It has been an interesting few days looking at political reality kicking in on politics and the net in the UK and the US.
The first story I read yesterday was in the US, about one of the lying dimwitted conspiracy nutcases who claimed that the 2012 Sandy Nook school massacre never happened, but was instead a hoax.
A US jury has awarded $450,000 (£350,000) to the father of a boy killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook school, in a defamation lawsuit against a conspiracy theorist writer.
In June a Wisconsin judge ruled that James Fetzer had defamed Leonard Pozner by claiming he had fabricated the death certificate of his son Noah.
Mr Fetzer, who co-wrote Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, said he would appeal.
Noah, aged six, was the youngest of 26 people killed in the shooting.
In the Dane County court in Wisconsin, Mr Pozner thanked the jury for recognising “the pain and terror that Mr Fetzer has purposefully inflicted on me and on other victims of these horrific mass casualty events, like the Sandy Hook shooting”.
Now this is just one of the many many cases coming down the legal route against conspiracy arseholes like Alex Jones and a number of others. With the relative freedom of the net and the a wide interpretation of free speech protections of the US first amendment, these conspiracy dickheads appear to have been making up false ‘facts’ and asserting that they were true simply because they’d said them.
Mostly I think that this done purely for profit as clickbait. This is a familiar pattern for us in NZ as well – it was the standard mode of behavior for the late and not mourned Whaleoil blog.
Their problem is that the precedence in US law don’t support this. There are numerous ways where making up such false facts is not protected by the first amendment. If it is done for a penurious advantage and/or done with malice, and it certainly doesn’t prevent private defamation actions about false facts by non-public people from succeeding.
Anyway, I suspect this will go to appeal through to the Supreme court regardless on one or more of these cases even if that court would probably really prefer not to hear it. And that will inevitably spiral back into the public life and across US net where the more rabid right wing trolls and their political backers have been over-using the false fact toolkit.
It will probably wind up much like it did here. Our false fact creators on the local net seem to have mostly wound up bankrupt with their blogs sold or bankrupt walking around with bracelets on their legs. All under a looming civil cases and large legal bills for the remainder.
On a side issue, if you like to promulgate and propagate false facts. Then wannabe trolls should make damn sure it is done in the style that David Farrar at Kiwiblog does it. I’d characterise that as:
At least how I see many commenters from all sides viewing his performances, both in his blog and everywhere else. It also seems to arise as a result of his other role with selling polling to National to assist with the framing of their chaotic utterances.
At least that is how I see it.
Of course that may not help you on this site as we’re only really interested in your actual opinion. Evasive troll game playing behaviour causes repetitive flame wars and bores the crap out of everyone reading the site.
The moderators tend to frown in it. Authors will often moderate it out of their posts if it diverts from the points that they made.
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