NEW YORK (Reuters) -Like a headline lifted from the Onion, the parody news website is buying conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars in a bankruptcy auction.
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The Onion said in a statement on Thursday it aims to replace Infowars’ “relentless barrage of disinformation” with the Onion’s “noticeably less hateful disinformation.”
“The Onion is proud to acquire Infowars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” the Onion CEO Ben Collins said in a statement.
Financial terms were not disclosed, and are subject to future approval by a U.S. bankruptcy judge in Houston. Infowars’ website was shut down on Thursday and the Onion said it aimed to relaunch the platform in January.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez, who is overseeing Infowars’ bankruptcy, said he had some concerns about the transparency of the auction at a court hearing late Thursday.
“I personally don’t care who wins the auction,” Lopez said. “I just care about the process.”
The purchase marks a sharp turn for Infowars, one of the internet’s most notorious purveyors of right-wing conspiracy content and misleadingly marketed dietary supplements.
Founded in 1999, it became a prime example of how online media platforms could exploit tech companies’ hands-off approach to moderating content and disseminate evidence-free claims to vast audiences.
These included false claims that the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington and the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut were staged.
Several families of Sandy Hook shooting victims supported the bid by the Onion, led by a CEO who spent years covering online disinformation and extremism as an NBC News reporter.
The Onion will acquire Infowars’ intellectual property, including its website, customer lists and inventory, certain social media accounts and production equipment, the families said.
Jones filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022 after courts ordered him to pay $1.5 billion for defaming the families of 20 students and six staff members killed in the Sandy Hook shooting.
Unable to pay those legal judgments, Jones was forced to auction his assets, including Infowars, in bankruptcy.
Families of eight victims of the Connecticut school shooting backed the Onion’s bid, saying it would put “an end to the misinformation machine” that Jones operated.
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Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest U.S. gun-violence-prevention organization, said it will serve as the exclusive advertiser on the new Infowars.
FAMILIES BACKED ONION BID
A court-supervised auction concluded on Wednesday. The Connecticut families said they agreed to forgo some payment from the defamation judgments to boost the Onion’s bid and prevent other right-wing content creators from continuing to broadcast conspiracy theories on Infowars.
“The world needs to see that having a platform does not mean you are above accountability,” said Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the Sandy Hook shooting. “The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for.”
The second-highest bid was submitted by First United American Companies, which is associated with Jones, according to court documents.
“They’re shutting us down,” Jones said on social media site X. “I’m going to be here until they come in here and turn the lights off.”
First United American Companies, which bid $3.5 million in cash for Infowars, objected to the way the auction was handled, saying it wasn’t given an opportunity to beat the Onion’s winning bid.
Its attorney, Walter Cicack, said at Thursday’s hearing in Houston that it did not even know how much the Onion was paying for Infowars’ assets.
Lopez said he would schedule a further court hearing, likely next week, to consider approval of the sale.
Jones said he would continue broadcasting on other platforms and resist what he said were politically motivated efforts to silence him, although his options beyond X are limited.
Most mainstream social-media companies and podcast distributors, including Apple, Alphabet’s YouTube, and Meta Platforms’ Facebook, banned Jones and Infowars about five years ago, saying they had violated the services’ rules.
X was among them at the time, but owner Elon Musk reinstated Jones last year after acquiring the company.
Jones claimed for years that the massacre at Sandy Hook was a hoax staged with actors as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns. He has since acknowledged the shooting occurred, but the families, who said Jones cashed in for years off his lies, sued him for defamation.
Courts in Connecticut and Texas have ruled that Jones intentionally defamed the families. Lopez previously ruled that those judgments could not be legally discharged in bankruptcy, meaning that Jones remains on the hook for most of the judgments even after Infowars was sold.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth and Katie PaulEditing by Nick Zieminski, Rod Nickel and Alexia Garamfalvi and David Gregorio)
-TheStar