left is how Jones is gonna pay it. Unless someone creditably believes someone is going to hand over close to a billion dollars to purchase InfoWars, it seems silly to reject an offer that the creditors themselves believe is fair and reasonable.
>Not sure why the bankruptcy trustee working with the companies largest creditors, so large, that a simple proportionate would result in them claiming pretty much the entire possible payout, can be considered collusion.
Because there is no actual money, there must be consensus among creditors, and the assets in question might more than pay the debt (in general). I believe there are also tax implications to writing off debt in some cases, as well as tax implications associated with the actual sale of property. So no, you can't just go rogue and take possession of someone's property for any price you like without even having the cash, just because they haven't paid their debts or they are an unlikeable person.
> Because there is no actual money, there must be consensus among creditors, and the assets in question might more than pay the debt (in general).
What makes you think there wasn’t agreement from all the creditors? There is zero chance the assets can cover the debt (which is close to a billion dollars). The whole point of the deal was that the primary creditor was giving up part of their claim to allow the other creditors to actually see a real payout. There was real cash on the table, and under the rejected deal, every creditor, except the biggest, would see more actual cash in their pocket.
All of this was only possible because the largest creditors worked with the trustee to create a better deal for everyone involved. The fact it also allowed the largest creditors to stick it Alex Jones was icing on top.
> So no, you can't just go rogue and take possession of someone's property for any price you like without even having the cash, just because they haven't paid their debts or they are an unlikeable person.
If you’re the one that owns their debts, then yes you absolutely can. The current owner has already forfeited their claim to the property when they defaulted on the debt and started bankruptcy proceedings. Why the hell would the owner of the debt be required to have the needed cash on hand to repay themselves, that’s ridiculous.
it very much was a case of FAFO. he lost the case by repeatedly skipping his deposition (once with a fake doctor's note), and by refusing to participate in the discovery process. them during the damages trial, he repeatedly lied on the stand in obvious ways, and also went on air repeatedly while the trial was ongoing to call the judge and jury insane, on drugs, etc. the trial strategy of loudly and repeatedly defaming the jury turns out to be a bad one since it does a very good job explaining to the jury just how awful being a target of Jones was.
Sealed auctions are a competitive manner and the sandy hook families are in all practical reality the only creditors of note. Their damages absolutely dwarf his other creditors to the point where they were already in line to effectively receive nothing. Going against the will of the families is absurd to begin with.
> But clearly restitution is not the objective.
Sure. And damages can be punitive in nature.
In this case, about half a billion dollars in punitive damages.
Free advice, kids: stay in school, don’t do drugs, and comply with court orders when you’re sued.
>Sealed auctions are a competitive manner [sic]
No they are not. Technically nobody knows what someone might be willing to pay. That is why public auctions are the default. The only reason an auction should be private is to protect the identity or interests of the bidders. Taking one round of bids from private parties is not an auction.
> No they are not.
Yes they are. They encourage people to make the best bid they reasonably can based on their desire to ensure the purchase goes through. There's a reason they are the de facto standard for bidding on government contracts.
> Technically nobody knows what someone might be willing to pay.
This is correct. But what you don't seem to understand is that this also causes people to overbid. This is the reason why the vickrey method was created - to ensure that the highest bidder does not massively overpay against the second.
> That is why public auctions are the default.
Public auctions are the default for... what? Bankruptcy? In the US, yes. In Canada and other parts of the world, no. And default does not mean only option or best option.
> The only reason an auction should be private is to protect the identity or interests of the bidders.
They are frequently used explicitly because they often get the person selling the best offer. If the people bidding in auction have asymmetric purchasing power, in an open auction, the winning bid will be slightly over the purchasing power of the weaker party. In a sealed bid auction, the winning party will frequently have a bid with a larger delta than they would have in an open auction.
> Taking one round of bids from private parties is not an auction.
Nothing about the word 'auction' precludes a single round of bidding, sealed or otherwise.
Bankruptcy is a process to make whole the debtors - in this case the primary debtors (those representing far more than 90% of the debt) were content with the outcome. The process was approved by everyone who is a relevant party to this matter - the original owner (Jones) no longer has any say in what happens to their former assets.
Just to reiterate - the trillions number is irrelevant - it's just an initial damages claim. The judgements were for 965M and 50M - slightly over 1B in total - and the expected final award to the injured parties is likely going to be below 200k.
> But clearly restitution is not the objective.
It's not the only objective, punishment is also an objective. If not you get settlements like Purdue Pharma's one which even after paying billions in damages still had made more money than that, you don't want an incentive to break the law like that, it becomes just another cost for the business and not really a punishment for it.
No, it's a process that takes also other interests into account.
Some societies in the past would suggest indentured servitude. In this case, I'd find it rather amusing.
Yeah, but nobody ever argues conservative values when adhering to those gives a disadvantage to the one arguing. Proper conservative argument should make my life easier and predictable at the expense of other.
Exactly. On the same vein, it's only legal if it benefits them (“Finally, a judge followed the law.”), otherwise it's illegal persecution trying to silence his free speech.
Let's not discuss "proper processes" when Jones illegally hid evidence and refused to participate in our legal system to the point of getting a default judgement against him. Everything he was accused of he did - he refused the right to participate in our justice system and accepted full liability for his actions.
On the point of "any award in the billions (much less trillions, as they initially demanded) is exorbitant for mere defamation" this is a pretty clear misunderstanding of our legal system as it is today. Initial claims are a mere formality that do nothing but potentially limit damages - the judgements rendered against Jones were 965M in the Connecticut case and 50M in the Texas case - no other numbers are relevant. Finally, referring to 1.015B as "Billions" feels rather dishonest - the total award is technically above a billion but the families will see nothing near that amount in the final resolution.
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It's perfectly fair to stop but I did want to highlight one thing:
> It's not a mere technical distinction. The fact that the number is so high essentially guarantees that AJ cannot pay it. A lower amount might have actually been paid. What can we make of this? The intent was not to get restitution, but rather to destroy the business. That seems unethical.
There is actually an important reason to secure an absurdly high judgement - some of the creditors involved in this situation are Jones parents (and I believe some affiliate companies also hold some of the debt). The judgement will be divided proportionally by debt so the size of the judgement will impact how much money from the bankruptcy sale Jones' parents will receive.
I also think it's fair to view this case through the lens of ongoing damages - Jones has received C&Ds about Sandyhook and ignored them - even during the trial he continued to cause additional damages. There was every indication (to me at least) that if the business survived the damages would continue and the only way to reasonably make the other parties whole was to destroy the business.
I understand this may feel like unnecessary censorship but the path to this point was AJ repeatedly ignoring the justice system saying "Stop doing that" and his response to the process up to this point hasn't been to act in good faith.
> Ok then, the lawsuit was settled with an absurdly large judgement. Nobody thinks he has this money.
The judgement was derived from the absurdly large damages he was proven to have caused to his victims.
If he has no money to compensate the victims of his actions for the absurdly large damage he caused then this means he's bound to declare bankruptcy.
> I think it's relevant as to the intent, which is to get a ridiculous sum rather than simply a reasonable one.
The intent is to ensure that people like Alex Jones cannot cause damages to innocent third-parties. The intent is to bring down legal consequences that match the damages caused to others in order to hold him accountable for his actions. Think: if you are going to constrain damages to your cash grab perspective, you'd be ensuring that those well off would be free to cause damages to everyone around them provided the are not as rich so that worst case scenario they would pay a symbolic fine and change nothing in their antisocial behavior. Do you think this makes sense?
>The judgement was derived from the absurdly large damages he was proven to have caused to his victims.
Obviously the amount of damages is entirely subjective. AJ said mean and inaccurate things on his podcast or something and that's about the extent of what happened. No person or thing was physically harmed because of this. There was no doubt some stress involved in being the subject of his podcast, but how much is that worth? There are people who literally get killed or maimed and their families don't get anywhere near this kind of settlement.
>The intent is to ensure that people like Alex Jones cannot cause damages to innocent third-parties. The intent is to bring down legal consequences that match the damages caused to others in order to hold him accountable for his actions. Think: if you are going to constrain damages to your cash grab perspective, you'd be ensuring that those well off would be free to cause damages to everyone around them provided the are not as rich so that worst case scenario they would pay a symbolic fine and change nothing in their antisocial behavior. Do you think this makes sense?
The emotional damages caused to others here are unfortunate but not worth a billion dollars (at least from where I'm sitting). You don't have to go to such extremes to discourage someone rich from doing bad things. It could have been a more reasonable number that can actually be paid over a reasonable amount of time. Making those payments would remind the offender to be more careful.
> The intent was not to get restitution, but rather to destroy the business. That seems unethical
Sometimes destruction of the business is restitution. Nothing unethical about that.
Someone saying publicly that you faked your child's death is an unforgivable insult. Money is beside the point here.
And its not simply that he accused some parents of faking their children's deaths. He also specifically instructed his listeners to rise up and "find out the truth". And he did so repeatedly to an audience he knew to be heavily armed, and prone to violent performances of their beliefs. And he did so after being ordered, repeatedly, to stop saying such things, and to retract his statements. But he persisted, arguably because he wanted the revenue he received from having that audience.
Now, most of these parents have dealt with consistent harassment of varying severity revolving around their dead kids for longer than the children have been alive in the first place. Many of these parents never even got the chance to grieve in peace before the harassment, stalking, assault and attempted murder (not sure what else a drive-by-shooting qualifies as) began.
