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The Onion has agreed to acquire Infowars, the far-right web site created by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in a deal backed by families of victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The US satirical website on Thursday said that it had won the bankruptcy auction for the media business controlled by Jones, the controversial right-wing media influencer. No price was disclosed.
Infowars had been auctioned to pay settlements to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims. Jones was ordered to pay them almost $1.5bn in damages in defamation verdicts after calling the 2012 massacre in Connecticut a hoax.
The Onion said its goal was 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”.
“The Onion is proud to acquire InfoWars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” chief executive Ben Collins said. “Or bitcoin. We will also accept bitcoin.”
Jones was forced to file for bankruptcy in 2022 after the Sandy Hook families successfully sued the media host for his repeated false claims about the massacre in which 20 children and six teachers were killed.
The families have agreed to “forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion’s bid, enabling its success”, they said in a statement.
As part of the deal, The Onion has acquired Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Infowars, with its website, customer lists, social media accounts, production equipment and Texas studio, trademarks and video archive.
The Onion is owned by Global Tetrahedron, the media group backed by Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson. It said that gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety would be the “exclusive launch advertiser” for a relaunched Infowars website next year, which is expected to carry satirical content.
The Onion, which carries the tagline “America’s Finest News Source”, has lampooned the sorts of content carried by Jones’ Infowars in the past, with a series of stories following shootings in the US over the past few years carrying the same headline: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”
Jones confirmed on X on Thursday that Infowars was being shut down “without a court order this morning . . . The Connecticut Democrats with The Onion newspaper bought us”.
Jones has promised a legal challenge to the deal, and also said that he will continue to broadcast over a different platform.
Chris Mattei, attorney for the families and partner at Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, said the families had “rejected Jones’ hollow offers for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm’s way”.
Despite social media platforms including Facebook and YouTube blocking content from InfoWars, the site continues to attract an audience. InfoWars.com drew 6.6mn visits in October, according to Similarweb.
The Onion plans to relaunch the site in January.