AFP

American radio host Alex Jones reaped millions spouting conspiracy-laden falsehoods that helped drive up sales of products like libido boosters, exploiting an internet ecosystem that experts say makes misinformation a lucrative business.

Jones, a serial provocateur who founded the far-right website InfoWars, has been ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages for calling a 2012 mass shooting in an elementary school –- which left 20 first graders and six adults dead — a “hoax.”

Defamation cases in Texas and Connecticut against Jones have spotlighted the challenge of curbing misinformation on the internet, where false and inflammatory content often spreads faster, generates more engagement — and more revenue -– than the truth.

“The modern internet business model consists of building an audience and then monetizing that audience, either through ads, merchandise sales, or direct donation,” Danny Rogers, cofounder of the nonprofit Global Disinformation Index, told AFP.  

“Alex Jones perfected that model by peddling the most adversarial narratives in the form of virulent conspiracy theories and unbridled anger, building a receptive audience, and then soaking that audience for profit.”

Jones, who was back in the spotlight this week when rapper Kanye West declared his admiration for Adolf Hitler on his show, has amassed what experts call a fortune by successfully merging the conspiracy theories with merchandise and dietary supplements from his InfoWars store.

Jones has hawked male vitality supplements and testosterone boosters, while claiming the government was feminizing men or turning them gay by using chemical pollutants.

He accused the government of deliberately putting fluoride in drinking water, while his store peddled fluoride-free toothpaste.

His audience, he claimed, can survive various doomsday scenarios with other products that his store can supply — storable food, body armor and even components for homemade guns.

– Bankruptcy – 

The extent of his wealth is opaque but a forensic economist testified during the Texas trial that the combined net worth of Jones and Free Speech Systems –- the parent company of Infowars –- likely fell between $135 million and $270 million.

But while bashing the trials as an assault on free speech, Jones has said he has little money to pay the damages and has repeatedly implored his audience for donations.

As he battled the defamation cases, an anonymous bitcoin donor sent Jones cryptocurrency worth $8 million, the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center reported in May.

This week, Jones declared personal bankruptcy in his home state of Texas, saying his liabilities far exceeded his assets that were worth between $1 million and $10 million.

InfoWars declared bankruptcy in April and Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy in July.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Jones had transferred millions of dollars out of Free Speech Systems to firms that he or his family members controlled, citing financial records.

Families of the victims in the 2012 shooting in Sandy Hooks Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, have alleged that Jones was trying to hide his wealth to avoid paying the damages.

A jury in Connecticut awarded $965 million in October to relatives of eight Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent. The judge later tacked on an additional $473 million in punitive damages.

In a separate trial, a jury in Texas ordered Jones to pay nearly $50 million damages to a couple whose six-year-old son was killed in the shooting.

Free Speech Systems and Jones did not respond to a request for comment.

– ‘Clicks and cash’ –

The families of the school shooting victims say they were harassed and threatened for years by Jones’s fans, with strangers showing up at their homes to confront them and hurling abuse online. Some even reported receiving rape and death threats.

“Their children got slaughtered — I saw it myself,” Bill Aldenberg, the FBI agent, said in an emotionally charged testimony during the Connecticut trial in September.

“And these people (Jones and company) made millions upon millions. They’ve destroyed everybody and they don’t give a damn.”

InfoWars sales data presented during the Connecticut trial showed a major spike in revenue after Jones peddled a new lie about the school shooting.

On September 25, 2014, when he falsely claimed that an FBI report showed that “no one died in 2012 in Sandy Hook” his site’s daily revenue jumped to more than $230,000, according to the data published by the Huffington Post.

On the previous day, before he peddled that claim, the site made only $48,000.

That underscores, what experts say, is the financial incentive of content creators to push out conspiratorial material that has potential to go viral.

“The fundamental problem is larger than Jones and is really the business model itself and its toxic externalities,” said Rogers.

“This creates an entire world of Alex Jones polarizing the global discourse, sowing fear and anger for clicks and cash. Until this changes, we’ll simply go from one Alex Jones to the next and little will change.”

President Joe Biden’s emphatic condemnation of anti-Semitism Friday was driven by an alarming normalization of anti-Jewish tropes and hate speech by influential public figures and on social media, experts said.

One day after hip-hop and fashion mogul Kanye West voiced a “love” for Nazis and 10 days after ex-president Donald Trump dined with West and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, Biden blasted a message about open anti-Semitism on Twitter.

“Silence is complicity,” Biden said.

“The Holocaust happened. Hitler was a demonic figure. And instead of giving it a platform, our political leaders should be calling out and rejecting anti-Semitism wherever it hides.”