Certainly, if any of these nutters continued to harass the parents after Jones issued a retraction, that's entirely on the nutter. But the thing about our legal definition of slander/libel is that it does take into account what happens when third parties hear and act on the slander/libel. Like, if I accuse somebody of pedophilia, and somebody else, of their own accord, murders the person I accused, the murder is considered in determining what the legal remedies are against me, even as the murderer is on the hook for the murder as such.
Since when does this "Ability to pay" metric have anything to do with "Damages"?
A judgement is what happens when the parties fail to come to any agreement about a settlement; A settlement would be where you'd figure in realistic actual compensation odds.
Also: "Destroying a business" and "unethical"? Businesses are artificial constructs we create and protect only for the social benefit they bring; They have inferior ethical status to human being in terms of accountability, behavioral psychology, and the sheer intangibility of meaningfully "harming" a business. We should be employing meaningfully large civil judgements against businesses far more often, because our criminal laws being difficult to apply at corporate scale so often fail to deter criminal wrongdoing which the justice system would otherwise throw the book at a biological human for.
Steal one person's house out from under them using fraud and we throw you in prison for 10 years. Do it with 100,000 houses from beneath the corporate veil, and we bail you out for your losses from having to relinquish the mortgage.
If not sizable fines, we should be employing "The Death Penalty", and simply revoking their corporate charter and seizing all their assets in a blanket action, when they do abhorrent things. Because, and I can't stress this enough - they aren't people, they're potentially dangerous, amoral / psychopathic algorithms which will only comply with rules to the extent that rules will be enforced in a way that destroys shareholder value.
What he did was beyond mere defamation. It was heinous, it was blatant and deliberate dishonesty, and targeted vulnerable victims.
Repeating the verifiable lie that the Sandy Hook incident did not happen, and promoting violence against the surviving families, despite repeated opportunities to stop without penalty, is beyond forgivable.
And this penalty is because he declined to defend this behavior. Remember, it's a default judgement.
The conditioning to the public is that this behavior is not tolerated in a civil society, no matter what your political leanings. Him losing his "intellectual property", but not his voice, is getting off lightly.
> Him losing his "intellectual property", but not his voice, is getting off lightly.
Indeed. This should be a matter of criminal charges. Jones should be in jail.
OTOH, he would, of course, be pardoned in a couple months.
Calling what Alex Jones has done (repeatedly, for quite a while) “dishonesty” is a bit like calling the Ukrainian war “special operation”.
Targeted harassment, defamation, libel, intimidation? Sure. Dishonesty, however, doesn’t seem to even remotely cut it.
No matter how heinous you may find his speech, in America, under the First Amendment, Jones (or any nutball or even Nazi you may choose to pick) has a right to say it - even if he has a large Radio and Podcast megaphone.
The First Amendment is nearly absolute, and must protect unpopular and offensive speech even more than it protects popular speech.
(Don't start with the bogus "fire in a crowded theater exception" - that wording comes from Schenk v. United States (which was not even a 1A case, but involved the Espionage Act), and was nearly entirely overturned in 1969's Brandenburg v. Ohio. The clear falsity of the "Fire!" claim has repeatedly and wrongly used as a justification for suppressing speech for a century, to the detriment of us all.)
I don't disagree with you.
As much as I'd personally enjoy never hearing from or about him again, I agree that 1A is an extremely important right that should be defended, even if you hate what the person is saying.
But free speech does NOT mean freedom from consequences. Taking away infowars does not stop him from continuing to speak his nonsense.
(nb this is not a defense of Alex Jones or the events of the article, please read my whole comment to understand my point)
> But free speech does NOT mean freedom from consequences
Freedom of speech most certainly means freedom from coercive consequences. Or do you think the first amendment merely prevents the government from engaging in physical prior restraint such as putting duct tape over your mouth, and post facto punishment is legal? Ultimately this "consequences" refrain is a broken talking point that was arrived at by people arguing for the attractive cryptofascism of big tech censorship [0].
The right answer is that there are "exceptions" [1] for freedom of speech based on other concepts. For example, forming a contract (especially a verbal one) is done entirely through speech but yet still commits parties to performing other actions in a legally enforceable way. Defamation and harassment are other concepts that get equitably weighed against the ideal of freedom of speech. And those last two are what Jones ran afoul of.
[0] It started off something like "... consequences from private parties" and then the last bit got dropped because the focus wasn't a good faith discussion of freedom but rather a cheering on of the consequences. See also the fake libertarians saying "edgy" things like those who can't afford food should die - their focus isn't really the freedom but rather it's the death.
[1] In actuality they are not exceptions but rather equitable balances. The axiomatic-foundation framing of rights is a dead end, as it intrinsically supports the cryptofascism of denying rights through an ever-increasing amount of preconditions.
You are 100℅ right but on here this kind of insightful comment is usually downvoted. I should have way higher karma but I have a bad habit of pointing out things that should be obvious to at least the Americans here. Keep up the effort!
Is he prohibited from speaking? Or just being held accountable for what he already said?
You may wish to look up the concept of 'jawboning' if you're under the misapprehension that this sort of workaround to the First Amendment is generally supported by historical jurisprudence.
You're going to be hearing that word a lot in the next four years. May as well get a head start on it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
I've also never seen video of him inciting people. But supposedly he did? Does someone have the actual evidence?
For one, he specifically gave financial and logistical support to Wolfgang Halbig so that he could harass the families of the victims.
It's clear how these people operate. Everything is black or white, good or bad. If someone is bad, then they are wholly evil and every allegation against them is true, no proof required. The key goal is to destroy him and the exact justification used is an unimportant detail.
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This comment flagrantly violates the HN guidelines.
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the problem with vigilanate justice is not that it doesn’t work, it’s very effective.
The problem is that the vigilante might not have the right version of justice
A worked example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Lead_(Italy)
A better example in the US is the thousands of innocent black men who have been hanged from a tree because "everyone knows they did it"
If the USA does have "Years of lead" then the quantity and quality of firearms (e.g. military grade assault rifles) will make it far worse.
"Years of lead" in a political sense I mean. In a more general sense, you already are in "Years of lead".
>A better example in the US is the thousands of innocent black men who have been hanged from a tree because "everyone knows they did it"
Atrocities against people were committed using this logic since the dawn of humanity. The bigger problem is this way of thinking is used to justify the vilification of people even to this day. See debates on supporting US election candidates.
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That's a great argument for keeping the official system neutral and uncorrupted but given how things are going, it's kinda too late for that.
Kinda yeah. The problem is when you allow for vigilante justice, it can easily also turn against you at some point.
Someone one day might decide that your mom/dad broke law and evaded justice and it's therefore OK to un-alive them because the court system failed.
Which is why countries where vigilante justice is common are significantly more dangerous and worse to live in than where it's not.
This isn’t TikTok. You can say kill and murder. Jesus.
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It’s being done right out in the open by having his parents “own” his vitamin business, which is now bidding for InfoWars. This is one of the big problems with how the court is handling this case.
This is a lie. Hiding assets is trivially easy. You just shouldn't hide them by literally hiding them or not telling about them. Selling the assets for almost free to a different organisation just before you go get your bankrupty is the way to go.
If it is legal and done in plain sight, then it is not "hiding" by definition. If it were illegal, the court and the lawyers representing parents would have done something about the fact of the sale.
Hide: "put or keep out of sight; conceal from the view or notice of others."
The fact is that most of complainers here would be laughed out of the bancruptcy court, yourself included.
Selling assets for nothing before bancruptcy is legal, but will almost certainly be scrutinized by the court. The court has a broad power to collect the proceeds, sue the purchaser for the difference from the market value, and take additional steps to recover assets.
In the financial world, hiding an asset doesn't always mean making it literally invisible. It just means making it out of reach to the collector.
You can argue about the legality of what he did if you want, but being a pedant about the dictionary definition of the word "hide" just detracts from your main point by showing that you're arguing in bad faith.
Fine, I'll go with your definition. I already pointed out (which you didn't bother to read) that fire-sale of assets before the bancruptcy does not make them out of reach to the collector. Maybe you need yet another definition. Try harder.
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Repeatedly accusing the families of being actors lying about the event sounds like defamation of living people to me
The argument the lawsuit wasn't about defending the honor of the dead kids while going after the nearest deep pockets is pretty questionable. I don't condone what Jones said but it seems pretty clear to me the reason the parents wanted the money was because they felt Jones was selling a false story about their children.
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> This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights.
It’s fascinating (and worrying) how the people who cry the loudest about the first amendment are the ones who least understand it. The right to free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything without consequences. If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.
I’m reminded of the Twitter engineer who said “Twitter wants to censor bullying and harassment, and the idea of free speech is that you can bully and harass people”. No dude, not it’s not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
> The right to free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything without consequences. If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.
Right, and how do you obtain that "proof of deliberateness"? Or measure that non-physical harm in a way that doesn't give power to people who just don't like what you're saying (possibly the truth)?
Most people in favour of free speech already know about libel and defamation, you're just trying to muddy the waters here.
You obtain it through a court, exactly had happened here. Jones as a deliberate lair, who has ruined the lives of dozens of people who had already had the most terrible thing happen to them -- the murder of a child.
> exactly had happened here
It actually wasn't. The case was decided on a default in discovery and no facts were ever tried. Then the separate penalty trial was started immediately afterwards. The judgement is being appealed, but in Texas, you can collect anyways. If the appeal is successful, then the claimants may have to pay any difference back, or reduce the total amount they can expect to receive from escrow.
