How Alex Jones Weaponized Sandy Hook

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now, President Obama called it the single darkest day of his presidency. Exactly 10 years ago when 20 children and six teachers walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and never walked out. President Biden paid tribute to the victims today and he said, our nation is missing a piece of its soul. But the heartache didn’t end there. Conspiracy theories cast illegitimate doubt on the shooting and caused inordinate pain to the parents. Elizabeth Williamson, author of the book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy”, joins Hari Sreenivasan now to explore the disinformation campaign and whether families will ever receive justice and compensations for their suffering.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Elizabeth Williamson, thanks for joining us.

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON, AUTHOR, “SANDY HOOK: AN AMERICA TRAGEDY” AND JOURNALIST, NEW YORK TIMES: It’s my pleasure, Hari. Good to see you.

SREENIVASAN: In the beginning of your book, you take great pains to point out the amount of research, the amount of interviews, the number of interviews that you did. But I think it’ll become apparent in this conversation why but why did you do that at the outset?

WILLIAMSON: Thanks, Hari. I did that because I wanted to do two things. One, establish the baseline truth of an event that, unfortunately, has become a foundational story and how disinformation spreads in our society. And so, it’s been questioned and denied by so many people. So — and then I also wanted to point out how many records there are out there that tell the truth of what happened on December 14, 2012. And the record is voluminous. And the investigations have been replete. So, I wanted to show readers of the book that, you know, there is plenty out there telling you exactly what happened that day.

SREENIVASAN: When you talk to, kind of, the survivors of this tragedy, in all the different ways that they’ve been affected, beyond the immediate grief of losing their child, what does the disinformation, what has the — what are the, sort of, campaigns of lies do to them?

WILLIAMSON: Hari, it’s a significant secondary trauma that is inflicted on these individuals. I mean, they — when they went through this tragedy one thing that they did receive from the great majority of Americans was an outpouring of heartbreak and support and positive messages to them. You know, people, you know, telling them that they’ve kept their loss in mind. That they grieved with them. And then when you have a growing swath of Americans, of their own fellow citizens, saying that this lost didn’t occur. And that — not only that, that this was some sort of government gun control plot and they were accomplices in the plot. So, it’s sort of villainizing them and demonizing them. I mean, that was just really difficult for them to take. Because if there’s one thing that people look for when they are grieving this way, it is the community of others. So, to have part of your community and your own nation calling you a liar and a fraud and saying that this horrific loss did not happen to you was just devastating to them.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you write, it has happened many times since, but Sandy Hook was the first mass tragedy to spawn an online circle of people impermeable and hostile to reality and its messengers. You basically wrote that these conspiracies, that this actually didn’t happen, started so fast after that tragedy. How did it happen?

WILLIAMSON: Yes, within hours these theories began. And I would have to place at the center of this Alex Jones of Infowars, who has an audience of tens of millions of people. And so, he gave voice to the suspicions among misguided Americans that, you know, this was a so-called, false flag operation. A government plot to institute draconian gun control measures. And Jones, on his show, within hours of this shooting, put that forward. I think both sides knew of the gun debate — rather, knew that this was going to be a watershed moment. But what people didn’t understand was that this was a watershed in the spread of these false narratives in our society. And this is something that we’ve seen happen repeatedly over the past 10 years since Sandy Hook. There was one father, Lenny Pozner, whose son, Noah Pozner, was the youngest Sandy Hook victim, who has a technology background. And he did understand that these falsehoods spreading on social media where the beginning of a trend, and we have seen that since. So, we’ve gone from, you know, these false theories attaching themselves to Sandy Hook, then to most mass shootings, then Pizzagate, then the great replacement theory that led to the violence in Charlottesville. Coronavirus myths. The 2020 election conspiracy that brought the rioters to the capitol on — in January of 2021. So, it really was, kind of, the beginning of a terrible trend in our society.

SREENIVASAN: You know, what’s interesting is we all know someone who is, kind of, just suspicious. Might be drawn to conspiracies. And what you lay out is also the role of the algorithms behind social media in here. These people who might have been by themselves found friends. What did that do to them?

