(SINGING) When you walk in the room, do you have sway? kara swisher Leonard Pozner reflects on how the truth can triumph online. I’m Kara Swisher, and you’re listening to “Sway.” Today I want to talk about how the information age has become the misinformation age. From Covid deniers to QAnon enthusiasts and big lie believers, it sometimes feels like we live in a post-truth world. In fact, it feels like we already live there all the time now. Leonard Pozner is the father of Noah, who, in 2012, at only age six, was murdered at the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Noah was one of 20 children and six educators who lost their lives in that massacre. And while much of America mourned the tragedy, some did not. Rumors abounded online, calling Sandy Hook a hoax. Amongst the chief conspiracists, conservative talk show host and founder of Infowars, Alex Jones. Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I knew they had actors there clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids.
And it just shows how bold they are that they clearly used actors. Leonard Pozner took on Jones first with facts, then with the law, which made him a target for relentless trolling first online, then in real life. Given the threats he and his family suffered, he’s still wary of showing his face in either domain.
So I wanted to talk to Pozner about what he’s learned from a near decade long personal battle against misinformation and what he thinks might solve it. Lenny Pozner, welcome to “Sway.” leonard pozner And I’m not going to ask you to relive the day of the Sandy Hook shooting because I can’t imagine- I have four children myself. When was that, and what did you see? leonard pozner But I do want to hear about the first day you saw lies online. The first time I looked at anything online would have been a few weeks after the tragedy. So right after the tragedy, I didn’t pay attention to anything else. kara swisherĪnd when I did start to look around to see how it was being reported on, I saw right away that the Infowars forums and other websites were really responding to the victims not in a compassionate way. The crisis actors meaning these were actors who acted this out, correct? leonard pozner So topics like crisis actors and false flag and all of those buzzwords that are probably quite common now, wherein at the time of the shooting, that wasn’t something that people were familiar with. Yeah, and what I noticed after the tragedy is that people were affected by this. So most people responded, of course, with compassion and the people that didn’t responded with kind of hate. And that took on the form of all of the accusations that started.Īnd that hate manifested itself with blaming. There’s always been conspiracy theories, but this took on an amplification level and I would say a hate level that was unprecedented. It did, and there was something about the timing of this and the evolution of the internet that really, I’ve heard it referred to as the canary in the coal mine for this type of expansion and these ideas. So it made me angry when I saw that right away. I had entertained many conspiracy theories. And of course, I was familiar with Alex Jones. But to hear them directed at me and what I was going through was extremely upsetting.