I really don't think people appreciate the precedents involved here. Including that one of the claimants is was an active FBI agent at the time and was suing over claims involving his job performance which has never been done before.
> Jones as a deliberate lair
Well, it could be that he actually believes what he says, if so, what exactly should happen then? This was never heard by a jury or judged on those merits.
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Wow go read the stories of the parents who dealt with this and think about who you are defending
Whether their stories about what they dealt with are true or not, they have incredible incentive to make sure they present such dealings as worth a billion dollars. You can't put a price on human life, but if you could surely those children are worth a billion and more, so they just took the money from Jones (the nearest lying person they hated) instead of the broke murderer.
Bernhard Gaetz famously said (accurately) the victims family never got a dime from him after the lawsuit. It's quite likely similar will be said from Jones, although they can take the scraps of Infowars which is worth very little without their star loon. They are grasping at straws while being yanked around by attorneys, while the brutal truth is the real enemy that murdered their children is in a grave and they will never be able to truly dish out justice to him while they flail around looking for it elsewhere.
I think Jones hurt them more than the murderer.
People do have their children murdered, and it's terrible, but they often go on with their lives.
Because of Jones, these parents were harrassed for years, forced to move home and go into hiding. Yes, it wasn't Jones doing the harrassing directly, but he was the one accussing them of being actors for years.
I don't at all agree with what Jones said. I find it disgusting. But you should take a look at some of the videos of the parents. There is one, where the dad is laughing and smiling and suddenly goes up to the microphone and switches to sad dad mode.
Now being a thinking, somewhat empathetic human being I understand people handle grief differently. I don't think he was an actor. But I understand why he might be viewed that way. It seems insane to me that somehow it was lawfared that Jone's real interpretation that it looked like acting to him (it looked like acting to me, but I know it wasn't and those kids really were killed) and somehow it is his fault that he is liable for harrassment others do under the flag of agreeing with Jones' take. That has an incredibly chilling effect on speech.
Jones did lose the civil case but it was a weird one, in the right venue, at the right time, in the worst possible light, and with pretty bad representation both of himself and spotty counsel. It's not something to look at to rest your hat on for how these things will continue to be interpreted in the future.
I do not find it credible to jump from one person showing a happy emotion at a stressful time, which happens in the real world all the time, to “this whole thing was the biggest setup of all time, a dozen children are fake, there are no bodies buried in the ground, but no one will admit it out of the hundreds who must have been involved”, and then to continue that, with no concrete evidence, for years and years (Jones will say he mentioned this once or twice. That is a clear lie with obvious evidence against it, we have the tapes proving it).
Again, if he’d said this once, or even a couple of times, we wouldn’t be here now. If jones could have provided any reasonable evidence to back up his claims, we wouldn’t be here now.
No I don't find it credible. I do find it credible that Jones would latch on to it out of reasons devoid of personal malice, and that even if he thought it wasn't true he would still be incapable of anything other than obsessing the anti-viewpoint presented by the government, if you know anything about the guy.
It is important people like Jones exist, even if what they spout almost all the time is vicious lies that nutjobs cite to harass people. Someone needs to bear the banner of the conspiracy angle, and drum up whatever evidence they can find.
There’s a long history of law and court cases that have set the rules for making this determination. Do you think this is the first such case in history, that no one has thought of this before? These sorts of laws go back thousands of years in general and hundreds of years specifically in the US. You are not some super genius who just realized it’s hard to figure out if people are intentionally lying. That part of the case is long over with here.
I feel like if this is your position, you should make it clear you’re not talking about the first amendment here, which is subject to interpretation by US courts. I’m not sure how you would do this succinctly though. Maybe “Unamerican Free Speech”?
> Right, and how do you obtain that "proof of deliberateness"? Or measure that non-physical harm in a way that doesn't give power to people who just don't like what you're saying (possibly the truth)?
If only there were a system of formal rules and a process where evidence is presented by highly trained and experienced experts, presided over by an impartial arbiter, with deliberation, established precedent, a system of appeals, and if only that system had been used here.
You're stretching it. In the US the government can't arrest for causing offense to someone specifically because of the 1st amendment...You can get sued for libel (very high bar and it's notoriously difficult in the US) but you're not going to be rounded up and put into a corrections facility for being offensive.
This is the perfect illustration of the first amendment in the US vs the UK. In the UK a violent Maoist (red guard-like) police mob went after teenager for causing offense: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12399911/Revealed-M...
> for being offensive.
The Sandy Hook parents received death threats for years because of him. That’s not “being offensive”, it’s tormenting people and putting their lives in peril.
https://archive.ph/20221013141353/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
How can you prove that the person sending a death threat was specifically motivated by a specific, broad act of speech? This is an impossible, unenforceable premise. It has no basis in law either in theory or practice.
Example lines of inquiry: How does one identify the “first mover”? How does one identify the integrity of the “calls”? What if the calls are a single caller represented separately? What if the calls are falsely represented by motive?
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FFS, nobody is stopping him from speaking! He's being held accountable for his own words. You have it completely backwards: this is Free Speech in action.
Dude you are uninformed! Jones profited off the sandy hook families, elevated people like halzig, and accused the parents of being crisis actors which directly led to harassment. Jones is the one with the platform spreading these lies and that is why he got sued.
Also he certainly may have won the defamation cases against him. Too bad he totally made a joke of the process which led to the default judgement. Maybe he thought providing the discovery info was worse?
Listen to his depositions yourself if you don't believe me. Jones is a sociopath.
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If someone started a rumour that “the_optimist on HN sleeps with seventeen goats every Thursday” and you started getting calls of people saying “you’re a pervert for sleeping with seventeen goats”, it would be quite obvious what motivated the call, would it not?
Before calling something impossible, consider the bare minimum effort to skim the linked article, or read any article on this subject. It is in fact quite trivial and provable.
Your hypothetical is neither trivial nor provable.
How does one identify the “first mover”? How does one identify the integrity of the “calls”? What if the calls are a single caller represented separately? What if the calls are falsely represented by motive?
What if I, in fact, have today received 400 calls on the matter you have stated? Am I eligible to sue you?
> are the ones who least understand it.
It's horrifying to me that when people don't like a defendant they're willing to justify almost any reduction of that person's rights in an effort to see them "punished."
> you can and should be punished.
This is a civil case. Why should he be "punished?" Shouldn't he just have to pay a settlement? Why is a billion dollars a reasonable penalty for his actions? Why must he necessarily sell his platform when the platform will make the most money staying in Jones' control? Why is it important to the victims in this case to ensure that a specific owner controls these assets?
> I’m reminded of the Twitter engineer who said
Okay, does that have any bearing on this particular case, or it's details?
The media is routinely used for psyops to bully people into certain policies for profit using known lies with no accountability, either all media companies should be held accountable for this or none should.
I am totally fine with holding all media accountable.
If the Judaical system enforces content regulation selectively, that is objectively worse than pure free speech since it encourages propaganda AND suppresses dissent of that propaganda. Also no one cares what you're ok with, go report some facebook posts if you want to feel like an idea authority.
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Most people who have this opinion going in tend to change it when the learn the particulars of the case. Jones absolutely knew he was lying, he did it deliberately, the lies caused incredible real world harm, he knew they were causing harm and he kept doing it because that’s his business model and that’s how he gets rich.
And the death threats those people have been living with for decades because of Jones? That's just acceptable and normal to you?
The amount of whataboutism and history rewriting going on in these comments is impressive
>If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.
The first amendment absolutely gives you the right to lie, and the right to profit from that lying if you're not explicitly committing fraud or defaming anyone. You may disagree with it, but that's what the law is.
Well I hate to break it to you but profiting by lying is the definition of fraud. In general if someone is impacted by your actions you are open to legal ramifications.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fraud
That's incredibly pedantic. What Alex Jones engaged in was nothing remotely like "fraud". The poster you're replying to is correct, the first amendment does protect "liars".
Have you really never heard of perjury or fraud before?
You don't have a right to lie.
Both of these concepts are specifically defined in law, whereas “lie” is not. You are made of marshmallows! Sue me.
> You are made of marshmallows!
This is defamation, which is also against the law. However, the damages here are incredibly minor, and thus not worth punishing. Most people probably don't believe you.
However, if I made a lie about you that caused you to lose your employment and become unhireable, is that also protected speech?
You don't have a right to harm others with lies. You don't have a right to lie.
There is no evidence that being made of marshmallows is damaging to one’s reputation, and thus this would not necessarily be classified as defamatory. The law requires proven damage. The details are tricky.
> The law requires proven damage
I'm aware. That's why I mentioned it. There's no remediation if there's no damages.
If I'm made of marshmallows I'm not human and not eligible for health insurance. If my insurer believes your claim which is a reckless disregard for the truth and I'm denied coverage, you're liable. If my wife leaves me because she didn't want to marry a marshmallow and causes massive legal damages and emotional harms you're liable for defamation.
It's like you're arguing you have the right to punch. Like, sure, swing your arms wherever. But your right to swing your arms ends at the tip of my nose.
You don't have a right to lie about me.
You seem to have the concepts logically inverted. Mistruth is necessary for defamation but not sufficient. You are quite certainly allowed to lie, generally. You are even allowed to lie about me, and there is no exemption to the recognition of God-granted freedoms for it in the US.
