TEHRAN— A jury has ordered the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay almost $1bn to people who suffered from his relentless promotion of the lie that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a hoax.

Among a number of fallacies, the owner of the Infowars website claimed the grieving families seen in news reports were in fact actors hired as part of a plot to deprive Americans of the right to carry arms.

The Connecticut suit was filed by relatives of five children and three teachers killed in the mass shooting, as well as an FBI agent who was among the first responders to the scene, The Guardian reported.

Parents and siblings told the trial how they were threatened and harassed for years by people who believed the lies told on Jones’s show. The daughter of the killed Sandy Hook principal testified that she was mailed rape threats to her home.

While Jones acknowledged he had been wrong about Sandy Hook during testimony, he called the proceedings a “kangaroo court”, mocked the judge, called the plaintiffs’ lawyer an ambulance chaser and labeled the case an affront to free speech rights, saying that he was “done saying sorry.”

The Sandy Hook elementary school shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. The perpetrator, Adam Lanza, fatally shot his mother before murdering 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook school, and later committed suicide. A number of conspiracy theories have been formed, mostly by Jones that doubt or dispute what occurred at Sandy Hook. He, along with various fringe conspiracy theorists have claimed, for example, that the massacre was actually orchestrated by the U.S. government as part of an elaborate plot to promote stricter gun control laws. Jones went even so far as to say that the shooting did not occur and it was faked.

In the last week of March 2019, Jones acknowledged the deaths were real, stating he had “almost like a form of psychosis,” where he “basically thought everything was staged.” By 2021, Jones did not provide one single piece of evidence proving his false claims.

“Why there is no penalty against media spreading misinformation on Iran”

Jones being sentenced to coughing up 965 million dollars to the Sandy Hook victims is obviously a good thing, but a million-dollar question is being raised: Why is there no such sentence for misinformation against Iran spread by Persian-language media based in the UK and the U.S.?

The BBC Persian, Iran International (otherwise known as Saudi International), Voice of America and Radio Farda (Radio Free, as it claims) affiliated with the American government and Manoto affiliated with the Baha'i movement did and are still doing all they can to fan the flames of riots, violence and unrest throughout Iran.

It is important to note that Jones did not incite violence. He did not call on people to pour into the streets, commit violent acts, target the police or destroy public property. He spread fake news, which is bad, yet it is incomparable to what these five media outlets have done to Iran. Among these five outlets, the BBC Persian topped the list with producing 58% lies. Iran International came into a close second with writing 53% lies.

Additionally, these media outlets have published a lie every two minutes on average since September 16, when Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish girl died while in police custody.

In this regard, on October 13, Gheis Ghoreishi, an Arab world analyst, told the Tehran Times, “Iran International, Manoto, Voice of America, and Radio Farda are intelligence-established networks. That is, they directly have a think tank and they try to ride on the protests and give direction to the protests. If there is no protest, they pump despair in society. They also misuse ethnic and religious minorities. If you pay attention, whenever something happens in Iran and someone is killed or injured in any way, these media outlets go directly to his or her religion, ethnicity, and race. Is he or she a Baha'i or a Shia Muslim? Is he or she a Kurd or an Arab? Is he or she a Turk or Baluch? They try to invest on these divisions and gaps.”

European governments and their best buddy, the United States, sought to seize the moment to exercise more pressure on Iran, with imposing additional sanctions on Tehran. The heavily politicized reports of the BBC Persian caused Iran’s Foreign Ministry to summon the British Ambassador to Tehran, Simon Shercliff, and hand him an official note of protest.

Nonetheless, it seems that issuing statements and summoning ambassadors are not enough and the Foreign Ministry should take on a more serious approach.

Ghoreishi told the Tehran Times, “The duty of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is to form a very strong legal team, but unfortunately, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not paying attention to this issue. In my opinion, not paying attention to public opinion is a crisis for Iran. This is in reference to both domestic media and state media, and in the field of dealing with the intelligence-established media that work against the security of the country. The least that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can do is to challenge these media in consultation with a legal expert team. These media are violating European and UK laws on a daily basis. The least can be done is that a team of lawyers would record and archive these violations and send them to institutions like Ofcom (the UK's communications regulator) which monitors the media and television channels and has the power to shut them down.”

Misinformation, inciting violence, teaching protesters how to make Molotov cocktails, and so on are more than enough to shut these media outlets down for good, but the West does not take action. Why? Because media outlets act as an additional force for these governments’ foreign policy apparatus.