Experts said the most recent controversies underscore a difficult new-generation fight against bigoted memes and conspiracy theories about Jews entering the mainstream.

Some of the new anti-Semitism has been propelled through Trump’s MAGA movement and the parallel QAnon conspiracy community.

Some has also been advanced through youth and African American communities by influential celebrities like West and basketball star Kyrie Irving, boosted by largely uncensored social media platforms.

West capped weeks of stoking anti-Semitic fires on Thursday when, in a podcast joined by Fuentes and extremist Alex Jones, he praised Hitler and then posted online a Nazi swastika interlaced with a Star of David. 

– Trump factor –

Oren Segal of ADL, which fights anti-Semitism, said the trend has been building for some time, with more people, intentionally or unintentionally, spreading anti-Semitic ideas.

“When you have celebrities who are promoting classic anti-Semitism like Kanye West, who has more followers on Twitter than there are Jews on the planet Earth, that is going to make that part of the public discussion,” Segal told AFP.

Aside from Trump dining with West and Fuentes, Segal noted, several Republican elected officials readily attended a pro-Trump conference organized by Fuentes earlier this year.

“That normalisation is not something that just began when Kanye lost his mind. It’s something that we have seen in the public, frankly, for a long time,” Segal.

Trumpism is an important factor, he added. 

“If  Trumpism is understood as normalising disinformation and conspiracy theories, the normalisation of anti-Semitism is not far behind,” he said.

That has real consequences, he said, pointing to the deadly extremist attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Poway, California in 2018 and 2019.

– Fringe ideas hit the mainstream –

The fact that West and Irving are both Black raised concerns about a surge of anti-Semitism among African Americans and young minorities.

But Cheryl Greenberg, a professor at Trinity College, said they reflected general trends in their communities.

“What I think it is, is the trend of mainstreaming otherwise fringe ideas.”

For example, she said, Irving highlighted an old video by the Black Hebrew Israelites, who are critical of Jews.

“They’ve been preaching the same stuff for decades,” Greenberg said.

“What’s unusual, I think, or what’s new, is that they’ve managed to move from New York street corners and elsewhere into the mainstream.”

A big reason for that is social media, which makes it easier to preserve and share anything, including hate. 

Elon Musk’s haphazard takeover of Twitter showed how fast objectionable material of any kind — against Jews or others — can return if a platform is not extremely diligent.

Segal said bigger problems are the “ecosystem” of algorithm-based video hosts like TikTok and mostly uncensored messaging and discussion boards like Telegram and Reddit, where virtual, global communities are built around anti-Semitism.

“It’s just a toxic online environment, where the most vulnerable people are getting their worldview, where I think we’re starting to see the consequences,” said Segal.

– Alliances unraveled –

Greenberg said another problem is that anti-Semitism’s importance has dissipated among younger Americans who are less knowledgeable about the Holocaust and are focused on the issues of other marginalized or oppressed groups, whether ethnic minorities or LGBTQ.

“The ways the Jews have made anti-Semitism a primary issue has made it much more difficult to engage with the many groups,” said Greenberg.

She said the 1950-60s alliance between African Americans and Jews for civil rights has mostly unraveled.

A younger generation of Blacks and other minorities today don’t see Jews as “fellow sufferers,” in part because they consider Jews as successful whites, Greenberg said.

“There are many groups out there, it is not just about Jews, it’s about lots of people,” she said.

Greenberg said the only answer is to work more closely with other groups — even those critical of Israel — to keep the issue of anti-Semitism in the mix.

“It’s never-ending because as soon as people forget, we fall off the radar,” she said.

President Emmanuel Macron on Friday visited New Orleans, a city emblematic of historic Franco-American ties, to promote the French language and conclude his state visit to the United States.

The French president, on the third day of a US trip that included a lavish reception at the White House a night earlier, strolled New Orleans’s historic French Quarter — and held an unannounced face-to-face meeting with Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Macron said the two had a “clear and honest” discussion during an hour-long meeting, and that he conveyed to Musk his — and Europe’s — concerns about content moderation on the influential platform.

“Transparent user policies, significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of speech: efforts have to be made by Twitter to comply with European regulations,” Macron tweeted after the meeting.

Macron arrived in the iconic Louisiana city to a colorful welcome by a jazz band on the tarmac at the airport, before walking the French Quarter’s lively streets with his wife, Brigitte.

Removing his jacket, Macron strolled beside New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, clasping the hands of well-wishers and beaming widely. He spoke briefly with women holding signs in support of protests in Iran.