However, there are very specific exceptions. You are not allowed to lie under oath. You are not allowed to defraud. You are not allowed to defame. Those states are each defined separate and apart from “lying,” which is freely permissible.
You really should read up on these things before you make statements like this.
Defamation is basically lying about someone to damage their reputation. So I don't think that the first amendment gives you the right to lie?
Also, doctors and lawyers are subjected to discipline by their respective guild. So even if it's your right to say bullshit, you might lose your job and license.
Arguably, there's no to little consequence of being a nobody and lying about something like autism and vaccine. It's probably isn't worth the effort to sue folks. That said, misinformation is clearly harmful and we shouldn't let people lie unchecked.
Yeah, that self-policing guild discipline by doctors and lawyers has really worked out well, hasn't it?
> This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights.
> There would be nothing stopping Jones from starting again with new equipment and a new domain name.
so... it doesn't constrain his speech at all. I don't see how that is "dangerously close" to taking away his 1A rights
The offer would have seen the families temporarily forgo immediate cash in return for future ad revenue.
There’s a saying for this: if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
Bankruptcy is not a punishment, neither is having to pay damages.
His business wasn't about the exercise of first amendment rights, it was about selling supplements and whatnot.
It's a pretty large punishment.
He recklessly caused a lot of pain to families that already suffered a horrific tragedy, and profited from the attention by being (almost literally) a snake-oil salesman. He deserves a large punishment.
Yeah I'm not denying that, he clearly caused harm. But he's definitely being punished for it.
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Not all consequences are punishments.
You cause a lot of damage, you get a lot of punishment.
It's not a punishment, it's a debt. If you steal a sandwich and eat it you'll be fined, that's a punishment and a transaction with the state, and you'll also pay the owner damages, which is not a transaction with the state.
I know this is a distinction relevant elsewhere in this thread, but I don’t think it affects the point I made.
Only in the most legalistic sense.
How so? Is the difference between having to repay Lisa when you've caused her harm and having to pay the state because you did something criminal that hard for you to understand that you actually consider it a matter of "legalistic" quibbling?
Would you accept a jurisdiction where, instead of going to prison, you could just pay someone a bunch of money after you've raped or performed some other obviously criminal act against them?
When the assessed damages are way out of proportion, that's in the realm of "making an example", i.e. punishment.
Who are you quoting?
None of what I've written in this thread is about the correctness in how damages are measured, I don't see the relevance of your comment. To me it seems like you're confusing suffering with punishment. Debt is commonly painful, but it's not a punishment.
The purpose of paying damages is to substitute someone else for harm you've caused. This is altogether another purpose than punishments. Paying damages is a reparation, punishment is based in another set of principles.
Actually generally for emotional damage you don't. In the US you're perfectly free to insult someone and hurt their feelings without being liable to pay them damages.
That hugely depends on the circumstances.
No it really doesn't. There are no legal consequences for insulting someone, unless you actually defame them. Nearly all defamation cases are dismissed by the court immediately for not rising to the very high level of facts required for defamation.
Yes, defamation. Many such cases are dismissed; this one was not and resulted in large punitive damages being awarded.
Less relevant to this case, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress can also both be against the law in the United States.
The interesting precedent here is if you lie about the dead (who until this fiction, had no protection from defamation), you have defamed any living person who says the opposite and factual information about them.
But we all know the precedent set in this case was a lie. Otherwise anyone who said the kids were really killed would have standing, since Jones thought they were "crisis actors."
We all know this was really used as a back door way to pay the parents for dishonoring the dead. Basically "meh we can't extract justice from the murderer, best we can do is get a lot of money from someone with mutual hate."
Edit: s/precedent/historical precedent/ . I did not mean to imply as assumed below this precedent is legally binding.
Interesting analysis... one potential wrinkle: There is no precedent being set here. This is just the expected outcome within the framework set by past precedent... Nothing novel or new happened wrt the law or anything else. It's just a bog standard case of a trashy asshole riling up his idiotic followers for money, and taking it well beyond the long established line of acceptable.
Is this some kind of joke I'm not getting?
Prison and fines are punishments, having to pay damages is not. When you can't afford to pay your debts, bankruptcy is not a punishment, it's a process to clear out the debts so both debtor and creditors can move on.
Punishment regulates the relation between a person and the state and is a part of criminal law, paying damages is part of civil law.
The Sandy Hook families have literally been awarded punitive damages.
Their point is literally punishment. That is why punitive damages exist in civil law. It's what the word punitive means.
Something can be punishing without being a punishment.
The intent is explicitly and specifically to punish someone and be a punishment.
Compensatory damages are awarded in an attempt to compensate the plaintiff for the damage they received due to the actions of the defendant. Punitive damages are awarded to the plaintiff on top of the compensatory damages and their exact purpose is to punish the defendant for their actions.
They are two different types of damages and the exact purpose of punitive damages is to be a punishment. It's their raison d'etre. They were created to provide further levers to punish people.
This is correct. People should split intent and outcome. So for example: you going to prison is a punishment. Your wife leaving you because of it, is not part of the punishment, that is an outcome, but it is not an outcome that is intended. The same here. There are damaged to be payed to the victims of alex' Jones heinous lies that have provably made the lives of people that were already victims so much worse. The judges entitled them to restitution for the damages done and because Jones didn't turn up for court and had contempt for the court by ignoring direct orders they probably punished him by making the sum very high. However. Going bankrupt was not the aim of the punishment. It just asks a high sum. He might have been able to pay it, which would have been fine. However. Jones didnt stop being an unethical human (pretty objectively, as long as you don't believe his lies) and tried to slither out of his duty to pay.
> Jones didn't turn up for court and had contempt for the court by ignoring direct orders they probably punished him by making the sum very high.
Just fyi he did, the court kept claiming he had to produce documents / analytics he said he didn’t have. There’s no evidence the documents ever existed, but judge disagreed, so they issued a default judgement (ie no trial).
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055864452/alex-jones-found-l...
They then had a jury trial to determine damages were in the billions (lol)
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/07/nx-s1-4996347/alex-jones-liqu...
And lost in all this is what jones actually did… which in my judgement is not even liable and we wouldn’t even know because a trial was never held —
https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/here-exactly-what-al...
Which, sure I think is nuts. But I don’t see anything in there besides his opinion and trying to support his bat shit crazy opinion. So what, he thinks it was a fake event. As far as I can tell from this (and perhaps I’m missing something), he didn’t do anything to anyone. If we start penalizing calling people a liar, we’re going to end up in a much worse place where all we have are liars
>the court kept claiming he had to produce documents / analytics he said he didn’t have
Which his lawyer then mistakenly sent to the Plaintiff's lawyer, so, they did have them.
Just FYI, the plaintiffs lawyers (not necessarily the court) was requesting financial documents that FSS LLC are required by law to have. They had two years to comply and did not.
Also FYI 'a trial was never held' is a common talking point used by Alex Jones on his program. He and his lawyers are responsible for there not being a trial. Their conduct guaranteed that there was no trial. It's a farce for him to complain about something that he is responsible for.
I’d agree re bankruptcy but can you discern between your use of damages (which you say is not a punishment) and fines (which you say are a punishment?
One is payed to the state, the other to another person, as in one regulates the relation to the state, the other the relation to another person.
What's your view on statutory damages for copyright infringement? "Wilful infringement" has statutory damages up to $150k per work. This is similar. Like this it's a punishment imposed by the state, through the medium of inflated damages.
No, I do not consider damages in copyright infringement a punishment. Whether damages are measured correctly or not in some case or other is beside the point I was making.
I’m confused what you define a punishment as then.
what kind of punishment do you think he deserves?
Default judgments are a punishment.
Your right to sell things derives from the first amendment.
No, but "commercial speech" does, though the protection is weaker than it is for political speech.
Commerce is constitutionally regulated in another way, by article I of the US constitution having a commerce clause allowing regulation, which, for example, is the basis of drug prohibition.
> This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights.
They'll never be able to stop him from creating "The Alex Jones Off the Deep End Show" where he thrills listeners with zany tales of conspiracies that can only be held at bay with these brand new supplements. He just has to forfeit Infowars and its assets.
They can, however, take all his profits from the new show until he's square.
Probably not all profits but yeah, substantial garnishing.
> They'll never be able to stop him from creating "The Alex Jones Off the Deep End Show" where he thrills listeners with zany tales of conspiracies that can only be held at bay with these brand new supplements
So you're unable to think about this problem without putting your bias at the forefront?
> He just has to forfeit Infowars and its assets.
Actually, with this ruling, he does not. Roger Stone's group will get a legitimate change to purchase it to keep it under Jones' control. If you think that's a miscarriage of justice, as the OP does, can you explain why?
Why is forfeiture of his platform a necessity in your eyes?
> So you're unable to think about this problem without putting your bias at the forefront?
He is a conspiracy theorist, this is his thing. And he sells supplements on his show. Those are facts, right? I suppose my bias only shows with the characterization of "zany tales"? But IMO it's not even a stretch, this guy seems really quite off base.
> Why is forfeiture of his platform a necessity in your eyes?
I mean, it's not. But he has assets and liabilities, right? Right now his liabilities vastly outweigh his assets. So it's unjust to deny his creditors access to his assets. He can keep his house and a car, I guess. Or whatever is normal/typical assets to be preserved in bankruptcy. But his interest in Infowars is not an inalienable right.
He has free speech, freer speech than any generation before him. He could broadcast a new show from his personal cell phone and it would be dynamite production value compared to AM radio shows that have been used in decades past (and still used today). He can even resume saying things about Sandy Hook victims that he walked back during the trial. He just risks new liabilities if he does that.
