Alex Jones told to pay $965M damages to Sandy Hook victims' families

This is the problem with BBC Breaking News: headlines can change. "Alex Jones to pay $965M to Sandy Hook victims" was the actual headline when I submitted, but it's now been amended to "Alex Jones told to pay $965m damages to Sandy Hook victims' families". I literally copy and pasted the original, unedited, into the "title" field on the submission page, but there's no way for me to update it to reflect the BBC's amended headline.

In an ideal world the title field would auto-populate from the page title, which would (at least mostly) work fine on BBC News because they're pretty disciplined about keeping page titles and rendered titles on the page in sync. But we don't live in an ideal world: not all sites do that, and there's no hard requirement for them to do so. Plenty will, for example, SEO the heck out of the page title such that it doesn't match the title rendered in the page. You wouldn't want to use the page title as the HN title in these cases.

So we're left with the current situation where an article's title can be updated, but the title on HN isn't. Can't really blame either HN or article submitters for that.

Can somebody explain the statement from the lawyer, as reported by Axios:

> «We disagree with the basis of the default, we disagree with the court’s evidentiary rulings. In more than 200 trials in the course of my career I have never seen a trial like this», Pattis added. «Today is a very, very dark day for freedom of speech»

given that another bullet states

> claimed the shooting was a "false flag" operation planned by the government using "crisis actors" to undermine gun rights

which gives very little space for interpretation.

You’ve got a fair point although I will play devils advocate at you can find them occasionally in deep corners of the internet like /r/libertarianUncensored, and even there they aren’t the majority

>What if you performed simple public records requests and realized that this whole event stinks to high heaven and that it was immediately politicized by politicians and billionaire media elites to suppress the rights of American citizens?

Are you claiming to have done so? If that's the case, what were the results of your "public records requests"?

What rights have been suppressed? Please do tell.

The reason why libel and slander laws worked was in part due to broadcasters having contributory liability that would hold them liable for broadcasting someone else's libel or printing someone else's slander. This long-standing principle - that the law does not chase pointers - is something the Internet was exempted from. CDA 230 created a new category of entity that is neither speaker nor publisher and thus exempted from defamation liability[0].

Also, the law itself is actually quite weak for very obvious 1st Amendment reasons. It has built-in exceptions designed to keep it from becoming a censorship tool. However, the context in which that law exists has made the exceptions wide enough to drive trucks through.

You see, CDA 230 alone would not have dynamited the foundations of libel or slander law. Back then, the entities shielded by these safe harbors were supposed to just be web hosting providers. But technology moves on, and now we have Facebook and Twitter, which act almost identically to broadcasters except without the liability. And since they've pushed everyone to make everything public, that makes everyone a public figure[1].

If you are a public figure, it is harder to be defamed. This should be obvious, if I say Donald Trump has a narcissism problem or just mis-state the size of his wealth I should not have to defend a multi-million dollar lawsuit from him[2]. However, if I, say, get defamed by someone and respond to them on Twitter, that makes me a public figure now - which means the bar is also raised for me as a plaintiff. This is how Elon Musk got away with calling one of the Thai cave rescue divers a pedophile, for example.

[0] DMCA 512 does the same with contributory copyright liability, though with the extra step of having to give anyone with a registered copyright total censorship powers over your platform in order to get the liability exception.

[1] Technically this is a "limited-purpose public figure", which basically means "you aren't a public figure, but you stuck your nose in the debate, so for this particular time we're going to act as if you were one".

[2] Not like it stopped him - the US court system has very few ways to stop a baseless suit before it is filed.