During an impromptu press briefing, he praised “a land of creolization” where “French is loved,” and later announced a program to broaden access to French language training.

He had said in Washington that he wanted to renovate the image of French in the United States, where it is “sometimes seen as elitist.”

Before taking off from Washington earlier Friday, Macron attended a breakfast with representatives of digital companies during which he, according to the Elysee, recalled “all the efforts” made since his first term to “make France the leading European country in tech.”

Once a French colonial city, New Orleans was sold to the United States by Napoleon as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and Macron has called it “the quintessential francophone land.”

– Energy and climate –

Besides celebrating French-American ties, Macron paid tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,800 people in and around New Orleans and caused billions of dollars in damage in 2005.

Accompanied by French film director Claude Lelouch and dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, Macron met local artists and prominent cultural figures of New Orleans, known as the birthplace of jazz.

Shortly after his arrival, Macron and European Affairs Minister Catherine Colonna met with Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards. As Macron looked on, Colonna and Edwards signed an accord to promote and carry out joint clean energy initiatives.

The visit came on the heels of a lavish dinner hosted by President Joe Biden at the White House, headlined by master jazzman Jon Batiste, who comes from a family of New Orleans musicians.

Macron’s state visit — the first such formal occasion since Biden took office in January 2021 — symbolized how Washington and Paris have buried last year’s bitter spat over the way Australia pulled out of a French submarine deal in favor of acquiring US nuclear subs instead.

The visit featured a full military honor guard for Macron, including service members from the marines, army, air force and even a detachment of soldiers in 18th-century Revolutionary War garb.

Prince William honored climate change innovators during a star-studded ceremony in Boston Friday at the culmination of a US trip overshadowed by a race row and estranged brother Harry’s Netflix series.

Britain’s heir to the throne rewarded five entrepreneurs with £1 million each ($1.2 million) as part of his Earthshot Prize initiative to support efforts to save the planet from warming temperatures.

Annie Lennox and sisters Chloe x Halle were among singers to perform at Boston’s MGM Music Hall. Actor Rami Malek and ex-footballer David Beckham presented awards.

British naturalist and television presenter David Attenborough and actress Cate Blanchett were among the judges.

Winners included a female-founded start-up providing cleaner-burning stoves to women in Kenya and a British company that crafts biodegradable packaging from marine plants. 

“I believe that the Earthshot solutions you have seen this evening prove we can overcome our planet’s greatest challenges. And by supporting and scaling them we can change our future,” William told the audience.

The ceremony, now in its second year, was trailed by royal insiders as William’s “Superbowl moment” and came at the end of his and wife Kate’s first visit to the United States in eight years.

The couple’s three-day trip to Boston focused on the environment, as they discussed rising sea levels with local officials and toured a laboratory specializing in green technologies. William briefly met President Joe Biden Friday.

The trip started Wednesday under a cloud after William’s godmother Susan Hussey apologized and quit the royal household for repeatedly asking a Black British woman where she was “really” from during a reception at Buckingham Palace the day before.

A spokesman for the royal couple told reporters in Boston that William believed it was right that Hussey, 83, had stood down. 

Then on Thursday, Netflix unveiled a trailer for its six-part docuseries in which Harry and wife Meghan Markle lift the lid on their lives in the royal family, which they quit in 2020.

Harry and Meghan, a mixed-race former television actress, cited racism in the royal household as one of the reasons for their acrimonious departure and move to California almost three years ago.

– ‘Halftime Show’ –

Omid Scobie, a close friend and biographer of the couple, tweeted that the series, due to air December 8, will share “the other side of their love story and the challenges they faced.”

“(I)f tomorrow is Prince William’s Super Bowl, then here’s your Halftime Show,” he wrote.

The Earthshot Prize, launched in October 2020, was inspired by US president John F. Kennedy’s “Moonshot” project in the 1960s to put a man on the moon.

Mukuru Clean Stoves of Kenya won the Clean our Air category for its biomass stoves made from charcoal, wood, and sugarcane that burn 70 percent less pollution than traditional stoves and cost just $10.

London-based Notpla scooped the Build a Waste-Free World prize for its packaging products made of seaweed.

The Protect and Restore Nature award went to Indian firm Kheyti whose greenhouses protect small-hold farmers’ crops from unpredictable weather and destructive pests.

The Queensland Indigenous Women Rangers Network won the Revive our Oceans category for training more than 60 women in techniques to preserve Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The Fix our Climate award went to Oman-based 44.01, which removes cardon dioxide from the atmosphere by turning it into peridotite rock stored underground.