Cam's already talked about what happened with Infowars. The Onion, of all people, now owns it and gun control is going show up in sponsored posts there.
The thing is, at least as I see it, that just means there's not going to be nearly as much of a difference in what Infowars will be compared to what people have long perceived it as.
See, Infowars has a long history of having a lot of "news" that people thought of as kind of kooky. Sure, these days, the difference between a conspiracy theory and an absolute fact is about six weeks, but Infowars took it in a new direction. I've heard some wild stuff out of Infowars founder Alex Jones and I suspect that's going to continue.
The term "fake news" was often applied to the stuff you'd find there.
Now, the parody site The Onion will own it. They'll probably run a lot of other kooky stuff, but they're doing it to try and be funny. I say "try" here because The Onion hasn't been all that funny for years, but I respect the fact that they just keep on trying despite their many failures.
But it won't be all parody and the new and improved Infowars. It seems it's going to be parody with a supposed point.
Everytown for Gun Safety is said to be the site's initial sponsor, aiming to use it to counter misinformation and advocate for common-sense gun control with sponsored content that will appear next to satire articles.
"Today @TheOnion won its bid to acquire Infowars, the notorious harbinger of disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech helmed by its founder, professional Internet troll, Alex Jones. Alex Jones has profited off the pain of Sandy Hook families, and his brand of hateful disinformation has seeped into mainstream American culture," Everytown for Gun Safety wrote on X.
While The Onion plans to relaunch Infowars this year with new content, including using humor to spotlight gun violence issues, Jones has vowed to fight the acquisition in court.
So they're going to counter "misinformation" on guns.
Which, by the way, will involve all those studies we've generally debunked and taken a good, long look at to see how incredibly flawed they are, and that's me being incredibly generous by not calling them outright propaganda, which is closer to the truth.
But if that's what's going up at Infowars, then...not much is going to change then, will it?
Oh, the satire probably be new, but as Cam noted in his piece, while the "brains" behind this are claiming this will help them reach a new audience, it's not. The regular Infowars readers aren't going to stick around. They're not going to reach a new audience. They're just going to run off the old one, import a new one that already agrees with them, then pat themselves on the back for doing...what? Nothing.
Yet at its core, what's being spread is going to largely be complete BS, which is what a lot of what showed up at Infowars was. Not all of it was, of course. Jones got stuff right from time to time, but the perception was what it was.
Strangely, though, now that it's supposedly going to combat misinformation, it'll spread infinitely more than Alex Jones ever did. Most people didn't take Jones seriously, so he wasn't nearly as influential as some want to believe. This new incarnation won't be any different.
Well, it'll be different in one small but important way.
People actually liked Alex Jones and his version of Infowars. I somehow suspect that The Onion and Everytown for Gun Safety are going to create an unholy abomination that appeals to no one except their own choir.
