synced and corrected by susinz *www.addic7ed.com*
I was walking up the street
to catch the bus
when I heard a man scream
from his car window,
"Fuck you, Dr. Cobb."
I did not recognize his face,
but I knew, if I went on to Twitter,
that it probably had been tweeted about.
Sure enough, it had.
Social media is a wonderful resource.
But it also can be a means to exile people
from the community that they reside in.
They're sharing scientific data,
arguing philosophy
or passing on cooking tips and gossip
night and day through a computer network
called "Internet."
It's tapped a yearning to connect.
It offers games that pit you against opponents
around the country.
Now that I've gotten on the Internet,
I'd rather be on my computer than doing just about anything.
It's really cool.
The Internet has lived up to its promise,
a globally connected community
where you can like, share,
and debate in a digital democracy.
But this is a democracy without ground rules,
where memes can be weapons.
Real events are transformed into fake news.
And those who speak out against the mob
may find themselves pursued by pitchforks and lies.
_
This is Jun,
otherwise known as Twitter Town.
Here, civic life plays out in 140 characters.
It's an experiment in online governance
designed by this man...
José Antonio Rodriguez Salas, the mayor of Jun.
Mayor Salas is not the only politician
whose tweets make headlines,
but to him, Twitter is more than a megaphone.
It's a way to upend the chain of command.
_
Each public office has a twitter handle
to field questions from concerned citizens.
_
In Jun, Twitter is the key to a more perfect community,
with an agenda of total transparency,
free from barriers and bureaucracy.
But the same tools that liberate some
can imprison others.
You don't know who's who online.
It's this cyber world that doesn't abide by any rules.
I mean, if I'm going to be on camera,
I don't want to put myself out there.
I don't want to have to think about
is someone recognizing me
and is that, potentially, a dangerous person?
Lenny Pozner is in hiding,
not from law enforcement,
but from a group of online harassers
hell-bent on exposing him as a fraud.
I have moved several times.
There's an aspect to moving that's...
it's like a reboot.
It's because of what happened to his son Noah
back when they lived in a quaint New England town.
He was kind. He was gentle.
He was sensitive. He was very, very smart.
And he was a little boy that, you know,
didn't always do what he was supposed to do.
But, you know,
he was definitely... the perfect son.
I remember the morning of December 14th
as being basically an ordinary day.
It was a Friday, and the kids were with me,
so I dropped them off at school that morning.
I watched them walk into the school,
and then I slowly rolled away.
The individual that I have on the phone
is continuing to hear what he believes to be gunfire.
It's like if you've ever sort of
taken your eyes off your kid in a supermarket or a store
and then it takes you 30 seconds to find them.
This was that times, you know, a million.
The worst shooting at an elementary school
in American history, it's believed.
I'm Lenny Pozner, and my son Noah
was murdered at the Sandy Hook school shooting.
On that December morning in 2012,
a lone shooter killed 26 people,
most of them small children.
It devastated the village of Sandy Hook,
but the grief of one community
became fodder for another.
Online, a new community was taking form.
Early on, I started posting photos
of Noah on my Google Plus page,
and I started to notice,
you know, comments that were popping up
that I didn't want on an area
that was devoted to Noah's memory.
This new community was made up of people
claiming the shooting was faked,
that Noah and his classmates never existed,
that the parents and mourners were actors,
that the goal was to outlaw guns.
And before long, a digital battle cry rang out.
They weren't just, you know, saying words.
They were feeling it when they were saying it.
To have that kind of...
hate directed at you...
after losing a child, is...
is hard to describe.
There was a time we could ignore
the parts of the web we didn't like,
when our digital footprint didn't follow us
and our enemies couldn't hunt us down.
Those days are gone.
You can choose not to socialize with someone
who's harassing you,
but with social media,
that person lives right there on your phone,
and I cannot erase the Internet of me.
In the south of Phoenix,
Dr. Cicely Cobb lives in Ahwatukee,
a community known as the world's largest cul-de-sac.
I was a teacher at Desert Vista High School.
I taught English and American studies.
I had come to the campus with a long list of ideas
that I wanted to use in my classroom,
but by the end of week 1, I knew that trouble was brewing.
It was her first year teaching at Desert Vista,
and so, of course, people knew
that they probably could get away with a little more.
My name is Nick, and I had senior English with Dr. Cobb.
In the classroom, I saw the amount of disrespect
that she received. It was heckling.
