Speech

Defamation lawsuits are emerging as a popular strategy against conspiracy influencers like Alex Jones. But legal blogger Ken White has nicely broken down a much trickier case: whether a professor can sue a TikTok personality named Ashely Guillard who accused her of murder based on tarot readings.

In this op-ed, Yoel Roth examines why he left Twitter last week (because all decisions now lie with one person, Elon Musk) and the hellish rules about content moderation Musk will have to navigate, whether made by regulators or the planned moderation council.

That’s what happened last week, as Vice’s David Gilbert highlights the muted reaction to last week’s four separate drops from the mystery conspiracist. Even within the world of Qanon, the response has been muted at best.

Alex Jones has had lots of profiles over the years, but a new feature by Verge alumnus Joseph Flatley at Failed State Update focuses on his cult of personality and the allegedly hostile work environment at his site Infowars. Beneath those allegations, there’s a larger story about Jones’s political and social opportunism — and how it’s slowly backed him into a corner.

First it was $45 million in Texas. Then $964 million in Connecticut. Now there’s another Connecticut penalty, thanks to a judge who imposed additional punitive damages. The judge cited Jones’s “utter lack of repentance” for subjecting families to years of harassment by lying about their children’s deaths. A separate order bans Jones from moving assets out of the country, preempting an attempt to keep his money out of the courts’ hands.

The BBC reports on a new wave of amateur documentarians harassing victims of the Manchester Arena bombing, similar to the Sandy Hook truthers spurred on by Infowars.

A new paper from researchers at the Brookings institute finds that YouTube’s algorithm makes all groups (liberal, moderate and conservative) slightly more conservative, rather than the universal push to extremes that many had assumed.