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> What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
Exactly. The lawfare must stop.
They won a defamation lawsuit when what he did was way more than just defamation. He deliberately made the families' lives hell, and did that for profit.
>money for Jones which he will use with even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences
He was fined over a billion dollars, in what world is losing a billion dollars no consequences?
>He was fined over a billion dollars, in what world is losing a billion dollars no consequences?
Parent’s point is that the amount of the fine doesn’t matter if he is able to avoid paying it. It could have been a quadrillion. A fine only matters if you actually have to pay it.
On an average-person-level, some municipalities nearby me have decided to not basically not do anything about parking fines. As a result, there are vehicles that over ten thousand dollars of fine. But they are still allowed to renew their registration and drive their vehicle. So it’s just a made up demerit.
Reminds me of that Russian court that recently fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Funnily enough this was along similar lines to the Alex Jones case but in reverse.
Huh, I wonder why they stopped at 20.
They didn't - it was a more modest amount that they put daily compounding interest on. The number keeps growing larger and larger by the day.
Well, that makes sense, at least.
He was fined a billion dollars, but it will never be collected, he never lost a billion dollars. With this decision all his debts are pardoned and he gets to keep his megaphone, that is very "no consequences".
America was founded with a constitution that guarantee's citizens a megaphone as part of a list of inalienable rights (God given per words in the constitution). Bankrupting Jones won't remove his ability speak or muzzle him and it's more than likely only going to give him more of an audience. He'll still be able to voice his performance art about growing babies-in-cows-for-25-years and gay-frogs. He'll more than likely struggle to sell his seeds and end-of-times nonsense and he's probably been debanked. But megaphone wise he'll be louder than ever.
Chemicals in the water turning the frogs gay is an actual thing though. E.g.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3280221/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1501065112
https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/
However
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/frogs-rev...
but, > The findings in no way exonerate pollutants like the widely used herbicide atrazine, scientists caution.
I don't see anything in those articles about gay frogs.
Trans frogs, sure, but sex and sexual orientation are different.
The correct term is intersex, but whatever. But in addition
> EE2 exposure at all concentrations lowered male sexual arousal, indicated by decreased proportions of advertisement calls and increased proportions of the call type rasping, which characterizes a sexually unaroused state of a male.
So the males also became uninterested in sex with females. Given that I think you must be really nitpicking to find fault with what he said.
> you must be really nitpicking
I mean...this IS Hacker News. Extreme levels of pedantry is just par for the course, isn't it?
OK. Going on an alex jones rant here...
I was always under the impression that the performance art he did with the frogs was in reference to Chlorpyrifos. And I am in concert with Alex Jones here. I agree with him. This crap is not good, is banned throughout the world, and is a mammalian neurotoxin.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1203396109
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/08/chlorpyrifos-neurotoxic-pes...
But you and I both know he crosses the line (and enjoys doing so) from authentic to clown. He'll bedazzle a libertarian and country boy with quirky strange perspectives that have a kernel of truth and then drag them down into the dark ass netherworld he's living his life in. He spins people up and inflames their amygdala's and connects the dots to some dark metaphysical Ba'al. But then he still comes back around and sells you some seeds and some product to stock your nuclear fall out shelter. He's one part performance artist one part grifter. But he crossed a third rail when he tried pulling the parents of a school shooting into his bi-polarish world. Bottom line with a guy like Alex Jones is that he's always going to connect the natural failure-state of a system (FDA regulatory capture) to some fever dream Ba'al conspiracy vs acknowledging that humans and their systems are flawed and that the natural state of a government is one in which it is picking winners and losers (cronyism) and it's been that way in his country since Washington's soldiers and officers mutinied over pensions. https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collect.... That didn't need the illuminati becuase, like the FDA, it's the natural mode of humanity and a system to fail.
He wasn't fined. He had a judgement for damages against him. They are different things with a similar outcome (he's out a billion dollars) - accuracy is important.
Also - until he actually pays any of that billion dollars, there have been no consequences.
Additionally, it's important to highlight that he refused to properly comply with the legal process - so it was a default judgement. This is essentially unheard of due to how unwise it is.
We can consider his non-compliance an investment in his audience. By refusing to comply, he signals his supporters that the lawsuit is unfair persecution. And they believe him.
His lawyer already stated “Finally, a judge followed the law.”.
Now that it's public knowledge how low the bids were, a re-auction might attract many more bidders and raise a LOT more money for the creditors. It is certainly not an asset with any appeal to me, but a talented brand and e-commerce operator can likely generate a river of cash flow from the IP/audience for sale here.
This other company is clearly part of the same legal operation and should also be held liable.
What kind of news article doesn't explain the judge's reasoning?
This is kind of bullshit. The Sandy Hook families were a part of The Onion’s bid. They were clearly ok with it.
The court knows it can’t sell it back to Jones or a proxy of, but this decision also allows Jones to continue as if he hadn’t sold. And I think that’s what they’re aiming for
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… are you seriously second-guessing what makes other people happy?
What makes them happy and what is the best outcome for them in the long run can be different things. Did you read the article?
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Wait, so you can be fined 1.5 Billion for reporting on a conspiracy theory?
BTW, this is a lot more than pharmaceutical companies pay out for actually killing people.
I remember watching the trial and it was the most ridiculous thing every. The defendant (Alex) wasn't allowed to say he's innocent because the judge defaulted him. Yet the prosecution was allowed to bring in all kinds of evidence of his guilt (other than him being defaulted) and present that to the jury.
So in essence, you're guilty because the judge said so, and the prosecution gets to pile on about your guilt, but you can't testify to the jury counter your guilt. Yet somehow this a jury trial.
The other ridiculous thing was he was defaulted for namely not showing Youtube ad revenue for his shows, after youtube deleted his channel.
They also awarded an FBI agent, I guess for hurt feelings, not even related to the families.
1.5 Billion .... apparently not a political prosecution of a critic, designed to silence him by taking InfoWars off air.
You know when Alex offered $55 million to settle. The lawyers somehow decided to get less by pushing for the bankruptcy.
Jones repeatedly violated court orders, withheld subpoenaed documents, ignored depositions, and disrupted the trial every chance he got, and so received a default judgement. I don't know where you heard the line about YouTube ad revenue but that's got nothing to do with nothing. Everything that happened was his own fault. He was extended plenty of leeway and he blew every last bit of it. If he thought the amount of money was unreasonable, he should have showed up to the trial and said so without doing fifty things worth being held in contempt of court for.
I don't watch the trial and don't know anything about Alex Jones but didn't he show up? His own lawyer "accidentally" sent his private text messages to the plaintiff attorneys.
Of course the judge allowed that mistake to be used in trial.
So I think he did show up as least from that memory of the trial.
Showing up isn't what he got in trouble and received a default judgement for was was not complying with discovery. He was required to produce certain things like messages about certain topics and financial records. For some topics they returned no records and later when the full phone record was sent by mistake there were texts with the keywords from the discovery request. Some documents they simply refused to produce and have lied ever since about actually providing.
And about the phone there are avenues to block the use of evidence accidentally sent to the opposition but Jones's lawyers failed to raise those when the plaintiff's lawyer pointed out the phone copy was included in the documents sent to them. They had the chance to get it excluded but failed to so it was allowed, it wasn't the judge allowing something unusual it was Jones and his lawyers being a complete disaster in the case.
This is like getting accused of murder, and the judge finding you guilty because you didn't produce knife during discovery, the prosecution said you had. Just absurd.
Then skipping ahead to the sentencing, and the judge telling your lawyers that if you testify you're not guilty to the jury, he'll find you and your lawyers in contempt (jail-able offence).
While lining up a long list of crying victims to tell the jury how horrible you are.
That's far from what actually happened to Jones and also you're mixing metaphors of criminal and civil trials which are very very different in the US. There were years between the start of the trial and the default judgements and the behavior extended beyond just failing to produce requested files people legitimately don't have requested records all the time in litigation and they do not suffer the same outcome because they properly cooperate with the process and demonstrate they they do not have the documents instead of refusing to provide them.
Jones lied and continues to lie to this day about why he lost the case because it's a liar and a con man and the claim he's persecuted unfairly helps him sell his supplements to his audience.
>they properly cooperate with the process and demonstrate they they do not have >the documents instead of refusing to provide them.
You make the assumption that it's practically possible to prove a negative like that. For example, prove that unicorns don't exist ... maybe you just haven't looked long and hard enough.
> Jones lied and continues to lie to this day about why he lost the case because > it's a liar and a con man and the claim he's persecuted unfairly helps him > sell his supplements to his audience.
If all that Alex did was lie, I don't think anyone would care about him.
Clearly he's been on the political radar because his "conspiracy theories" too often turned out to be true..
I don't think you're being very charitable to his audience.
People enjoy listening to a counter negative to the mainstream narrative. And some people find great value in it, enough to support him by buying his supplements.
Alex speaks in hyperbolic ways, people can make whatever they want of that. If he calls P. Diddy a deep state demon, for example. Is that a lie? Demons don't exist. Sure. But can humans approach demon like behaviour. I think so.
> This is like getting accused of murder, and the judge finding you guilty because you didn't produce knife during discovery, the prosecution said you had. Just absurd.
To extend the analogy, it helps if you don't subsequently mail the knife you said you didn't have to the prosecution. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-jones-lawyers-acci...
