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  • 2018-02-20 (xsd:date)
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  • Were News Stories About the Florida Mass Shooting Posted Days Before It Happened? (en)
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  • A gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on 14 February 2018, killing seventeen people — mostly teenaged students. Immediately, in what has become a deeply troubling (yet entirely predictable) pattern, Internet trolls took the tragedy as yet another opportunity to hawk false flag conspiracy theories. Before the families of massacre victims even had the chance to bury their loved ones, disreputable outlets and personalities like InfoWars' Alex Jones began claiming without evidence the shooting was a false flag, or a government operation carried out for the purpose of seizing guns from Americans. Alex Leary, Washington bureau chief for the Tampa Bay Times, reported that an aide for Florida Rep. Shawn Harrison had claimed in an official e-mail that child survivors of the Florida shooting were crisis actors who travel around the country posing as victims in mass shootings: Others pounced on a Google search engine glitch that mischaracterizes the publishing dates of news stories to claim reports about the shooting were posted in advance. For example, a site dedicated to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Henry Makow posted an image of the Google search results and claimed there were crisis actors and multiple shooters, both common conspiracy theory motifs. Images like this one circulated on the message board 4chan and various other disreputable web sites: It might look damning, except that this screenshot shows nothing more than the result of a known glitch with Google that sometimes shows the wrong dates in search results, as a Google spokeswoman told us: Google's public search liaison Danny Sullivan addressed the issue on Twitter, explaining why some of the article dates were misleading: The false flag conspiracy theory is applied almost as a reflexive reaction to promote unfounded fears of a government takeover, which will be preceded by a forcible national gun grab (although there's never any explanation offered for how a government entity might be clever enough to keep the same hoax with the same people going over and over again for years but too stupid to be able to orchestrate a full takeover). Although it is hardly original, it is sadly employed as grounds to harass victims of mass shootings. Since at least the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, the families of shooting victims have been relentlessly harassed. One conspiracy theorist was sentenced to prison for sending a death threat to the father of a child who was killed in that shooting. (en)
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