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.

  • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
    0·
    8 days ago

    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?

    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.

    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?

    The money they earned - exactly! Not forcing them to keep doing porn. Of course this case isn’t extreme like that.

    how much of his ‘likeness’ is being sold is debatable to begin with

    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.