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- The Onion, the satirical news site, bought Alex Jones' Infowars at an auction.
- Jones was found liable for defaming the Sandy Hook families and ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion.
- Under The Onion, the revamped Infowars is set to feature ads from Everytown for Gun Safety.
The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' 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.
Everytown for Gun Safety, an anti-gun-violence nonprofit, said the purchase of Infowars had the support of the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre. It also said it also had a "multi-year agreement" with the new Infowars to advertise on it. The terms of that 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, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety.
The organization said The Onion's goal for the acquisition 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," referring to Jones' sales of dietary supplements.
Jones, who spent years spreading lies that the deadly 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax, was found liable for defaming the victims' families.
Many of those lies were touted on Infowars, 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 families.
Jones had said he hoped that one of his "patriot" allies would buy his company so that he could continue to broadcast on the platform.
After news of The Onion's purchase broke, Jones streamed 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, its trademarks, its video archive, and its studio in Austin. The revamped platform is expected to launch in January.
As for what the new Infowars will look like, Ben Collins, the CEO of The Onion's parent company, told The New York Times that the site would be a parody of itself and would 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."