“It's easy to revel in Alex Jones being punished,” said Rebecca Adelman, a communications professor at the University of Maryland. “But there's a certain shortsightedness in that celebration.”
ordering Alex Jones to pay $965 million to parents of Sandy Hook shooting victims he maligned was heartening for people disgusted by the muck of disinformation.
What's different today? The internet allows such stories to spread rapidly and widely — and helps adherents find communities of the likeminded. That in turn can push such untrue theories into mainstream politics. Now the will to spread false narratives skillfully online has spread to governments, and the technology to doctor photos and videos enables purveyors to make disinformation more believable.
To some, disinformation is the price America pays for the right to free speech. And in a society that popularized the term “alternative facts,” one person's effort to curb disinformation is another person's attempt to squash the truth. “It seems to me that the people who peddle this information for profit may look upon this as the cost of doing business,” Adelman said. “If there's an audience for it, someone is going to meet the demand if there's money to be made.”
The case is reminiscent of Seth Rich, a young Democratic Party aide killed in a Washington robbery in 2016, she said. Rich's name was dragged — posthumously — into political conspiracy theories, and his parents later sued and The message, in other words: Be wary of dragging private citizens into outlandish theories.
“What this says is we can't just make up truths to fit our own ideological predilections," John Jackson said. “There is a hard and fast ground to facts that we can't stray too far from as storytellers.”
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