WASHINGTON, Nov 15 — Satirical news outlet The Onion said Thursday it had acquired Infowars, a conspiracy-laden website whose owner made money by running stories that called one of America’s most notorious school shootings a hoax.
The Onion said it prevailed in a bankruptcy auction to buy Alex Jones’ Infowars site with the support of families of victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
The new Infowars, starting in January, will operate as a parody of its former self, The Onion said, with a anti-gun violence nonprofit founded after the 2012 shooting advertising on the site that once claimed the bloody attack was staged.
The massacre left 20 small children and six educators dead in a particularly gruesome chapter of America’s gun violence epidemic.
Families sued Jones in 2018 after he spread the claim that the shooting rampage was staged with actors.
Four years later they won a US$1.4 billion (RM6.3 billion) defamation settlement against Jones, who declared bankruptcy, and his company Free Speech Systems.
In September a judge in Texas said Infowars and other assets owned by Free Speech Systems could be auctioned to raise money for creditors who include Sandy Hook families.
The Onion declined to say how much it paid for Infowars, including its production studio and a dietary supplement business.
Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit created after the Sandy Hook shooting, will advertise on an overhauled version of Infowars.
The nonprofit said it and The Onion share the goal of ending gun violence.
A famous headline that The Onion runs after mass shootings is, “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said bidding to buy Infowars was an easy decision to make, calling it an “invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses.”
“InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalising the most vulnerable members of society — values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron,” the company wrote Thursday on its website.
Ben Collins, the chief executive of Global Tetrahedron, said the new Infowars would make fun of internet personalities like Jones who traffic in misinformation.
“We thought this would be a hilarious joke,” Collins told The New York Times.
“This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything’s kind of insane.” — AFP
