In this episode of “Intelligence Affairs,” host Michael Morell talks to journalist and writer Elizabeth Williamson, who tracked the rise and proliferation of conspiracy theories surrounding the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in a new book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy in Battle. Williamson and Morell how conspiracy theories began, who they tend to attract, and how social media corporations have been an integral component of their spread. co-opted through literary governments around the world.
Editor’s note: This episode was recorded before the tragic events in Uvalde, Texas.
STRENGTHS
The appeal of conspiracy theories: “People get a sense of belonging to a group. They get a whole new identity for themselves. They gain a sense of superior social status. They gather in groups, they build themselves. They embroider those theories. They with each other. Many of those Americans have abandoned their families, their jobs, their reputation in the real world just to be part of those kinds of groups. It’s a form of tribalism. . . The internet and social media allow you to locate each other, and they have shaped an entire electorate, and that component electorate now has a role in our politics. “
Role of social media: “There has been such a development in the use of social media through Americans over the last ten years and since Sandy Hook and indeed in the years before, that it is communicating about it without communicating about how conspiracy theories spread online. Without those vehicles, I wouldn’t be involved in the conspiracy theories we have in this country. “
The US is ‘exporting’ politicised disinformation: “Where it took a complicated Cold War adversary like Russia to undermine our democracy and disrupt our electoral process, the 2020 insurrection on Capitol Hill, the lies spread around the 2020 presidential election, the tumult that has happened since then, actually shows that a group of Americans are willing to spread this disinformation on their own. And employing a smartphone or social media, they can do it in minutes where, again, it would never have been imaginable to them. But this concept of spreading disinformation about basic democratic processes, like our elections, is, as you well know, much bigger than me, a playbook that came from elsewhere, and is now being followed by despots around the world. “
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INTELLIGENCE MATTERS – ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON *Editor’s note: This episode was recorded before the tragic occasions in Uvalde, Texas.
PRODUCER: OLIVIA GAZIS
MICHAEL MORELL: Elizabeth, welcome to Intelligence Matters. C’s to reach out to you.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Michael, thank you for having me.
MICHAEL MORELL: So, Elizabeth, you’re the author of a new e-book called “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth. “It’s an amazing read and I think it’s a very vital e-book. So congratulations. I know how complicated it is to write and publish an e-book. Congratulations.
So, as you know, I would like to divide this discussion into two parts. One, the e-book itself, and two, the implications, actually, of Sandy Hook’s tale for national security.
But before I delve into the book, Elizabeth, I need to start linking the two in combination, the book and national security in combination from the beginning. So, he began his career as a journalist reporting from Russia and the East. And I am indeed surprised by the fact that this part of the world, especially Russia, has long had a conspiratorial mentality: if you are Russian, you see sinister forces in the scenes manipulating almost everything.
And I wonder when you were there, if you felt that mentality, number one, and do you think your time there made you more aware of what you saw after all in the story of the sandy hook?Did it help you see more clearly?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: That’s a wonderful question. And, yes, remembering to write my book, I came back in the mid-90s when in Vladimir Putin’s St. Petersburg and heard my first kind of conspiracy theories about elections, actually. That there were hard foreign forces interfering in the duma. and the presidential elections at that time. These were the Yeltsin years and then the transition to Putin. So I went back and had an idea about it.
And at the time, I thought they were pretty funny and so crazy that they were, you know, like “so bad it’s good,” so weird and surprising that no one can take it seriously. It bothers me all those years after thinking, “Wow, those are very similar theories that are gaining ground in our politics here in America today. “
MICHAEL MORELL: OK, Elizabeth, the book, what led you to write it, and we the story arc.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Absolutely. So when I first learned that the families of two Sandy Hook victims were suing Infowars conspiracy announcer Alex Jones in Texas, this was in mid-2018, I think it would be a very attractive verification of whether the First Amendment, like Alex Jones and many conspiracy theorists continually claim to protect their right to spread lies that cause years of torment and threats against other vulnerable people. in the case of Sandy Hook families.
But then I started talking to Lenny Pozner, who is the father of Noah, the youngest victim of Sandy Hook. And temporarily I learned that Sandy Hook is a basic story about how false narratives and incorrect information have gained ground in our society.
