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.
His billion dollar settlement won’t be discharged through this bankruptcy, so his wages will probably be garnished for the rest of his life as it is. I really don’t have any sympathy for him, and taking the social media account he’s been using for his business as part of that business’s liquidation really doesn’t feel like a big deal.
The precedent troubles me. That a media account in a personal name, even if through that one does commercial or objectionable things, can become a commodity to buy and sell - and be forced to sell.
The same precedent applies to ordinary people too. Should a debt collector acquire your Facebook page? Because you used Facebook marketplace it’s now a business asset?
If you had a talk show called the [Your Name] show, should it be immune to bankruptcy courts? Should a the company [Your Name] Inc. not be allowed to be bought and sold? Should we forbid people from selling tshirts or pictures with their names and faces on them? Where do you think we should draw the line?
Most people don’t own a business. The occasional use of facebook marketplace doesn’t make a personal account part of a nonexistant business.
That’s a fair point. It seems rather awkward. Selling off the assets of said talk show, easy decision. Selling the brand, though, if it’s tied to your person / personal name, that seems dubious. Especially against the named person’s will.
For something like t-shirt likenesses, I suppose I think the line is the person’s consent. I can sell permission for my face to be on your t-shirt, but being forced to seems wrong. In the extreme case: a person is legally entitled to sell nude images of themselves, but surely a court would never order it, even if that person had been previously selling nude images.
So if he had a warehouse full of tshirts with his name or face on them and decides after filing bankruptcy that he doesn’t want to sell them anymore, should he just get to keep it? Should it all be destroyed?
If he took a cattle brand and burned his name into everything on set, does that mean he shouldn’t have to sell it any more?
If someone was already selling porn before, do you think if they continued to that they shouldn’t have to give any of that money they earned to the people they owe money to? This case isn’t anywhere near that extreme because he’s not the only person in the world named ‘Alex Jones’, so how much of his ‘likeness’ is being sold is debatable to begin with. And also, we aren’t talking about future permission to use his likeness, we’re talking about a social media account used to promote his business.
It’s more like, should be be forced to sell them to someone else who will put their own messages on the t-shirt with his face.
As to the cattle brand (and less so the t-shirts), the cattle are valuable property regardless of his branding. The social media account is the branding. To forceably sell the cattle is quite different from forceably selling the brand with his name.
It goes further: the real value of his social media handle, I imagine, is the number of subscribers it has. Are subscribers an asset to be bought and sold? Capitalism thinks so. 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.
The money they earned - exactly! Not forcing them to keep doing porn. Of course this case isn’t extreme like that.
No it’s not. The value is that it is (was) his Alex Jones account, presumably with his subscribers too. Or are there a bunch of other Alex Jonses clamouring to have the handle freed so they can have the name fresh for themselves? I’m sure they’d like it; but that’s not the value in this case.
Wipe his Twitter account - if you think deplatforming is an appropriate action. Let another person buy the name fresh (and be sued if they use it to pretend they are him). Take his real assets and sell them. But taking his Twitter account as is and selling it seems, IMHO, the wrong sort of capitalism.
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.
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.
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.