WILLIAMSON: Absolutely. So, it’s really important to remember and in a strange way comforting to know that most of the people who attach themselves to this particular body of falsehoods don’t necessarily believe it. But they’re getting something out of being part of a group of Sandy Hook deniers or a group of conspiracy theorists around any major event. And that’s — that they get a chance to form a new identity from themselves. They become citizen journalists or investigators. They find other friends. A lot of conspiracy theorists, as you point out, were very isolated before the internet and before social media. Here they find this group of people, they become a, kind of, army of misguided people. A closed circle. They, sort of, praise each other. They embroider these theories. They create a growing body of falsehoods and they defend them. And sometimes with confrontation, and as we’ve seen, with violence.

SREENIVASAN: So, tell us a little bit about Alex Jones here. What did Sandy Hook do for him? And what is his role in the spread of how these conspiracy theories make it into the mainstream?

WILLIAMSON: Alex Jones — for Alex Jones, Sandy Hook was, first of all, a driver of sales on his Infowars website. His business model is that he sells products in advertising adjacent to these theories on his Infowars online and radio show. So, when people listen to his show, he pitches them products like dried food and doomsday prep or gear for your shelter when you’re preparing for the ends of times. Diet supplements and quack cures for people who distrust traditional medicine in established science. So, he uses these, kind of, viral theories to move merchandise. And he makes up to $70 million a year in revenues doing that. So, for him, this definitely was a profit-making event and this theory was something that, as we’ve seen in court, he was tracking how successful, you know, the sales were and the viewership was, as he spoke about this theory.

SREENIVASAN: There was an instance right after Newtown where one of the parents, reluctantly, sort of, steps up to a press lectern to address this tragedy. What is important about, I guess, that speech, and more specifically, a few seconds right before that happens?

WILLIAMSON: So, yes, you’re speaking about Robbie Parker, Hari, whose daughter, Emilie Parker, died at Sandy Hook. He was the first relative of a victim to speak publicly. So, he was hearing from friends that media were trying to, you know, piece together the lives of all of the victims and say a little bit about them. And he wanted that information to come from him. So, he agreed to meet at his church in Newtown, out in the parking lot at, you know, just a lectern. What he thought would be a single journalist, but really it was a sea of cameras and reporters and microphones. And so, when he steps to the lectern, he gave a, kind of, shocked, gasping half laugh. And Alex Jones seized upon that, that split second, beginning what was otherwise a wrenching and heartbreaking recollection of Emilie’s life. And he used that half laugh to say, Robbie Parker is an actor and he’s a fraud and he’s making this up, and he’s getting into character. And he played that video snippet over and over again for years. And in so doing he turned Robbie Parker into, kind of, the face of this false idea. That these parents and relatives of the victims were participants in a government plot.

SREENIVASAN: But where did that idea of crisis actor come from?

WILLIAMSON: That’s really an interesting thought because the person who really coined that in this context was a man named James Tracy. Who, at the time, unbelievably, was a journalism professor at Florida Atlantic University. And he had found a website in which people were offering to help first responders rehears for the response to a mass tragic event, you know, mass casualty event. And so, they were offering people, who they called crisis actors, to pose as victims so that firefighters and EMTs could practice triage and first aid and evacuation. And he applied that term to the Sandy Hook families and it stuck. And it sticks to this day to a variety of people who are falsely accused of participating in government plots, including, most recently, it was used by the Russian to describe the women who were evacuated from the maternity hospital that the Russians bombed in Mariupol. They were calling them crisis actors. So, that just gives you an idea of the virality of these terms and how they have come to pervade our culture.

SREENIVASAN: So, what is the cost of being called a crisis actor or being, kind of, the center of one of these conspiracies? What is the cost to the parents of these children who were murdered in their daily lives? Do they have to deal with this?

WILLIAMSON: Yes. So, the abuse for them began online. People started going on to their personal social media pages and leaving vile comments. Calling them actors and liars, frauds, and worse. They went on to social media pages that were created by their friends and family, both to memorialize the victims and also to raise money for things like funeral expenses. Then they started to confront them on the street. They showed up at their homes. They dug through their trash. They looked in their windows. They harassed family and friends. They disrupted memorial events that they were holding to commemorate the lives of their loved ones they lost that day. And then they began to threaten their lives. And some individuals have actually been arrested and jailed for doing this over the years.