So in the book, I hint at Sandy Hook to the fullest of the primary mass shootings, Pizzagate, QAnon, Charlottesville, the coronavirus myths, the 2020 election plot, and that lie that drove the crowd to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. So I grasped through this concept and, you know, I was horrified that an increasing number of Americans for ideological or tribal reasons or, like Alex Jones, for profit, are willing to deny accepted facts and established science.
MICHAEL MORELL: A little bit about the effect on families, okay. Because I think other people think, ‘What difference is it if someone is out there saying a conspiracy theory?’But in this case, it actually had a massive effect on sandy hook families.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes, absolutely. Then, you can draw a continuum for families. So, a few hours and days after the shooting, other people reached out to them on their online accounts so that some of them have created memorial pages on Facebook or their friends have created Facebook pages to increase the budget for funeral expenses of members of the circle of surviving relatives.
And those trolls came to those pages and started harassing family members. They call them liars, saying that sandy Hook never happened at that time, that it migrated from the virtual world to the real one. People gave the impression of filming circle of family members with their mobile phone arrived herera. They sent letters home.
And it alarmed the families, as you can imagine, because it meant that those other people knew where they lived. They searched their trash cans. They appeared at memorial events they organized to raise funds or to commemorate their lost loved ones. And they started confronting them on the street.
MICHAEL MORELL: One of the things that struck me when I read the eBook is that Alex Jones is rarely the only antagonist here. That’s what I thought when I read the eBook. But he’s not the only one.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: No, not at all. It was definitely the biggest and richest amplifier of the Sandy Hook conspirators. But there have been many, many others who have become their content providers. So those were other people who, there’s one in South Florida, Wolfgang Halbig, a retiree, if you can, school administrator, kind of a failure to embark on your retirement. I tried to enter a consulting firm on this front. He had spent a year as a state police officer very early in his career. He tried to merge the two and become a school protection consultant. He actually approached Newtown, offering, in quotes, “to investigate the crime. “
And when his emails went unanswered, he began attacking the facts of the crime and harassing and archiving a bunch of pages of public document requests in Newtown for data that he claimed would be his false allegations. It also raised more than $100,000 to fund this search.
There’s another woman, Kelly White, who works at a cleaning company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who has a long history, you know, of researching conspiracy theories dating back to the ’90s. Demand families online. There were a lot of academics, you know, doctors who were conspiratorial-minded, who wrote articles, created websites, and made videos, calling Sandy Hook a hoax.
MICHAEL MORELL: So, Elizabeth, I wanted to share with you my reaction to reading the book. I think it was a page turn, which is a smart thing, it’s rarely the same, when you read a book. I knew what happened next, but at the same time, I had to put down the eBook to catch my breath. Reading it made me angry. And I wonder if you’ve heard that from other readers.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: It’s very interesting. First of all, thank you for reading the book, and I appreciate other people’s impressions of it. It’s wonderful to hear what other people think and how they react.
And it’s not the only one in this case, Michael. A lot of other people have written to me and said, you know, “It’s hard to get in, especially at the beginning. “Well, for other reasons at first, because I identify the fundamental fact of the shooting so that we have the facts.
And then other people left because they’re so angry that someone dared to question that narrative and not just question it, but confronted other people whose losses were already so wonderful and inflicted some kind of secondary trauma on them by doing that, denying the losses.
So, yes, many other people have done it. And families have an attractive reaction because they have found out themselves. First of all, their reaction is curious because they didn’t know how much was happening to everyone, because the initial reaction was to have no interaction with those other people. And it’s a perfectly general and understandable human response.
So Lenny Pozner, once again, the father of Noah, the youngest victim of Sandy Hook, had technical expertise. And, you know, I knew how this hoax would spread through social media algorithms. And I also knew that this wasn’t going to be a one-time event, that it was the beginning of what was going to be a feature of American life.
And then his reaction was curious. I think a lot of Americans, even though I was immersed in this topic for 3 years, a lot of Americans had no idea what had happened to the families, adding to the families themselves, because they didn’t know how to exchange information about it and tried to avoid it. They expected it to happen, but it never happened. In fact, it metastasized in other mass shootings, which in part encouraged them to fight.
