After the massacre, falsehoods were spread about the killer, the policemen and the victims The script seen after the Newtown massacre ten years ago is repeated
On Telegram, and on 4chan – a site frequented by the far right – a few hours later, we already read: killer of the massacre from Uvalde era transgender. False statement with evidence attached, of course false: dozens of photos showing a guy in women’s clothes stolen from a user on Instagram. Then came the Proud Boys, the group of white supremacists who became famous after the attack on the Capitol. Of course, the shooting was the result of hormone therapy, they wrote in their chats. To close the circle – indeed, to widen it – was Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, a member of the House of Representatives, who posted on Twitter (and then removed): a transsexual, left-wing clandestine foreigner named Salvador Ramos. The kind of junk you like.
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Not even time to count the dead, which on social networks is already the conspiracy theories on the Uvalde massacre – where the eighteen year old Salvador Ramos killed 21 people, including 19 children – have made their way through the message boards of thousands of Americans, adding another analogy with the Sandy Hook massacre, which took place ten years ago in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty-year-old Adam Lanza then killed 27 people, 20 of whom were children between the ages of six and seven.
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Primary school was not enough, the little dead among the desks and corridors, the young age of the killer and former pupil. The images of the families destroyed by pain in the school parking lot were not enough to unite these two towns of the American province, geographically very distant (3,200 kilometers, thirty hours by car). To complete the tragic similarity came the fake news. What happened to the Sandy Hook families is now happening to the Uvalde families. In addition to grief over the loss of their children, Connecticut parents have faced the humiliation of defending themselves against the false and slanderous allegations of conspiracy theorists for ten years.. Now it happens for every news story, but in Sandy Hook the conspiracy theorists have divided a community, ruined lives already put to the test by fate.
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In 2012 Telegram did not yet exist. In that case it all started with a closed Facebook group, attended by about ten people. The image on the page was that of a child with black-rimmed eyes, a muddy finger pressed to his lips. They began to wonder if the massacre was real, if it were not engineered by the federal government, by the state. There were those who exchanged photos of the killed children to compare them with others they met on the street, trying to prove that the victims were still alive, that it was all a hoax. There were those who claimed to have seen them at their funeral. For instance, Lenny Pozner and his wife were the parents of Noah, a six-year-old boy killed in the massacre. They were accused of being actors, of crying on command in front of the cameras. To convince them that their son’s death was true, they found themselves forced to publish the hospital report. But the more I tried to explain the truth, the more the conspiracy theorists attacked me, Pozner said. They were inundated with threats and eventually had to move houses.
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In Uvalde the script repeats itself. In addition to the false news of the transgender killer, there are those who claim that the shooting was orchestrated to remove the police
engaged on the border with Mexico and thus allow drug traffickers and criminals to cross the border. As with Sandy Hook, there are those who wrote on social media that the parents of the victims were not desperate enough, that they were actually actors playing a role. Also on Telegram, far-right groups have spread another fake news about Salvador Ramos. They wrote that he was an undocumented immigrant, even after Roland Gutierrez, a senator from Texas, confirmed that he was born in North Dakota.
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May 26, 2022 (change May 26, 2022 | 23:50)
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