Infowars Auctioned Off to The Onion, Website Shut Down After 25 Years

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Nov. 14, 2024

Infowars has been shut down after 25 years and sold at auction to The Onion for an undisclosed sum at the behest of the Sandy Hook families.

Alex Jones said Thursday that higher bids from Infowars' allies were rejected just to ensure he could no longer control the site.



From The New York Times, "The Onion Buys Infowars, Alex Jones’s Site, Out of Bankruptcy":
The Onion, a satirical publication that skewers newsmakers and current events, said on Thursday that it had won a bankruptcy auction to acquire Infowars, a website founded and operated by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

The Onion said the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.

Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit dedicated to ending gun violence that was founded in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, will advertise on a relaunched version of the site under The Onion.

The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.
The Onion is owned by former Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson (you'll never guess his background!).
[...] While the alliance between Everytown and The Onion may seem like an odd fit, the two organizations share an interest in curbing gun violence, said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown. Mr. Feinblatt said that mission was underscored with depressing regularity in the aftermath of mass shootings, when The Onion goes viral with its oft-shared headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

“This was an opportunity for us to give The Onion the facts, the storytelling, the data and the research that’s at our fingertips,” Mr. Feinblatt said. “And for them to give us the creativity of how to turn all of that information into new messaging to a new audience.”
Infowars is going to rebuild itself through the Alex Jones Network.



In both of the Infowars' trials, the judges simply sidestepped the First Amendment by finding Jones guilty before trial for allegedly not complying with discovery (the same tactic was then used against Rudy Giuliani).

Infowars posted hundreds of my articles and they were regularly picked up by the Drudge Report over the years and it sucks to see them go. With the attacks on the Internet Archive, the purging of Google Search results, mass deletion of YouTube videos for political reasons and other deplatforming measures over the years, it really goes to show just how temporary much of the internet is.

Roosh V captured this sentiment many years ago after he was banned from everything in his article "I was fooled by the promise of the internet" (which is no longer online but was fortunately archived).

That said, with Musk buying Twitter and unshackling the algorithms it's possible Alex Jones' reach has never been bigger (that's certainly the case with InfoLib). Additionally, the actual motive for the lawsuits against Jones was just to punish him for helping Trump win the presidency in 2016 and yet Trump just won the presidency once again.

X, Rumble and Telegram are all booming due to allowing (mostly) free speech and the future looks bright.

If Alex Jones is able to stay on X, he will likely be able to rebuild his media empire virtually overnight and these lawsuits will have been all for naught.

The power to deplatform people is waning and that's a great development for us all.

If the Trump administration makes rules against debanking -- and it's within the realm of possibility they will as Melania complained about Barron being denied a bank account in her memoir released just last month -- then we should be on cloud nine.

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