MICHAEL MORELL: Yes, social media corporations are also part of that narrative, right?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes, absolutely. His utter inability to curb the spread of this content and, especially at first, his reluctance to remove this destructive curtain, even though Lenny Pozner has become his project to convince Facebook, Twitter, hosting companies, Google and Google’s YouTube to remove this curtain.
At first, it was like screaming against a brick wall. I couldn’t even get an answer. Therefore, the e-book also describes its progress in development to get its attention, basically through public humiliation.
MICHAEL MORELL: So, Elizabeth, how did that happen? How is it imaginable that such a blatantly false narrative could begin, spread so far, and continue to this day?
I actually went to Amazon and looked at some of the reviews they had posted on their eebook. And the vast majority is positive. But there are some people, there are some conspiracy theorists, who reacted to your e-book and said, “Where are the photos of the young people?The fact that there are no photographs in his e-book proves that young people existed.
I mean, some crazy stuff so far. How is that possible?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: So there are several reasons. One is in the minds of Americans who are the most consistent announcers of this. And Alex Jones, we’re almost forced to differentiate ourselves because he did this for profit. During the years it broadcast this, especially between 2013 and 2016, its audience: so some listeners may not know that it is on a hundred radio stations across the country and that it is broadcast online for four hours each afternoon. Its audience has more than doubled to 50 million more people per month. So, that same figure, $50 million in profits that he made in the same years. So, for him, the motivation was profit.
And Sandy Hook, without a doubt, the evidence in those lawsuits that the Sandy Hook families filed against him, revealed that every time he talked about this, he was given a wider hearing. He moved other people, other people participated. And that brings us to the moment.
So the other people who bought that and turned it into a kind of life search, made a lot, I mean, “psychic source of income,” however, I was talking about it with Lenny Pozner the other day and said, “Elizabeth, it’s not just a psychic source of income that they get out of it. They get a whole new identity.
So, one guy, one of the most pernicious, the administrator of the Sandy Hook hoax Facebook page, which now no longer exists, but at the time had a lot of listeners who accumulated every night and exchanged for hours the Sandy Hook hoax. the theory.
He’s a guy who moves to South Florida. He posed as what he called a “citizen researcher,” a “citizen journalist. “He founded an organization called Media Solidarity Independientes. Se became a completely different user who vowed to expose the lies and incorrect information that the idea got here from the government.
And the Parkland shooting in 2018 happened on his street. And he filmed through a documentary crew wearing his Independent Media Solidarity T-shirt in front of makeshift monuments to the dead, calling it a hoax.
Thus, other people have a sense of belonging to the group. They get a totally new identity for themselves. They have a superior sense of social status. They regroup, they are built. They embroider those theories. They with each other. A lot of those other people have abandoned their families, their jobs, their reputation in the real world just to be part of those kinds of groups.
It’s a form of tribalism, and once you start to deduce from it, those are other people who, when you and I were developing, were some kind of remote user buttoning you into the subway or, you know, maybe you’d get stuck in the circle of relatives meeting. The internet and social media allow them to locate themselves, and they have shaped an entire electorate, and that specific electorate now has a role in our politics.
MICHAEL MORELL: But what about the average type of user, right, who maybe doesn’t take the time to go around the web and sign up for one of those teams and have a conversation, but only the user who listens to Alex Jones, who buys in the conspiracy theory.
Is it a sentiment they can’t accept as true with the government?What do you think motivates the average person?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes, it is. As a CIA analyst, I can perfectly perceive what he is doing here; you build a personality profile. That is precisely what these Americans have. They are other people with a conspiratorial mentality. Therefore, they tend to be suspicious, they are not sure, because, of course, we know that the government has lied to us in history, but they are suspicious of all official accounts, everyone. mainstream media reports. They find an explanation of why to doubt each official publication of information. That’s the first thing.
Secondly, in interviewing them for my e-book, I discovered a lot of traumas in their origins. And here you see other people with that right and left. You know, the most remarkable thing is that you have Robert F. Kennedy, who is one of the biggest and greatest popular anti-vaccine conspirators, an apparent trauma in his past.