SREENIVASAN: There have been a series of lawsuits and — against Alex Jones. What is the state of that now?

WILLIAMSON: So, in — as you’re saying, in mid-2018 the families, in total, of 10 Sandy Hook victims sued Alex Jones for defamation in a series of four separate lawsuits filed in Texas and Connecticut, later combined into three. At the end of last year, after nearly four years of stonewalling, refusing to submit business records and testimony ordered by the courts, the courts in both of those states found him liable by default, which meant that he lost those cases. He lost his ability to defend himself in court because he wasn’t compliant with what the judicial system requires. So, that set the stage for a series of three trials for damages. One that was in Austin this summer, in which a jury awarded Neil Heslin and and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Lewis who died at Sandy Hook a total of nearly $50 million in compensatory and punitive damages. And then a very big case brought by the families of eight victims in Waterbury, Connecticut, that negative verdict of $1.4 billion dollars for those plaintiffs, those family members. And then there is one more damage of trial brought by Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa whose son in Noah Pozner, and that is scheduled for March 27. Alex Jones is trying to evade these verdicts that he’s already received and so he has declared bankruptcy and so that is moving through the courts.

SREENIVASAN: So, how do we deal with that? It seems that we’re in an era where disinformation and misinformation spreads a lot farther and faster than the truth.

WILLIAMSON: Yes, unfortunately, you know, we have a lot to lay on the doorstep of the big social media platforms for that. They can spread this material with impunity. Something needs to be done to rein in that ability to spread disinformation and not be held, you know, liable or even responsible for the consequences when, you know, vulnerable people are harassed or when our democracy is eroded by the lies, as we saw on January6, 2021 and in election questioning since. So, there is some work being done to try and adjust the policies governing social media platforms so that it — there’s a disincentive for spreading this disinformation. And then on the personal front there is some work being done developing some ways to teach people how to recognize these manipulative viral conspiracy theories when they encounter them in the wild. When they see them online. Because once someone embraces them for all those social reasons, it’s really hard to get them to relinquish their grip on these theories. But you can teach people to be a little more savvy and aware when they encounter them online and to be more likely to report them and less likely to spread them.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that there is any step that we can take? Is there a legislative solution? Is there something about holding social media companies responsible that doesn’t trample free speech?

WILLIAMSON: If you look at the social media platforms, first of all, there is a wide misconception that this is a freedom of speech issue when a lot of what happens here is happening on private platforms that are businesses. This is not government stifling who want freedom of speech. This is companies saying, by spreading falsehoods, you are or inciting violence through these falsehoods. You are violating our terms of service. That is not a violation of free speech principles. And companies have to be incentivized, either through penalty or through some kind of positive measure to tighten the cranks on this kind of, you know, disinformation that’s spreading and causing these problems. You know, downstream problems both in our democracy and the violence that we are seeing and the domestic terror plots that are based on these misconceptions. So, if a company is using disinformation or viral conspiracy means to draw attention and to end — they’re pushing it out through their algorithms to people in order to keep them online, one of the models says that that should be held as a violation of section 230, or an outright violation that if you’re actively as a company, as a very profitable, successful, business, using disinformation to draw in and reel in and keep people online, then you should be held liable for that content.

SREENIVASAN: So, what are these families looking for now 10 years afterwards? I know some of them were party to the lawsuits against Alex Jones but, every parent will tell you that I don’t really care how much money, you’re never going to give me back my kid. So, what is it that they’re looking for?

WILLIAMSON: They really are looking to alert Americans to the fact this is not something that just impacted them. That it wasn’t this specifically horrible nature of this crime that ignited these conspiracy theories, that this phenomenon is pervasive. That there is a growing number of Americans who are willing to embrace these delusions and act on them. And that’s eroding the way our politics operates, the way we conduct ourselves online, and really how our society functions. So, that is their message. And you’re absolutely right, Hari. The money doesn’t matter to them. But they want people who engage in this to be to account.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth”, author and journalist for The New York Times, Elizabeth Williamson, thanks so much for joining us.

WILLIAMSON: It’s my pleasure, Hari. Thank you.