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.
So fuck Alex Jones, but I really don’t think it’s a good idea to force people to sell their accounts so that other people can impersonate them. It’s just inviting social engineering attacks.
Yes but you can just tell everyone the attacks never happened, for attention
Isn’t it against the tos to sell your account?
If the Wendys burger chain was sold, there would be no problem with the new owner taking the Wendys social media accounts. In this case Jones has long used his social media accounts as part of his business. They’re part of the Infowars assets so they can and should be handed over to debtors to settle the claims against Infowars.
Yeah well Wendy’s would be owned by the company not a person… You need some kind of legal distinction between the two…
So if Wendy’s sold the account to a non Wendy’s person that would be different than it being used by a different person within the company… I’m sure most social media companies have a distinction for business accounts.
And if they can close any account if they choose…
Law trumps TOS so it really doesn’t matter what it says.
But is there any precedent in selling accounts due to a court decision? Does the social media company get to close the account due to the TOS violation?
In any case, if it does get sold, it’ll create an interesting situation.
Except in this case, much like with Trump, His business and his person were deeply intertwined. So the account is a business asset. And as such, it is subject to being an asset of the company. Maybe he should have separated them at some point.