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Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

nytimes.com

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Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#441

Post by rtkwe »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #408
rtkwe wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#442

Post by m-ee »

hbn wrote: post #241
acdha wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#443

Post by bcrosby95 »

roenxi wrote: post #227
acdha wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 wate…

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#444

Post by motorest »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #343
munk-a wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exorbita…

[flagged]

> 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?

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#445

Post by busterarm »

skulk wrote: post #436
busterarm wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#447

Post by Canada »

alt187 wrote: post #73
ipaddr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#448

Post by pessimizer »

hbn wrote: post #188

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 abo…

> 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.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#449

Post by probably_wrong »

impossiblefork wrote: post #322
probably_wrong wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 def…

> 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...

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