The Onion buys Alex Jones's Infowars — and that's not a joke
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- The Onion, the satirical news site, bought Alex Jones's Infowars at an auction.
- Jones had been found liable for defaming the Sandy Hook families and ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion.
- Under The Onion, the revamped Infowars will feature ads from Everytown for Gun Safety.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones's Infowars has a new home — and it's not the one he wanted.
The Onion, the satirical publication, announced on Thursday that it had purchased the disgraced far-right commentator's company at auction. The terms of the sale weren't disclosed.
The purchase of Infowars has the support of the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, an anti-gun-violence nonprofit said. Everytown for Gun Safety, the nonprofit, said it also had a "multi-year agreement" with the new Infowars to advertise. The terms of the agreement weren't disclosed.
"It's fitting that a platform once used to profit off of tragedy will be a tool of education, hence our multi-year advertising commitment to this new venture," said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety.
The Onion's goal for the acquisition is "to end Infowars' relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion's relentless barrage of humor for good," Everytown for Gun Safety said in its statement, referencing Jones' sales of dietary supplements.
Jones had been found liable for defaming the Sandy Hook families in four lawsuits after he spent years spreading lies that the deadly 2012 school shooting was a hoax.
Many of those lies were touted on his Infowars platform, which was put up for auction this year as part of an agreement that Jones would liquidate his assets to help pay a fraction of the nearly $1.5 billion he was ordered to pay the Sandy Hook victims' families.
Jones had previously expressed his hopes that one of his "patriot" allies would buy his company so that he could continue to broadcast on the platform.
On Thursday morning, after news of The Onion's purchase broke, Jones was streaming a "critical emergency broadcast" on X with the heading "Democrats Are On Their Way To The Building To Shut InfoWars Down Now."
The Associated Press reported that The Onion would acquire Infowars' social media accounts, trademarks, video archive, and its studio in Austin. The revamped platform is expected to launch in January.
As for what the new Infowars site will actually look like, Ben Collins, the CEO of The Onion's parent company, told The New York Times that the site will be a parody of itself, and will make fun of "weird internet personalities" like Jones.
"We thought this would be a hilarious joke," Collins told the outlet. "This is going to be our answer to this no-guardrails world where there are no gatekeepers and everything's kind of insane."