Is this defamation calculation valid? Is the calculation based on the number of people who listen or read? If so, they would need to see how many actually viewed as not every follower sees every post by people they follow.
Maybe one of the nice upsides is that these social media firms are forced to reveal the source to how they display posts.
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They reached the trillion-dollar sum by multiplying the state law’s up-to $5,000 per-violation fine by the 550 million social media exposures Jones’s audience received on his Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts in the three years following a school shooting that claimed the lives
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So if you argue that each post to each person is an instance of aa violation as it's an attempted sale of his products, then they multiply out that way.
It's the lawyers role to advocate for a particular reading of the law.
You could argue it other ways too, eg. every actual sale, or every post is a single instance of an attempted sale (but in aggregate, rather than per individual).
But, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm interpreting the law as written in that except from the Bloomberg article, not the statute, so, don't put much legal weight on the above.
I followed the trial and this is the way the “trial” went:
1. Plaintiffs / Judge claimed he had evidence (marketing material on sandy hook - claimed he never had marketing material)
2. Jones said he didn’t
3. discovery didn’t prove the evidence ever existed
4. Judge then said “guilty by default, because he must have destroyed the evidence”
5. Jury trial commences for damages - judge tells Jones he can’t claim not to have evidence, can’t claim innocence, and a whole list of other stuff
6. Jury trial talks about a bunch of unrelated stuff that other people said.
7. A few times you see a clip where Jones mention “sandy hook is a psyop” or “this parent laughing before fake crying is a crisis actor” (paraphrasing obviously). But never mentions people by name, nor outside what is presented on the news (CNN for instance)
If anyone knows about defamation. (1) defaulting never happens (2) you have to name the person and have to claim an explicit in the defamation that you know to be false, with the purpose of causing damage.
It was real interesting to watch, but I imagine it’ll be overturned
So default judgment, and he goes to court for damages (default mean he is automatically guilty if i understand right? Us law is weird. In my country the police would've seized then copied everything). From what I've managed to get (from a non English source), his lawyer then submitted too much and did not retract in time, so the plaintiffs have now more evidence than asked during the initial discovery. Maybe it's wrong (this was humor so this might have been exaggeration, but the guy research his stuff pretty well).
I'll have to get to doing some digging, because if it's as you say, this is even more of a travesty than it seemed.
As for this new total, well, this makes the Napster lawsuits against children of yore seem sane by comparison, and much of the same logic seems to have been used for how the figure was calculated. And the idea that we're actually talking about the events the trial is supposedly about rather than Jones' entire history of being a thorn in the side of some powerful people is clearly a lie. If anything, I have to wonder how anyone doesn't see this as suggesting that maybe he was onto a thing or two they'd previously written off that he's being publicly made an example of for exposing.
$10 million, or even $100 million, and I'd say these victims must have suffered a lot...but very well, maybe they did. $1 billion? This is an abuse of the court system, and is the sort of money large corporations get fined when they do something really bad. Facebook famously got hit for $5 billion over Cambridge Analytica in 2019. OJ Simpson, on the other hand, paid $70 million when a person actually died. Even with inflation, getting to $1 billion is stretching things well past the breaking point.