> Then skipping ahead to the sentencing, and the judge telling your lawyers that if you testify you're not guilty to the jury, he'll find you and your lawyers in contempt (jail-able offence).
The same will happen to you in any criminal trial if you try to argue innocent post-conviction, during the sentencing phase. The time to argue innocence is during the trial itself.
> While lining up a long list of crying victims to tell the jury how horrible you are.
Again, standard practice in sentencing. Jones is entitled to his own character witnesses, if he can find some.
Here's the clip of the testimony at the key moment in the trial.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DMbGhAU77ns?feature=share
1. The phone records are from the last 2 years. So not during the time frame of the actual broadcasts about Sandy Hook happened ( which happened way earlier...)
2. He gave the phone records to his lawyer, which goes against claims of him not co-operating. His lawyers would determine which messages get sent over to the prosecution. For example, private communications with his legal team would be protected and would not need to be disclosed.
The defence sent over the entire phone backup, by mistake. Why is this a gotcha you think it is?
The prosecution also acted unethically by not informing the defence that they received protected communications, they weren't entitled to.
The prosecution let the trial happen for 2 weeks, and had not informed the judge that they actually had the information, that they used to get the judge to default him for not cooperating!
So how is this not actually grounds to throw the case out? Seems like misconduct.
Also, just because he mentioned Sandy Hook in a text message with his lawyers, or privately, doesn't mean the prosecution is automatically entitled to it.
> The prosecution also acted unethically by not informing the defence that they received protected communications, they weren't entitled to.
This is a flat-out lie.
https://www.nextpoint.com/ediscovery-blog/alex-jones-ediscov...
"For example, why didn’t Mr. Jones’ attorney take advantage of the 'snap-back' provision in the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure (Rule 193.3) and assert a privilege on the text messages within the 10-day prescribed period? We know from court filings that Plaintiff’s counsel (Mark Bankston) sent an email to Mr. Jones’ attorney (Federico Reynal) shortly before midnight on July 22, 2022 stating, 'My assumption is now that you did not intend to send us this? Let me know if I am correct.'"
"All Mr. Reynal had to do was 'identify the material or information produced and state the privilege asserted,' and Mr. Bankston would be required to 'promptly return the specified material or information' and would be prohibited from using it in court."
(Of note: Jones' attorney faced, but dodged sanctions over this. https://www.law.com/ctlawtribune/2023/01/20/alex-jones-texas...)
> Also, just because he mentioned Sandy Hook in a text message with his lawyers, or privately, doesn't mean the prosecution is automatically entitled to it.
Your own clip shows he lied under oath, stating he personally searched the phone for "Sandy Hook" and got zero results.
>>"My assumption is now that you did not intend to send us this? Let me know if >>I am correct.'"
Full motion: https://craigball.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/585543969-f...
"My assumption is now that you did not intend to send us this? Let me know if I am correct.” Id.
In response thereto, Reynal instructed Bankston that “there appears to have been a mistake in the file transfer. […] Disregard the link and I will work on resending. Id."
Still doesn't excuse the prosecution from not informing the judge in a prompt manner, that they had received the information, who's lack of they used to get a default judgment. They let an entire trial happen, and still did not inform the judge that they had received the information. Prosecution only did so after the defence filled this motion.
>>Your own clip shows he lied under oath, stating he personally searched the
>> phone for "Sandy Hook" and got zero results.
It's possible he lied, but there's other explanations.
1. We don't actually know what kind of phone he was using, and its search capabilities. You're assuming it was the latest apple or Samsung. But it could have been a very basic phone, with limited search capability.
2. The phone in question, was not the one he searched. As Alex was likely using multiple phones (quite possible) over a span of 2 years. Gave the old one to his lawyer to backup, and searched his new phone. People lose or brake or upgrades phones all the time. The backup may not always restore everything. So it's possible there's a difference between what was given to the lawyer and the phone he searched, without any malice.
3. It's possible he searched for Sandy Hook, and still had no results for technical reasons. Eg. Gave the phone to the defence to backup. The backup copied the phone's data to a computer, but also erased the phone.
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> As you can always be credibly accused of withholding something.
It's a little easier when your lawyers accidentally email the stuff you claim not to have to the plaintiffs.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-jones-lawyers-acci...
> Kafkaesque level farce, if the the Judge literally threatens you, and your lawyers with jail for daring to testify that you're not guilty during your own trial. Just think about it.
Not during; after. Similarly, you can't argue innocence at criminal sentencing proceedings.
It wasn't his trial though, he lost that by default judgement for failing to produce documents including financial records, he can't say he's not guilty because he isn't it would be a lie. We know a lot of those documents exist because Jones's lawyers accidentally sent a copy of his entire phone with records that should have been produced.
You're right is almost never done, not many cases are lost by default because most defendants and their lawyers aren't incompetent enough to get to that point. They had years to comply with discovery or demonstrate that they did not have access to the documents
> testify that you're not guilty during your own trial.
> Not allowed to make any sort of free speech / free press argument
He didn't get to raise those because they're not relevant at a damages hearing. If he'd complied with discovery instead of blocking it every chance he got he would have had the ability to raise those at trial. He was warned, he persisted and was punished for it. We know his lawyers had the documents because they accidentally turned them over later then failed to raise an objection that would have stopped them from being shared and used during the damages hearing.
> Reporting on it
He didn't just report on things he made statements as facts that it was staged, the kids are still alive/were never alive, doxxed Pozner's home address and was one of the first to do so in the days after the shooting. It's not just reporting that got Jones in trouble.
He did it and he did it to himself because the optics of fighting a "show trial" were better for him and his supplement business than the slim chance he could win if he fought the trial legitimately.
Ignoring the fact that he lost for not participating and for lying throughout the process...which is why we are were we are...its worth reviewing what he actually did.
A really entertaining podcast has actually done a series of episodes on the depositions in the case. If you are curious about the facts heres a list of those episodes:
https://knowledgefight.libsyn.com/size/25/?search=Formulaic+...
Be warned they are...long and detailed.
Well, no...backs away slowly
I haven't invested time watching all of the trials or following this as closely as some. It is strange that for all of the demonization of AJ, there aren't any compelling clips of him inciting his viewers or specifically mentioning the names of the family members.
Given how aggressive the partisan media is, you'd think they would have an established set of incriminating soundbites. When I did look into it deeper, I found that the case was decided by a default decision. Maybe there are reasons for these legal technicalities. I can appreciate that.
If the standard for the discussion is, "AJ was found guilty in court", then we should be clear that this doesn't mean he was found guilty in the substance of the case. Posters here should consider that before going off the deep end in demonizing AJ. HN is a site where discussions routinely involve citing sources. Yet, this part is assumed.
An unprecedented 1.5B in judgement, some of which goes to an FBI agent who worked on the case? Specifically on that point, there are compelling reasons why libel laws apply differently or not at all to government officials. Mainly this revolves around the threat of censoring regime critics. See also: lese-majesty.
Then we find that the plaintiffs' lawyers are explicitly a political group, "The Everytown Group For Gun Control", funded by Michael Bloomberg. Lawyers have claimed that they don't actually want to collect the damages for their client, rather that they have an ulterior motive in shutting down InfoWars. It isn't unreasonable to view this as a war of political factions.
The drama is on-going, but now it is viewed within the context of partisan lawfare against a former and now elected president.
None of these observations are inexplicable, but taken all-together, they fail the smell test for this poster.
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I watched the trial...did you?
Yeah, I did, and if you watched then you understand why it was defaulted since Alex Jones refused to participate, was found in contempt of court for not produce materials relevant to the case, a default judgment is the punishment for not participating in the legal process.
If he wanted to avoid it then he could abide by the law and be a part in his own judgment before it came to that.
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Remember that this was made possible by the intervention of Elon Musk.
I suspect he may end up buying the assets himself or someone in this circle.
This was not made possible by the intervention of Musk. If you're referring to the X Corp objection, this has absolutely nothing to do with that.
If you say so.
Is that asset of any use at this point? Even onion’s bid seems like a waste of money to me
Could Elon or a billionaire friend of his buy it, at a slightly higher price than the Onion offered, and then employ Alex Jones as a host?
InfoWars is worth nothing if not for Alex Jones right. So if you want to maximize value, you need to somehow keep him around to serve his audience.
Alex Jones owes a lot of money after the lawsuits against hi , if he was hired back at Infowars everything he made would be clawed over. Second, Alex Jobes is what his followers are interested in, if he still has any followers left. Anyone else who buys this asset will not be able to extract any value from it.
That idea is disgusting enough for him to try.
Given what was touted early, so loudly and by so many outlets, this is quite the narrative collapse, on an epic scale.
https://archive.is/hPq1e
In case that one still cuts off halfway through, another snapshot is at https://archive.is/8q8m8
It only archived part of the article. They want a logged-in user to avoid the paywall.
From Bluesky's Gift Link feed: [0]
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/business/media/the-onion-...
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/davidsacerdote.bsky.social/feed/aaa...
And just in case: apparently you can gift the articles even if you only have a free 48/72h subscription from a library, e.g. here: https://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/explore/elibrary/new-y...
“Judge refuses to allow sales of Infowars to The Onion, allows sale of Super Male Vitality Alpha-Z Colloidal Silver instead”
What a shame
This is all totally ridiculous. The assets are only worth a large amount when run as a disinformation outlet for Russian/extreme-right propaganda. Since no buyer is going to do that (see earlier, that gets you sued), the assets aren't worth much.
appointed in 2019, gee what a shocker
"Auction closed. Reserve not met. Try again."
