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After a gunman murdered Lenny Pozner’s baby, conspiracy theorists relentlessly attacked Pozner on-line. Then they got here for him in individual.
Pozner’s 6-year-old son, Noah, was one in all 26 individuals killed within the taking pictures at Sandy Hook Elementary School eight years in the past. Shortly after, conspiracy theorists took to the net to unfold lies, saying the taking pictures was staged and that individuals like Pozner had been being paid to pretend kids’s deaths.
Pozner fought again, acquiring a copyright for images of his son and asking platforms to take away the false info. That is when he grew to become a goal.
People posted his private, figuring out info on-line, in a apply often known as doxing. Without warning, the data was accessible in public boards, together with his birthdate, his social safety quantity, and the addresses and images of properties he had lived in going again nearly twenty years. To keep forward of the threats, he has moved his household greater than half a dozen instances.
But harassers have nonetheless discovered him. Pozner was as soon as in courtroom to acquire a restraining order for somebody cyberstalking him when one other stalker confirmed up exterior the courtroom to taunt him in individual.
For his security, theatrical make-up artists created a disguise for him to put on throughout his 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley, which was shot earlier than the pandemic.
“There isn’t any longer a separation between the online world and the offline world,” Pozner mentioned. “What is said about you will carry over into your personal life, into your career, into your relationships, into your community. And it will impact your life.”
Pozner’s story demonstrates that preventing again in opposition to on-line harassers may be difficult—and infrequently requires the sufferer to be proactive.
Four years after his son’s homicide, Pozner turned to the FBI for assist. A lady who believed the Sandy Hook taking pictures was a hoax left threatening voicemails for him, together with one which mentioned, “You are going to die. Death is coming to you real soon.” That lady, Lucy Richards, was finally sentenced to 5 months in jail.
But Richards’ case was uncommon, partly, as a result of she referred to as from her personal telephone quantity, making her identification simply traceable by regulation enforcement. Many of the others who’ve harassed Pozner have carried out so anonymously.
“Of the dozens of people who’ve harassed him, the other people who have threatened him, none of them have paid much of a price, if any price at all, because that’s not the way it works,” mentioned 60 Minutes’ Henry Schuster, who produced this week’s report with Pelley. “The law is really ill-equipped in the cyber age to deal with cyber harassment.”
Virginia couple Matt and Maatje Benassi discovered how little authorized recourse victims have after they grew to become focused on-line in the course of the early weeks of the pandemic final yr. Conspiracy theorists had concocted a narrative that claimed Maatje was COVID-19’s affected person zero—the individual chargeable for bringing the coronavirus into the world.
The Benassis quickly started receiving dying threats. When their residence deal with was posted on-line, they took the menace to their native police division, the FBI, and even the State Department.
But there was little regulation enforcement may do.
“Even though we’re receiving death threats, they didn’t say, we’re coming to the Benassis to kill them tonight,” Matt Benassi mentioned. ”And they want something that they can act on right away.”
The couple employed a lawyer however discovered that, when coping with harassers on the web, closure is commonly not so simple as submitting a lawsuit.
“We’ve put a lot of time into trying to set up a defamation case,” Matt Benassi mentioned. “But you realize that for someone who probably has very little money, even if we won a defamation case, it would cost us probably more money than we can even get out of him.”
The Benassis, nevertheless, have had some success. They turned to Lenny Pozner’s non-profit, the HONR Network, which focuses on eradicating conspiratorial content material from platforms like YouTube and Facebook. With Pozner’s assist, they had been in a position to get George Webb, the principle COVID-19 hoax peddler focusing on the Benassis, faraway from YouTube.
Pozner has additionally efficiently filed defamation fits in opposition to high-profile conspiracy theorists. Alex Jones, who claimed the Newtown, Conn. college taking pictures was a hoax throughout his radio present Infowars, was ordered to pay $100,000. Jones later admitted in affidavit that “psychosis” led him to say the taking pictures was faked. In one other case, Pozner was awarded $450,000 in a defamation case in opposition to the editors of a ebook that claimed the Sandy Hook taking pictures was a hoax.
According to the HONR Network, one in 5 adults has skilled extreme and extended on-line harassment that always continues offline. For Pozner, the web shouldn’t be a spot the place individuals can say something they need, nevertheless dangerous.
“I think that people don’t understand the concept of freedom of speech,” Pozner mentioned. “And the internet has now blurred that definition. It doesn’t give people the right to defame someone or incite others to hunt someone down. Just generally terrorizing someone is not free speech.”
The video above was produced by Will Croxton and Brit McCandless Farmer. It was edited by Will Croxton
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