Irish Examiner view: Online vitriol

Sandy Hook defamation case

 A six-person jury reached a verdict, saying that Alex Jones should pay $965 million to 15 plaintiffs who suffered from his lies about the Sandy Hook school massacre.

One of the grim side effects of gun culture in America is that some of the mass shootings in that country, though horrifying at the time, can fade from the memory because they occur with such regularity.

The killings in Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 are still remembered, however. The death toll — 27, 20 of those children — isn’t the only reason many readers will recall the event. It lingered in the public imagination for years because right-wing podcaster and radio host Alex Jones spent years promoting a baseless theory that the massacre never occurred and the grieving parents were really actors.

Jones’s contention that the killings were staged was supported by many of his listeners, with horrifying results. Recently, the father of a child killed at Sandy Hook revealed that his child’s grave had been desecrated, while other parents
described online harassment and death threats from Jones’s supporters.

Those revelations were made at a defamation case taken against Jones which ended this week. He was ordered to pay 5m in damages to those families (and an FBI agent).

The bare facts of the case cannot describe the cruelty of the hoax promoted by Jones, nor can they do justice to the misery and suffering heaped on people already grieving the unimaginable loss of a murdered child.

While sympathising with those people, readers might consider how Jones was facilitated for years by social media platforms in spreading his poison. And how those platforms’ interest in maintaining their profits superseded any consideration of decency or respect for the parents of 20 murdered children.