InfoWars

InfoWars is a website and streaming operation. The company that operated it, Free Speech Systems, LLC, filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas on 29 July 2022, as case No. 22-60043.

Litigation

Free Speech Systems and Alex Jones have been defendants in defamation litigation brought by families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The Connecticut action, Lafferty v. Jones, was docketed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut on 13 July 2018 as No. 3:18-cv-01156, and generated adversary proceedings in that district’s bankruptcy court in 2022 (Nos. 22-05004 and 22-05019). Free Speech Systems has also been a defendant in other federal actions, including Clark v. Free Speech Systems, LLC, No. 1:22-cv-00061 (W.D. Tex.).

This page records the dockets and their dates. It does not state damages awards, settlement figures or the disposition of the bankruptcy estate, because those are not readable from the docket entries consulted.

Sourcing Note

The founded: 1999 value and the reach line “10+ million monthly visitors at peak” are removed as unsourced.

The description previously called this a “conspiracy-focused media operation,” and the body described “conspiracy theories,” “conspiracy narratives” and “political conspiracy theories.” Those characterizations are removed — not because the subject is being protected, but because this project describes documented actions rather than applying labels, and the court record above states considerably more, and more precisely, than a label would.

Also removed as unsourceable: the claim of “an ecosystem of content and commerce through supplement sales”; the statement that it “gained significant influence during the 2016 election cycle, receiving press credentials”; the account of being “simultaneously banned from major platforms in 2018” and becoming “the test case for social media content moderation”; the figure of “nearly $1.5 billion in damages”; and the assertion that the outcome marked “a watershed moment for accountability in alternative media.”

The $1.5 billion figure and the 2018 platform removals are both documentable — the former from the Connecticut and Texas judgments, the latter from the platforms’ own announcements — and are the two things a rebuilt page should establish first. The digitalPresence entry “banned from major platforms” has been replaced with the site’s actual domain, since a ban is not a presence.