[lbwtaylor]

The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me.

He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered. He's scum of the earth.

That business was taken away from him, and folks think that's too much? What the actual fuck.

[Eextra953]

It shocking to me too. I can't understand how people are 'both sides-ing' this or just supporting him under some free speech argument. Free speech has limits and a court found Jones went too far and that cost him his business.

[kypro]

People have been arguing the same bogus free speech point in the UK recently because people have been arrested for saying things that are anti-immigration and offensive online.

People have free speech, but obviously that doesn't mean you are free to say things that could be considered hateful or factually untrue. If you go around tweeting hateful things about the Royal family and the courts find you guilty, don't be surprised if that costs you your freedom. It's pretty simple.

Alex is legally free to saying whatever he wants, but he had the wrong views on Sandy Hook and his wrong views hurt the families affected, therefore he deserves to lose his business.

[llamaimperative]

Reflexive contrarianism runs amok in these parts. It’s pretty pathetic.

[dnissley]

To be clear I haven't seen a single comment that could be charitably characterized as "supporting Alex Jones". I see a lot of comments that are pointing out that the judgment against him seems unreasonable given the damage he did to these families.

[jotux]

I see a few instance of people defending his actions as "free speech."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42387916

"View it for what it is: a deliberate attack on free speech. This is essentially legislating from the bench. They can't ban him from speaking but they can make it very VERY expensive to do so, and warn anyone else at the same time."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42385358

"Maybe the “victims” should go after the actual shooter for a billion dollars then.

Instead we have people crying that free speech is the actual evil crime here."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384921#42389350

[fzeroracer]

The people pointing out that the judgment is 'unreasonable' are either intentionally lying or extremely ignorant.

The context is that the judge awarded a default judgment because Alex Jones literally refused to participate in the legal system. He committed overt perjury (and was outright caught on this) and proceeded to just stop complying entirely.

If any of us received a court summons and refused to show up or defend ourselves the court isn't going to shrug and say the case goes away. In a system of law you can't just ignore the law and expect the judge to take pity on you.

[Pxtl]

Torts are not just about damage, they're also about deterrence. Jones repeatedly demonstrated in the court battle that no deterrence would work on him.

His entire business is built on this kind of defamation -- how much proceeds of this kind of business should he be allowed to keep?

[hoten]

It is unreasonable imo. He deserves to see jail time.

[talldayo]

It's Hacker News. I hate to say it, but this is all the website is known for at this point. Bring it up in passing conversation with the in-crowd and you'll get laughed out of the room for using "Orange Site" and fraternizing with drug-addled Elon worshipers and "soloprenuers" that beg for recognition for their dogshit SaaS product. The score has been known for years, the political leaning of Hacker News is basically the same as the "curious individuals" that inform themselves via JRE and random X accounts from Russia.

The people using Hacker News are regularly a stone's throw away from the sort of people that use 4chan. Except Hacker News has usernames and karma so it tends to create cults of personality around people that say what people want to hear.

[LordDragonfang]

The thing is, this (admittedly common) opinion is as facile as the opinions of progressives who act as though all of reddit is /r/TheDonald. Overall, both are actually very left-leaning websites (in reddit's case, almost overwhelmingly so), they just tolerate the existence of pockets of very right-leaning individuals - because of lofty ideals of "free speech". However, even then, you'll usually see legitimate social conservatism get downvoted pretty heavily, and even fiscal conservatism will garner rapid disagree in most cases.

(That said, to a lot of those people, it doesn't matter if the "majority" are left leaning. And for some of those (e.g. trans people), they're even somewhat justified in that stance, since it doesn't make a difference if the harassment they get from being brought to the attention of "orange site" users comes from the majority or the minority)

[archagon]

Consciously or unconsciously, people begin with an unshakable feeling of “my tribe good,” then reverse engineer a justification for whatever issue is being politicized. Even if it involves defending a repugnant conman and slanderer like Jones.

It just goes to show that far too many people have no fundamental values, only political affiliations.

[crossroadsguy]

When the right wing Govt was elected in my country suddenly right wing nutjobs appeared out of the woodwork on country/cities subreddits (seen quite sometimes here on hn as well) overnight as if they were just always there and were just dormant waiting for a time to show up in the right climate. No, they were not immediate new inserts from some IT Cell at all. They were always there.

I do not find anything shocking about Jones support in this post. A great social mistake has been thinking that people supporting nefarious stuff or shady, disgusting, and pathetic people do not know any better - but they do. Thing is - that is exactly what they want!

[ljsprague]

>he built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered

That not what he built his business on. That was one (bad) thing he did.

[lbwtaylor]

That is exactly what he built his business on - attacking people with bald face lies and using the generated outrage to sell snake oil.

[uv-depression]

You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.

[dang]

This is a common claim, but it only ever seems to be made by people with a strong ideological commitment who are mad that the opposing commitment isn't banned on the site. In other words, the complaint is that we don't moderate HN based on ideology. Since to do that would contradict HN's reason for existing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), I'm not inclined to start.

The irony is that people with the opposing ideological passion—the ones you refer to as techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists—make exactly the same complaint that you do, just with the ideological bit flipped. They think that HN is (let me see...) full of uber sensitive, far left ideologues [1], not only socialists but delusional anti-socials [2], full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark [3]. Virtually every leftist post is upvoted [4], anything that can be remotely considered right wing is automatically flagged and/or downvoted [5], and only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, because I have destroyed this site! [6]

It's not really ironic, because these perceptions are only opposed to each other on the surface—just one bit is flipped, as I said. The underlying mechanisms have to be the same.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160087

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330143

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41846634

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41851430

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799361

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42076694

[andrewmcwatters]

> Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content

My least favorite thing about reading HN, by far. Glad someone else said it.

[phatfish]

This articulates something I couldn't put my finger on. I think it comes from the internet becoming the main propaganda tool of -- well could be any government -- but for the audience here nation states or actors hostile to the English speaking "west".

The well-spoken troll gets people that are not caught by the meme gifs/jpgs. It requires more work on the propaganda side, but persistence pays off it seems.

Memes alone are not enough to turn most people here, but an account spewing hard-to-disprove nonsense on social media, or someone willing to shill on podcasts tickles the "DYOR" itch.

This feeds back into the comments here and "talking points" are spread.

[dtquad]

>The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me

That shouldn't be a surprise considering how many American libertarian techbros are fans of Alex Jones Lite (Joe Rogan).

[anigbrowl]

About 30% of people are assholes, and birds of a feather flock together.