The Onion, a wildly popular satirical news publication, bought the right-wing conspiracy website Infowars for $1.1 trillion at an auction on Nov. 14. This purchase comes after the Sandy Hook shooting families won a defamation lawsuit against Infowars previous owner Alex Jones, causing him to have to pay more than $1 billion in damages.
The Onion plans to change Infowars into a parody of itself, a site where satirical conspiracies will frequently be found, all while promoting gun-violence prevention by partnering with Everytown for Gun Safety. This new update would make the site much like The Onion but with an increased emphasis on making fun of conspiracy theorists.
“We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website,” chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, Ben Collins wrote on a Bluesky post. “We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off.”
While The Onion is a satirical site, this purchase was a serious one with a positive message behind it.
“We’re going to pay this over and give some people a good place on the internet to go to because that’s very rare now,” Collins said in an interview with ABC News. “That’s a big part of why we want to do this. We want, the media ecosystem is just filled with like lies and hate and garbage, and we want to give people a place to at least laugh at it.”
The purchase is also significant for the Sandy Hook Families, who decided to forgo the portion of the damages owed to them as a way to help The Onion with the sale. This is the first big news coverage The Onion has seen in a while, and through this media attention, The Onion is being introduced to a whole new generation of viewers.
“I think that’s what’s most important here for both Everytown [for Guns Safety] and for The Onion to talk about [buying Infowars] in yes, in a humorous way, but to really expose the damage misinformation does and talk to people that are beyond just talking to ourselves,” president of Everytown for Gun Safety John Feinblatt said in an interview with ABC News. “Talking to conservative people, talking to young people and reaching them and really, really exposing how misinformation distorts reality.
Infowar’s previous owner, Jones, has not taken kindly to the purchase and has gone to X to label The Onion’s Purchase as a “fraudulent sale” and “auction fraud”. First United American Cos., a company affiliated with Jones, has claimed that the auction was fraudulent after the bankruptcy trustee improperly colluded with the Sandy Hook Families. This only elongated the media attention The Onion was receiving.
“We always knew the guys who currently run Infowars were going to take this badly and use the loss to fundraise off of it, and they did not disappoint,” Collins wrote on X and Bluesky. “Obviously, when the current operators of Infowars went back to operating as a business, they used that to falsely say the auction had been overturned and allege some truly wacky stuff.”
The Onion has received some backlash for the purchase, mostly by fans of Jones, but overall the reaction has been positive.
“This is bad karma turned good,” X user Timothy W. Larson said to the Associated Press. “I love it.”