Probably needs to be settled before Trump gets in?
United States Bankruptcy Judge Christopher M. López was appointed to the United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Texas, effective August 14, 2019. Judge López was sworn in by United States Circuit Judge Gregg Costa on Wednesday, August 14, 2019.
Hmm.
Can Trump pardon Jones? I thought pardons apply in criminal cases, not in civil cases like bankruptcy.
And as a follow on, if the president pardons someone for a crime can those harmed by it still sue the perpetrator for damages in a civil case?
Yes absolutely. Being found not guilty of a crime or being pardoned has no bearing on the evidence that exists which is presented in a separate civil case against you.
There’s no double jeopardy in a civil case - it’s a matter of if someone has a claim of damages.
It's not about pardoning, it's about what US bankruptcy trustee thinks is ok or not ok. Had this happen under Trump administration, I would assume that the trustee would not even allow such a deal to go ahead in the first place.
Trump, nor any other president, can eliminate the court's decision. A president's power would be limited to appointing judges in open positions, so potentially the responsible appeals court (up to the SCOTUS) could be influenced, but not controlled.
> influenced, but not controlled
A useless distinction in practice.
Why, so the outgoing government which lost the public vote can make the decision instead of the president elect ?
Disclaimer, I think Trump is a buffoon, but I also think this kind of thinking is backwards.
The elected government isn't making this decision anyways, this is in a court in front of a judge (one previously appointed by the president-elect, no less).
President elect shouldn’t control the courts but whatever.
You think the current president is influencing this court case?
People posting in this thread seem to think a Trump DOJ appointed trustee would act in a way that benefits Alex Jones.
Infowars has a large following and has been very supportive of Trump while being critical of Biden. The rationale for the motivation to act politically in both directions is certainly there.
I posted the same news 24 days ago, it got downvote-brigaded by malicious actors (at the same time they were upvote-brigading fake news that he lost InfoWars to The Onion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160692
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Defamation is a crime, the fact that his listeners harassed people because of that defamation makes it even worse.
This. A core part of defamation cases (especially from a damages point of view), is showing that the false statements caused harm, and that's generally by way of those statements influncing other's beliefs and actions (apart from harassment, this could also take the form of people being unwilling to work with/provide a service to the defamed party because of said statements).
(Note that it's important that the statements are false, and depending on some details, that either they were known to be false at the time, or that there was a reckless disregard to the truth, i.e. no effort was made to determine if they were true or false. If you state something that is true, or is false but you had good reason to believe is true, or that is merely an opinion, then it's not defamation even if someone harassess them or worse)
Ok thanks. This is what I was curious about. Got it.
Jones was never technically tried for anything. He refused to participate in the trial in a meaningful manner and had a default judgment against him instead.
Oh won't someone rid me of this troublesome priest
It's an immediate consequence.
He is being held responsible for personally defaming the Sandy Hook victims and families.
Thank you. Can you elaborate? Wouldn’t jones stating garbage like the shooting didn’t happen etc. be opinion? How were his statements defamation ? I missed where he defamed the families as I don’t listen to his shows.
IANAL, but the semantics of opinion vs fact are typically tangential to the court's determination of defamation. However, in many cases it's a matter of framing: "I think that ..." prefixing a statement can carry a lot of weight versus presenting it as a fact.
> Wouldn’t jones stating garbage like the shooting didn’t happen etc. be opinion?
Holy shit the last 8 years really have damaged our understanding of what “facts” are.
I don't think anything can ever happen in the US -- that's part of the First Amendment.
I do think there should be some other way that would lead to Alex Jones lose his audience. But I don't see anything happening yet.
Trump and Elon are not nearly as bad as Alex Jones (arguably), and lots of people don't like them, but they have an audience, lots of other people like them, support them and send money to them. If they are not held responsible for things they say, if Trump is aquitted of January 6th, I don't think people should expect much to happen.
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Both are politically fairly aligned with Jones. They sometimes half heartedly pretend it doesn’t, but it clearly significantly steers their actions.
I understood the parent as saying, "These people point at humor when asked whey they do certain provocative things when clearly it's much more about their personal politics than humor." Obvious, but lost in the sarcasm.
Context needed about why Musk blocked The Onion accounts?
Musk filed saying that he owns the X accounts and they aren't allowed to be sold according to the TOS. The X accounts were removed from the pending sale.
Very speech much free
All social media accounts are owned by the company and they can and do shutdown people every second of everyday. This is the least surprising.
Instagram just shutdown the account of the suspected ceo killer. That person didn't break any social media rules (didn't post copyright or tell someone off or spam marketplace) but instagram has the right.
I don't see anyone shocked.
No one is "shocked", the irony is that Musk postures as a rabid free speech advocate. It's not surprising, but it's hypocritical.
You can support people's right to say what they want, while also saying it's against the house rules to impersonate other people. Doesn't seem that unreasonable.
But it's not impersonation. Jones was ordered by a court to give up all the Infowars assets, including the brand and the associated social media handles. The sale is on hold for legal reasons but that's beside the point.
Moreover: the same argument used to defend Musk could be applied to the transfer of Twitter to him.
Both that and the InfoWars exchange were property transfers. The first a market transaction, the second by court order.
The namespace on Twitter is not property owned by the user. It's just namespace which is owned by Twitter. The use of it is at the sole discretion of Twitter. If Twitter doesn't think that it's appropriate that this group be able to represent themselves as "Alex Jones" or "Infowars" in their namespace then they don't have to. It doesn't matter if it's a voluntary sale or a court ordered transfer.
My default action would be to just take all the handles away. I wouldn't tolerate allowing courts to redefine my namespace into other people's property. Especially if I just paid $44 billion to purchase it!
I'd definitely not allow the new owners of Infowars to have Alex Jones personal Twitter handle(s) because they are not Alex Jones and doing so would be an admission that my namespace is not my private property, but that of someone else.
If a court were to order transfer of assets, your argument would find a limit.
That's what courts do.
Rarely enough that there's not a whole lot of coverage but I'm finding a few cases:
We have previously written an OnPoint about the law concerning ownership of social media accounts in light of the explosive growth in the use of such media for commercial advertising, product development and customer engagement. We presented on this and related topics at the Federal Bar Association and MyLawCLE webinar on September 6, 2023. We then wrote an OnPoint about the Second Circuit’s decision in JLM Couture, Inc. v. Hayley Paige Gutman, in which the Second Circuit instructed that ownership and control of social media accounts created during employment or in connection with one’s employment should be determined on a case-by-case basis without a pre-determined multifactor test.
"From Creation to Control: Navigating Social Media Ownership in the Second Circuit" <https://www.dechert.com/knowledge/onpoint/2024/9/social-medi...> (24 Sep 2024)
And:
[T]he court issued a memorandum opinion regarding the social media accounts on April 3, 2015. The court ruled that the reorganized debtor was entitled to direct control of the social media accounts — a Facebook page and a Twitter account — because the accounts were business accounts, not Alcede’s personal accounts. The court’s analysis was thorough and will be frequently cited in future social media cases.
"Social Media Accounts — Bankruptcy Court Ruling Sets Precedent" <https://www.abfjournal.com/articles/social-media-accounts-ba...> (9 Jul 2015)
This is a decidedly different case than, say, squatting or hijacking an identifier, or having a service provider arbitrarily reassign it. Both instances of which definitely do occur.
The first often enough that there are multiple how-to guides to recovery and avoidance:
"How to deal with (and prevent) a hacked Twitter account" <https://sproutsocial.com/insights/hacked-twitter-account/>
"5 Signs Your X (Twitter) Account Is Hacked – And What To Do" <https://www.forbes.com/sites/technology/article/x-twitter-ha...>
As well as coverage of specific events:
"The original owner of @N gets his $50k Twitter handle back" <https://www.dailydot.com/debug/twitter-handle-n-hijacking-fi...> (2021)
Twitter does and has commandeered or arbitrarily seized accounts:
"Twitter commandeers @X username from man who had it since 2007 " <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/twitter-took-x-h...> (26 July 2023)
I understand these arguments, which is why I'd just kill the accounts if I were Twitter or Facebook or even HN. It's not in Twitter's interest to allow these handles to be property. It's not in the interest of Twitter to allow some high profile account to be taken over in this manner. I'm not a fan on Alex Jones, but it wouldn't be good for Twitter to let these people take over his account. The users who do interact with the account expect to be interacting with Alex Jones, so handing the account over only degrades Twitter's service for those users.
It's perfectly reasonable for Twitter to care more about its own integrity and value, like how users would prefer things to be moderated, than whether people who Alex Jones owes money to can extract any value from his social media handles.
The difference between Elon Musk buying Twitter is that the previous owners sold it willingly and everyone accepts that Twitter is Musk's now, and he can do as he likes, even renaming the site. Nobody believes that the Onion or whoever is really Infowars just because some bankruptcy judge says so. When Musk acquired Twitter he continued operating the service. The new owners of Infowars have no intention of continuing it.
If anyone acquired a browser plugin or mobile app in a bankruptcy, got the app store credentials, then pushed updates changing the fundamental nature of the app to something its existing users don't want or expect, then they shouldn't be surprised if the app store just removes them. Same goes for social media handles.
Courts. Limit. Discretionary. Action.
If a court were to say "transfer the accounts", then a failure to do so would put the entity (a private individual, company, or other organisation or institution) in violation of the court's express order.
