Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Tuesday that Infowars host Alex Jones and the technology companies that help spread his conspiracy theories are partly to blame for the recent suicides of people affected by school shootings.
Murphy appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday and discussed the recent suicides of two survivors from the school shooting in Parkland, Florida and of the parent of a child that died in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle asked Murphy about Jones without using his name but describing someone who “promulgated, promoted and achieved the almost incomprehensible feat of having some people in this country believe that Newtown was staged and as you know better than most, some of the parents were forced to move, to virtually hide in public.”
He asked: “What do we do about, and not just that one aspect of it, what he did, but the fact something like that takes on a life of its own?”
“I’ll use his name, we’re talking about Alex Jones,” Murphy said. "And the fact of the matter is that the companies that allow people like him, conspiracy theorists, to be able to purvey lies have a responsibility. There is no constitutional duty on an internet company to allow somebody to terrorize parents in mass tragedies like Alex Jones did for so long.”
"The Newtown families are proceeding with a court case to try to hold him accountable, but the companies that allowed for this nonsense, this garbage, to be spread around the internet, have a responsibility and a duty themselves to do something earlier than they did in the case of Infowars," he continued.
"I wish these parents could shut it all out but they can't. Some of them have frankly turned to chasing down these conspiracy theorists as a full-time job. Because they see it as their responsibility to make sure everyone knows what happened to their child. ... While we can't ever make these lunatics completely disappear, there are some big commercial actors like Facebook, like Twitter who can do a much better job of policing their space," he added.
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