It was anything, really, just to take her down.
Students, like, are so quick to pull out their cellphone,
tweet something real quick, and then put it away.
It happens as soon as the teacher turns their back.
The bulk of the issues that I had in my classrooms,
in terms of student reprimands, was cellphone violations.
I was collecting cellphones all day long.
Every generation has teenage troublemakers,
but not every generation had Twitter.
Now, public shaming can get you likes from the in crowd.
These kids felt that detention was nothing.
It was worth being able to be the popular person
who had the best tweet about Dr. Cobb that day.
Dr. Cobb sought help from the administration.
By her account, she didn't get it.
I was informed that I was trending on Twitter.
And kids will be kids,
but they took their tweets to a different level.
People were saying
how they felt about her as a teacher,
but it always had this racist, sexist undertone to it,
portraying her as a crazy black woman,
while they tried to maintain that it's just a joke.
Just walking down the hallways, I would hear racist remarks,
hear white students saying the N-word
or just making casual jokes.
I don't know if they saw it as racism,
but they definitely found it funny,
no matter who was being hurt by these comments.
To see the magnitude of their race issues
right there on Twitter, it was mind-blowing.
What the "F" is going on?
Hidden behind usernames,
people will say whatever they want.
You know, every community has these people
that stand outside and say that the end of the world is coming.
But if you imagine every single one of those people
everywhere in the world at the same time,
every village idiot
collaborating together with one another,
that's a powerful amount of idiots
that are there when you sit down at the computer screen,
because they're right in front of your face.
My typical morning is to...
...start off with making my coffee
and starting to see if there are new theories,
if there are new ugly things being said about Noah.
In the same way that
compassionate people are drawn to... to Noah
or other victims of that tragedy,
hoaxers are drawn to specific victims
but in a dark way,
in a negative way, to tear down.
A lot of people think that the hoaxer group online
is a small group of people.
It is not.
It is a very large group of people.
There are many seriously missing pieces
to what happened at Sandy Hook,
and they do not seem to be showing up.
He said the guy is sitting in the front of the police car.
Why would they put a suspect in front of the police car?
Did this guy have some major credentials,
that he gets to sit in the front of the police car
after he's caught after a mass shooting?
That school system was shut down for those years.
That's what the records show.
They tell us it was open.
There were no children killed
because there were no children present at the school.
Sandy Hook was a monstrous scam,
instilled fear into every parent in the country,
and it was totally abusive,
actually an act of terrorism being perpetrated
by the American government on the American people.
And it was done to promote gun control.
My name is Jim Fetzer.
I'm a former Marine Corps officer
and McKnight Professor Emeritus
on the Duluth campus of the University of Minnesota.
How you doing, neighbor?
It's great to see you.
As a philosopher, I care about truth.
I despise liars, phonies,
cheats, frauds.
I take offense, and I speak out about it.
Jim Fetzer is a scholar
with the Truther Movement.
They comb major news stories for plot holes,
then turn to the web to compare notes
and devise alternative facts.
I regard myself as a conspiracy analyst
or a conspiracy realist,
and to my dismay,
I've discovered again and again and again
on the major issues of our time...
Sandy Hook, the Boston bombing, Orlando, Dallas...
that the government has been misleading the American people.
Jim's theories contradict law enforcement,
eyewitnesses, victims' families,
and news reports.
But on the web, he's found an audience of thousands,
and his videos have led many to believe
that Sandy Hook was staged.
The American people are entitled to know the truth.
If we who actually have special background
and abilities don't dedicate ourselves
to accomplishing the task,
it won't be done.
The government isn't going to do it.
The government's complicit.
And, in fact, not even the parents
were allowed to see their children
and other striking...
What kind of people are drawn to make videos
where they're just inventing anything that they want to say?
They want to be recognized. They want to be known.
They like the attention.
And even if something is disproven,
they'll find a way around it.
They don't care who they hurt
because there's no cost for them.
There's no moral issue.
While some Sandy Hook families
ignored the Truthers, Lenny spoke out.
He debunked rumors with evidence,
countered lies with proof.
Now he's a primary target.
Lenny sent one protest at one point in time,
to which I responded that, you know,
as far as I was concerned, he was a fraud
and that he had not lost a son at Sandy Hook,
that the school had been closed by 2008,
and that the whole thing was an elaborate scam
where he was a principal player.
It's like the mood in a bar
when people drink and become intoxicated.
