Hook

In her new book, New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson shows how conspiracy theories went mainstream.

And now it’s Pizzagate, now it’s the coronavirus — the fact that these theories started attaching themselves to every major mass shooting was what convinced family members that this was not going to end, that this was a societal phenomenon, not a Sandy Hook phenomenon. You’d think the families have reason to be incredibly cynical about the way things work, but they still believe that justice is possible and that their story can help improve things for the rest of us because they’re seeing the impact of the world of disinformation in communities all over the place and not just Newtown. I’m just so inspired by that belief. One thing that has been a throughline is that the audience for this has never really changed. Like with Sandy Hook, the people who coalesced around the 2020 election lie were people that were really impervious to outside challenges. It shows a lot of promise because it gets to people before they embrace a conspiracy theory and refuse to let go. He thought presenting the records to them would maybe help convince them of the fact that he was a grieving father of a victim. What I learned through the psychologists and the political scientists I interviewed for the book, about the motives behind the spread of these conspiracy rumors, is that it can be about fact-finding, it can be about a shared doubt in the official narrative. One who I interviewed, Tiffany Moser, said, “I got online and I was like: I am here for anyone who can tell me that these babies didn’t die the way they told us they did.” That was a significant group of people early on. That’s a persistent reaction to this kind of thing: Don’t feed the trolls and they’ll go away. A lot of these young moms also became the core of the HONR Network, which Lenny founded, to take this disinformation down. A lawyer for the families told the Austin American-Statesman that he expects the trial to take place this summer. “Sandy Hook was a foundational moment in the world of misinformation and disinformation that we now live in,” Williamson says.