In the latest bankruptcy court battle for Jones, he claims the personal accounts that use his real name are not owned by Infowars or its parent company, Free Speech Systems.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is seeking to protect his personal social media accounts from being sold in the upcoming auction of his Infowars media platform to pay more than $1 billion he owes relatives of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, claiming selling those accounts would violate his privacy and deny him a chance to make a fresh start after bankruptcy.

The trustee overseeing the liquidation and selloff of the assets of Infowars and its parent company Free Speech Systems, asked a federal judge on Friday to include the social media accounts as part of the auctions scheduled for November and December. The judge delayed a decision on the matter for at least a week.

Jones’ lawyers argue the personal media accounts that use his real name are not owned by Infowars or FSS, but are controlled by him personally, and should be considered part of his “persona” that cannot be owned by someone other than himself.

  • ltxrtquq@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    All I can really say is, if you don’t want your personal image to be commodified, you probably shouldn’t commodify it. The fact that Alex Jones has used his company that’s deeply tied to his personal image to attack and lie about the families of the victims of Sandy Hook make his case particularly unsympathetic, and so now that he owes an absurd amount of money to those families I think he should be forced to give up his social media accounts if it helps give those families what they’re owed.

    It also doesn’t help that he still thinks there are “unanswered questions” about what happened at Sandy Hook and doesn’t feel any remorse for lying and spreading misinformation about the families for years.

    Take his real assets and sell them.

    This is exactly what the lawyers trying to take the account think they’re doing. There’s some real value in having access to his social media followers, especially if that access can be tied to the purchase of the larger operation.

    But I think they’re not ‘his’ assets, they’re the choices of those subscribers. To ‘buy’ them seems like defrauding the people who chose to listen to him.

    And those subscribers can easily unfollow him as soon as they don’t like what they’re hearing. It’s not like once you follow someone on twitter you’re forced to see updates from them for the rest of your life. But since they’re following TheRealAlexJones probably to get updates about his business at InfoWars, it makes sense that the social media account that he uses to promote the business being sold needs to be considered as part of the business.