I recognized that this was
just the same conspiracy personalities
doing what they do about everything,
and now they were doing it to something
that was so true to my life.
To crusaders on keyboards,
truth may seem elusive.
But here in Newtown,
there's a community that lost its kids
and lives with that truth daily.
And I thank you for coming together
in prayer and in faith tonight,
as we remember our tragedy of December 14th.
We'll take a few moments now to remember with love
those whose lives were lost.
Noah Pozner.
The children had such a really short amount of time
in this world,
and then to rob them of that
is really...
unimaginable.
But if the hoax theory
continues to spread,
then, 30 years from now,
it will be past the point of no return
of convincing people.
When social networks
replace traditional news,
how do we know what is true?
When every voice is heard, does the loudest mob win?
I would consider it a game.
How far can you push someone?
Power can influence any kind of community.
People love power,
and if they have just an ounce of power,
they're going to do anything to obtain more.
In the beginning, it started out as just jokes
amongst certain friends and certain groups.
And as it went on,
it definitely turned into an attack.
They wanted her to get fired.
During her second year at Desert Vista,
the school declined to renew Dr. Cobb's contract.
By then, the Twitter war had grown beyond the classroom
and had taken on a life of its own.
I was constantly looking to the left,
to the right.
Who's around here to tweet something that I'm about to do?
Does someone have their phone out?
Are people looking at me, taking my picture,
talking about me?
I was stalked
at a local grocery store...
...at local shopping centers.
It was to the point where it wasn't just my students.
It was their friends, too.
It became a game.
I was literally the "Pokémon Go."
It was like, "How many points do you get
for hitting Dr. Cobb today?"
I didn't know who these kids were.
I didn't know who their parents were.
I mean, I literally was, like, on Twitter going,
"Who is this person?"
I think they were striving to make me feel so uncomfortable
that I would pack up and leave.
Dr. Cobb stood her ground,
but it came with a price.
Talk about being expelled from a community.
I cannot even worship God in peace.
I was running into too many of the people
who had persecuted me,
So I've sought refuge
in churches outside of Ahwatukee.
With you, we renew our vows to love God
with our whole heart.
Love our neighbor as generously as we love ourselves,
accept Jesus as our savior...
This was definitely a witch hunt...
...but I wasn't the black witch.
I was the black bitch...
...that needed to be exorcised from my community.
No one wanted to acknowledge what she was saying.
They just wanted to brush it under the rug,
call her a crazy black woman and get on with their day.
In 2016, another social media post
from students at Desert Vista High School
appeared online.
This one would make headlines.
There is growing outrage over a photo
of six Phoenix high school students
spelling out a racial slur.
Here's the photo.
It shows six senior girls in black shirts
with gold letters spelling out the N-word.
When those six Caucasian females
spelled out the racial slur with those t-shirts,
I felt vindicated
that finally,
someone is seeing that this campus is racially-charged.
Things on the Internet
don't just stay on the Internet.
It's not this massive multi-player game
that remains online.
It crosses over to the real world.
For Lenny,
there's no escaping the Sandy Hook hoax.
It's a story years in the making,
one that threatens Noah's legacy
and now his father's life.
This wasn't just trolling anymore.
There have been videos made
about places that I've lived using Google Earth
and, you know, kind of walking around
and showing images of the building
and showing where I live.
You're going to die, you motherfucking nigger,
kike, Jew bastard, fag.
Did you hide your imaginary son in the attic?
Are you still fucking him, you fucking Jew bastard?
Lenny resolved to fight fire with fire.
He formed an online community of his own,
the HONR Network.
I had this idea that the HONR Network
would be a group of people that are like-minded.
As long as everyone's anti-hoaxer,
they can contribute to this energy.
Hosting companies have terms of service,
they have acceptable-use policies.
You know, we look for ways where that's violated
because the content is what's spreading this virus.
I hate Google. And I hate Facebook.
And I hate Twitter.
They have created and propagated
this infrastructure of abuse and hate,
and they decide what remains or not.
What Google is ranking is becoming the truth.
There's nothing that checks for accuracy,
so you can invent anything.
You can invent anything.
There is no truth on the Internet.
There is only what people are searching more for
and what they're reading when they search it.
The Internet gave us
a community of our own design.
What have we become?
_
In the future,
if we continue to allow social media
to dictate what the norms are,
you're going to have a community
that looks like Ahwatukee.
It's just a community of followers.
_
synced and corrected by susinz *www.addic7ed.com*