And then, on the other side, other people who have lived: Sandy Hook hoaxes that went through the collapse of their family, abuses in their history. So, there’s something like that. There is a sure fault in having interaction in your own perception. , they didn’t realize what they were looking for to achieve in their life. And it provides them with a kind of new vocation in life.
Then there is also a sense of a kind of narcissism. There is a certain complacency in talking to them. They like to possess amazing wisdom and have some kind of inner track.
MICHAEL MORELL: So there have been conspiracy theories, right?But they seem to have a bigger impact. And that certainly, as you say, the Internet is a source of it. Social media is a source of it. Are there other things at stake here?Is there anything about the nature of our society and how it has evolved?How do you think that?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: So, I think we want to communicate about the social media component first. The use of social media by Americans has been so dramatic over the last decade and since Sandy Hook and, indeed, in previous years, that it is to communicate about it. without communicating how conspiracy theories spread online.
Without those vehicles, I would hardly be afraid of the conspiracy theories we have in this country. So, just for comparison, the worst school shooting in U. S. history occurred in 2007. It was the Virginia Tech shooting in Blacksburg, Virginia. 32 other people were killed there. Five years later, in 2012, you have Sandy Hook. I went back and asked a woman whose daughter was injured at Virginia Tech, “Did someone come to your Facebook page and call you a liar or spread conspiracy theories or say you were part of a government hoax?
And he really came back and looked at his Facebook page and said, “No, probably not. “But here’s the difference. That year, 2007, there were 20 million Facebook accounts through other people around the world. Five years later, after Sandy Hook, there was, at the time of Sandy Hook, there were 1 billion. So it’s been incredible. And Facebook is the largest of the platforms.
But Twitter, somewhat relatively small, had in 2007, 5000 tweets per day. In 2012, in the days of Sandy Hook, there were 5000 tweets every second. So, isArray is a very important role that social media plays. in all this. But second, I think we want to go back, and that’s what I do in the e-book, to the connection between an individual and a conspiracy district like Alex Jones and his listeners, and former President Trump.
You know, Trump and Roger Stone, who is his former adviser and a lot of Infowars, knew this group of distrustful and alienated Americans as a potential group just for Trump, that by taking care of them, he could give himself an advantage in a crowded Republican number one box and climb to the top. And he did. He gave the impression on the screen of Alex Jones in December 2015. Alex, in a way, you can hear him train Trump through the conspiracy themes that his listeners believed in. Many of them have now become common in our politics and in our country. . conversation, but at the time, very foreign, unless for Alex Jones’ listeners. And he ran: he was a conspiratorial presidential candidate who had a brain fused with that conspiratorial component of the American electorate.
MICHAEL MORELL: So it’s a weird question, and I think I was looking to ask it at the literary event I attended for your eBook in Politics and Prose, but I couldn’t get my pencil moving fast enough on the sheet of paper. . But I wondered, to what extent are we ourselves to blame here?And what I mean by that is that for years we’ve allowed mainstream politicians to exaggerate things: their campaign, while they govern. for example, from President Biden, who said the withdrawal from Afghanistan was an “extraordinary success” and that no one actually criticized him. This is a more classical policy than the big conspiracy theory and disinformation. And I wonder to what extent. I have allowed one to bleed into the other. What’s your reaction to that?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Yes, I think the hyperbole in our politics, while it’s been there, like the kind of whistling dog that has now become open conspiracy theories, has gained momentum, I think our political discourse in every degree has become more irresponsible. , more hyperbolic, more full of gently discredited lies.
And at the same time, they’re like fact-checking sites, and my colleagues who do this for a living, they’re rushing to support themselves because there are so many out there. And again, a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, is traveling the world as it travels not only through classic broadcast chains, but also online. And so, other people go over the individual lines and them.
So, yes, we will surely have to blame ourselves not only for increasing the tension in our rhetoric at all levels, but also for opting out and spreading online without asking questions and without checking.
MICHAEL MORELL: And as an electorate for saying, “Enough is enough, enough. “Droit. Et, in fact, votes to reflect that.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Oui. Et the electorate will praise this habit if they don’t look any further or if they say, “Well, whatever my side says. “And his Biden example is relevant: if he says what my side says, if they say this, “Why are you asking here?”