All of which is straightforwardly true, and in fact, uncontroversial.
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It's also nonsense, if that was true then every merger and acquisition would need fresh Twitter accounts. He's thumbing the scale here and back justifying it.
Wait what? Do you have any source for subreddits being sold to Democrats?
Of course he doesn't :)
It used to be on reddit but who knows now.
> Musk filed saying that he owns the X accounts
This would then also imply that any post containing illegal stuff is also his problem, wouldn't it?
Section 230 of Title 47 says no.
he's arguably waving that by claiming he, and not the poster, owns the content
The claim that he owns the account is not the same as claiming to own its contents. E.g. a landlord that owns an apartment typically does not have a claim on their tenant's property in the apartment, except under special circumstances. They may have some liability for their tenant's property in some cases, e.g. if they knowingly allow a bomb factory. But Section 230 is an explicit waiver for that liability in terms of speech.
Both parties are very interested in limiting the scope of that waiver in different ways, but that's the current law, and it tends to be broadly interpreted.
You know how we percieve absurd hacking scenes in movies?
That's how lawyers look at internet comments like this.
and I'm sure novelists are upset about our brevity
What does this mean and how does it relate to bad legal analysis?
very good question
I haven't seen the filing, but I presume you mean that X filed saying that they own the accounts, right?
I don't get why people conflate Elon Musk with the companies that he runs. I imagine he has controlling stakes in all of them, but for the most part he's probably not even a majority shareholder in most of the companies he's running.
You bring up a fair point. In my mind, Musk has taken so much control over X that it's more of a direct relationship than Tesla or SpaceX would be.
For this filing, IIRC It was reported that Musk instructed X to step in on Jone's request for help. That feels different to me than GM shutting down a project. It feels politically motivated by Musk's personal beliefs then a decision being made on the company's behalf for the benefit of the company.
But I do accept the criticism that it was X that filed, not Musk and I mis-spoke in my original comment
X does have a vested interested in ensuring its usernames and accounts do not legally become alienable property that can be auctioned in a bankruptcy auction. They don’t technically allow accounts or usernames to be sold at all (or follows, engagement and so forth), although I’m sure this happens quite often under the radar.
X can and has taken any username they want away from a user for any or no reason.
Filing a brief in a bankruptcy auction that “this property is ours, not the debtor’s, and may not be auctioned or also” is an obvious way for them to publicly assert their rights and ownership.
Even the other companies basically just do his bidding. Remember when he 'shared' engineers around between different companies?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/elon-musk-has-pulled-more-th...
These are not places you want to invest in if you think there are any sorts of checks and balances on him.
Because X is purely a platform to do whatever Elon wants. It’s so blatantly obvious that this decision came from Musk even if it was delivered indirectly.
Isn't that how all companies operate? For instance, GM reconsidering Cruise is clearly from Mary Barra, but the decision is overall a GM decision. Saying "Mary Barra is shutting down Cruise" would just seem childish.
Privately held companies, yes. Not all.
All of Musk's companies are run in accordance with his whims, so there isn't a meaningful distinction between them.
musk is the majority shareholder at X and posts obsessively
I don't think the full ownership structure is publicly known, but feel free to link me to it if I'm wrong. Capital other than his did come in as part of the acquisition; there's almost 100 shareholders.
https://www.rcfp.org/x-investors-unsealed/
I think you're missing context? Infowars is rabidly pro-MAGA. Trump appeared on Alex Jones numerous times. The Onion is an entertainment company with more attachment to reality than Infowars. I would like to think a judge wouldn't allow friends of Alex Jones to take the company back.
> The Onion is an entertainment company with more attachment to reality than Infowars
Yep, that's exactly why it could have been the most entertaining outcome. What's funner than replacing "BS made for serious people" with "serious parodies"?
I don't understand. Infowars would be owned by the same people if Musk or Trump bought it. It would be funny if the Onion owned it. MAGA cult doesn't really do humor, just cruelty.
Why would fellow far-right grifters not help Jones?
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The deal wasn't shaky. It was an auction where there were only two potential buyers who actually rocked up. It wasn't secret, it was public. It was issued by a court, including a process where bidders had to submit offers before a deadline. [0]
ThreeSixty Asset Advisors ran the process. As they often do. Tranzon Asset Advisors assisted, as they often do. There were confidentiality agreements and sealed bids... But that's the normal process for selling off assets through a court.
A sealed bid is designed to avoid negotiation, and other processes more easily manipulated by bias, unconscious or otherwise. The bids are unseen between the buyers, and opened at the same time.
There were a "large number" of interested parties before the deadline. However, most pulled out and did not submit a bid before the deadline. Leaving only two.
Some potential bidders, like The Barbed Wire, stated that they pulled out because they simply couldn't afford the expected sale price.
All of this was the exact same procedure for other forfeiture assets.
The Judge did not find any wrong doing by the buyers, but rather lamented that the final sale price was too low. That's it. Not a procedural stuff up. That was followed correctly.
> "I don't like second-guessing trustees," the judge said, but that is exactly what he did.
> "It's clear that [U.S. bankruptcy trustee Christopher Murray] left a lot of money on the table," Lopez said, adding that he thought the process was "doomed" the moment Murray decided to cancel a live auction and call for sealed "best and final" offers instead.
He simply wanted the auction to take longer.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2024/11/13/alex-jone...
Yeah it is so dumb seeing the shady shit when it's so not needed -- reminds me of that wild Alec baldwin prosecutor
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> I suspect the billion dollar settlement will be overturned on appeal as being excessive
Not a lawyer, but that didn't seem to have happened?
Quote from this article: https://www.reuters.com/legal/appeals-court-upholds-nearly-1...
"A three-judge panel of the Connecticut Appellate Court found that a jury's October 2022 decision to award $965 million in damages plus attorneys fees and costs to families of the shooting's victims was not unreasonable given the mental anguish they suffered due to the lies by Jones about Sandy Hook."
They found fault with a smaller portion of the whole award, and even there not because it was found to be excessive: "the judges found fault only with a portion awarding $150 million in damages under a state unfair trade practices law, finding that should be thrown out because it did not properly apply to the facts of the case."
Just found out he recently lost appeal. He has Connecticut Supreme Court, federal district court and SCOTUS to appeal to now.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/connecticut-court-uphold...
Ok, then I would be very surprised (positively) if it weren't overturned by SCOTUS (if it goes that far).
The damages seem excessive to me. If he were the shooter, it would be justified, but he was not. I'm surprised the appellate court upheld it. Don't get me wrong, what Jones did was pretty horrible, especially after having just lost their kids right before Christmas. The presents were still under the tree. I couldn't imagine, but he wasn't the shooter.
If it stands, it would also set a pretty bad precedent. Trump could sue MSNBC for $1B for their RussiaGate reporting. Gaetz could sue ABC for $1B their View reporting, etc. They would be effectively shut down.
Or maybe it would be good. It would force news organizations to not be so sloppy.
>Default judgements usually occur when the defendant doesn't show up. Was this the case?
Almost. He was overtly attempting to stall the proceedings by endlessly failing to co-operate in discovery.
> I suspect the billion dollar settlement will be overturned on appeal as being excessive.
Why?
You have to prove damages.
You don't, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages
> Because they are usually paid in excess of the plaintiff's provable injuries, punitive damages are awarded only in special cases, usually under tort law, if the defendant's conduct was egregiously insidious.
Only 1/3 were punative and those were for attorney's fees, but yes, you still have to prove injuries in the first place.
Lopez ruled that more than $1.1 billion of those verdicts, awarded for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, cannot be wiped away in bankruptcy. But he ruled that other parts of the verdicts, including $324 million in attorneys' fees that were awarded as punitive damages in the Connecticut case, could possibly be discharged.
The $1B is a ridiculous number that will never get repaid and it's just to make a big emotional virtuous show. Judges aren't supposed to be emotional, judges aren't supposed to let their personal feelings affect their virdict. If it was say $15, $20, $35 million, the families might get something. It makes a mockery out of the justice system and just goes to show how unserious law is in the US today. Why not $5 trillion? Why not $50 trillion, would that be too obvious where $1 billion somehow is not? Reminds me of the trial in Idiocracy.
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Jones had a default judgement against him because he repeatedly failed to comply with court orders and discovery. It probably didn't help that he openly declared on his show that his idiotic behavior was a clever plan to fool the courts... apparently a couple million fools can't keep a secret.
Because the auction was a scam, I guess.
Refuses to allow? This is like saying I dislike to like instead of saying I don't like. I would assume there is a different way of writing that.
"Refuse" is an action verb, "Dislike" is a stative verb. The infinitive phrase ("to allow") serves as a complement to the verb "refuse," forming a grammatically correct structure. refusare = deny.
I wasn't saying it was grammatically incorrect, just that it was a very bloated and roundabout expression instead of saying something simpler like "the court refuses the merger".
'Deny' is the trivial choice here I think.
“Disallow” is one option, though maybe uncommon.
The first auction was illegal and this article should be seen as the mea culpa. The families bid the theoretical future earnings of jones instead of actual money. The trustee secretly accepted, but had to walk it back when it was exposed.
It's like bidding on a foreclosed house with $0 but beating everybody because you say you're going to rent it and pay back the bank with that money.
The first auction was NOT illegal.
The trustee was explicitly granted wide latitude in how to handle the auction, including canceling it outright. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmDNz7irGgw&t=880