A Grieving Sandy Hook Father on How to Fight Online Hoaxers

Lenny Pozner lost his son in the 2012 mass shooting, only to be attacked by internet trolls. He talks with OneZero about battling back.

Lenny Pozner with his son. Credit: The Guardian

After the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 — which killed 26 people, 20 of them children — it surely seemed that if nothing else, Americans could agree on the abhorrent nature of the tragedy. The country may be divided on gun control and the proper political response to mass shootings, but who could doubt that they were real, and horrible?

Yet not long after Sandy Hook, alternative narratives began to take hold on the internet, attempting to proffer new — and utterly false — theories as to what happened that day. One claims that Sandy Hook was a “false flag” event engineered by the U.S. government, utilizing “crisis actors” — fake victims, in other words — to promote stricter gun control laws. Far-right radio host Alex Jones used his show Infowars to peddle this story, openly inciting violence against those standing in the way of the “truth.”

As a result, family members of the children who died — people who have already suffered unimaginably — have been harassed online and in real life by a contingent of die-hard hoaxers.

Many of the families have chosen to remain silent in the hope that attacks by conspiracy theorists would melt away. But Lenny Pozner, father of six-year-old Sandy Hook victim Noah, has chosen another way. Pozner began to counter-troll the trolls, flagging thousands of conspiracy videos for policy violations which led to them being taken down. He has also brought the issue to national attention through media appearances, op-eds, open letters, and litigation that helped speed the downfall of Jones.

I soon realized that many of the attackers were fringe internet personalities who used the shooting to profit. They didn’t care about the truth.

Pozner now heads up HONR Network, a company that helps the families of those affected by such mass shootings deal with the digital aftermath. Fresh from winning a defamation lawsuit, Pozner spoke with OneZero…