I would say that probably more people who adhere to us online are from the left and say, “How dare you check the facts about our team, on the Democratic side,” assuming the total newspaper is also on the left. . . like an editorial board or that we’re not acting in an intelligent religion by making Joe Biden stunned by this falsehood about Afghanistan.
MICHAEL MORELL: So, Elizabeth, you talked about it before, but I need to address it more directly. through the list, and that they are detrimental to our democracy.
And I wonder, did Sandy Hook turn out to be the first or did Sandy Hook somehow contribute to others and play a vital role in the place where we ended up here?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: I think Sandy Hook is a basic story for a number of reasons. It is a confluence of points that are now part of each and every one of the disinformation crusades that are propagated in our politics.
This is how Sandy Hook arrived, as we have already mentioned, to a kind of era of exponential adoption of social networks by Americans. So there were a lot of places where other people can just communicate about it, communicate about it, and spread those theories.
It came here at a time when our politics were incredibly divided and Barack Obama had just been re-elected in a kind of moot campaign. But there was a gang from America and then those Americans really exploded: Donald Trump’s presidency, a lot. of Americans who spread many conspiracy theories about President Obama, adding that he was not born in the United States, and that was the basic lie that Donald Trump spread when he entered politics.
But then the event itself was seen across both sides in one of our crudest and most debatable debates in America, the gun debate. This was noted as a turning point due to the scale of the crime, the deaths of so many young people, both sides of the gun debate knew that what would hold would be a very big war over the new gun legislation.
And then, for the other people on the pro-new gun side, they knew there would be a big fight. And the opposition, other groups, pro-Second Amendment groups, conspiratorial minds among them saw categorically deny the shots as a tool in their toolbox, that or not.
MICHAEL MORELL: Let’s move on, Elizabeth, to the national security component of the discussion. And let me start by asking you about an article you wrote in late April for something called The Times Insider, which I guess is a blog, right??
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: It’s in the internal segment of the paper on page two. It usually says who the Times is and who the hounds are. journalism comes together.
MICHAEL MORELL: Understood. So you’re writing this play and it’s called “Crisis Actors. “Where have I ever heard this? Tell us about this piece. And why did you write it?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Absolutely. So, right after my book came out, we were in the beginning: it came out in March. We were at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And since they won’t forget, who could forget?– there was the bombing of the maternity ward in Mariupol, Ukraine. And subsequently, something considered by many to be an atrocity, some of the pregnant women who were evacuated from this hospital later died. It was tragic and horrible. And I think it’s constant and everybody’s eyes on what was going on in Ukraine.
And Russia, just as quickly, came forward and introduced a disinformation campaign. They lied that it had happened. They said that the hospital was not functioning, that it was a base for Ukrainian fighters, that the airstrike, their own airstrike, an organized provocation across Ukraine. In other words, they did it themselves.
And then, what struck me was that Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, called those evacuated women “crisis actors. “Shooting that was a government pretext for gun control.
MICHAEL MORELL: So, Elizabeth, I saw you write that you think the U. S. The U. S. is now exporting the politicization of disinformation to other countries. By the way, Russia didn’t want in this regard, right?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: No.
MICHAEL MORELL: When we used to. . . when we used to export the equipment to build democracy. Talk a little bit about it. Really powerful
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: So, as if we were talking before about Russia, those terms that are so familiar to us when they were applied to the mass shootings in the United States to describe their atrocities, to deny their atrocities in Ukraine by calling the participants, the murdered civilians, “crisis actors” in a kind of Ukrainian staged plot; I mean, it’s just an indication of how we created a playbook for the other people we saw as creators of misinformation.
Where it once took a complicated Cold War adversary like Russia to undermine our democracy and disrupt our electoral process, the 2020 insurrection on Capitol Hill, the lies spread around the 2020 presidential election, the tumult that has occurred since then, actually shows that a lot of Americans are willing to spread this incorrect information on their own. And by using a smartphone or social media, they can do it in minutes where, again, it would never have been imaginable to them. But this concept of spreading disinformation about basic democratic processes, like our elections, is like, as you well know, much bigger than me, a playbook that came from elsewhere, and is now followed by despots around the world.
Anyone who loses an election can now say and say, as Donald Trump said, “It was manipulated, it didn’t work, it was wrong, it was stolen. “This is a terrible turn of events.
MICHAEL MORELL: And it’s deeply ironic that the country that defends democracy more than any other in the world has exported this tool of authoritarian despots.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: Oui. Et, this literally raises a question, Michael, as we move on, with great apprehension, in fact, to the midterm elections later this year and the presidential crusade of 2024, we’ve noticed that there’s a giant, very tough group of the American electorate and American political leaders who are in a position to disrupt our own elections. And will we worry about Russia and foreign adversaries disrupting our elections?Of course. But we have also shown them that we are more than willing to interfere and annoy them ourselves.
MICHAEL MORELL: I guess the other detail of national security here is not just the authoritarians and despots, on the right, the other people who govern the countries, however, the box to spread false narratives and disinformation is now open to almost everyone, whatever the explanation of why: social, religious, even criminal. And I don’t think from a national security perspective, we’re ready for that.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: No. Do you see a merger of the periphery with the establishment?I mean, you and I are talking after a brutal shooting in Buffalo against ten African Americans committed by a deranged and hateful young man who used an old conspiracy trope, the update theory. The theory that people, black and brown, immigrant, are part of a grand conspiracy to update white American Christians in society.
It’s anything you’ve only heard in the feverish swamps of Reddit or 4Chan before, or on Alex Jones’ show. But now this trope is evoked, whistled, derived from the Republican leadership. And why do they do it? Because in a certain group of Americans, it’s effective. But power will not be the only measure of the dissemination of those messages. These are dangerous.
MICHAEL MORELL: So here’s the last question. And that’s the hardest part. How can we, as a nation, handle this?Personally, I wouldn’t recommend to the government what the fact is. Or does this story, you know, still seem to end with the loss of Alex Jones in several trials?What do you think, what do we do with this question?
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON: So, there are vital and general things that we can do, nationally and politically, and then there are individual things that we can do. So, we can start with the individual. We may all be a little more hygienic online when we come across incendiary curtains, it’s exciting, it makes us angry, it bothers us. “retweet” or “share” online. It’s basic.
I have noticed, and this is very encouraging, my children, who are notoriously active online, much more skeptical and much more judicious in what they post and share. So I think their greater sophistication and the fact that they grew up online is very helpful.
At the political level, a great deal of effort is being made. There are some bipartisan issues of agreement on restricting the broad immunity granted to social media platforms through Section 230, which is the provision that treats them as a channel rather than creators of this destructive curtain and exempts them from things like defamation lawsuits or defamation lawsuits. So they’re talking about adjusting that.
And there’s a really sublime proposition that refers to how those platforms work. So they pulled this curtain because it helps keep you connected online. That’s the business model. It’s not to get in touch with your schoolmates or to help you locate your next wife or anything, it’s actually to keep you online as long as possible so those platforms can collect your non-public data and use it to sell. your products and sell advertising.
So, anything that helps you move on longer, and what infuriates is commitment. So, the more incendiary the content, the longer it will remain. So if social media companies use this destructive content as part of their algorithm, meaning they pass it on to other people to help them stay online longer, they will be to blame for the harm this content inflicts.
So, to me, this is an attractive proposition because it doesn’t mean that one government company or one party or the other or Congress are the arbiters of truth. Because I think that’s how chaos is. So that’s a possibility. At the social science level, many studies are being done to dissuade other people from adopting those theories before they cling to them. Because once they absorb that content, it’s hard, for all the reasons we’ve already talked about, It’s hard to get them to let go. They take too much credit from their club in a conspiracy community.
But at Cambridge, they do research, and it’s about the content of elections, where other people play a game. They are encouraged to devise a conspiracy theory, to propose an “other” organization, an outdoor organization to demonize, to find tactics to make it viral, to make it truly incendiary and anger-generating. And the theory is. . . it’s called the inoculation theory.
The theory is that once other people know how sausage is made by creating the conspiracy theory and spreading it, this incredible sense of wisdom that they want to acquire, will tend to be sensible and distrustful when they come across this online. , so they are more likely to report it and less likely to spread it. And there is a lot of good fortune in this area.
I mean, those studies are still pretty small, but they’re gaining a lot of traction in the EU, and the U. S. State Department is gaining a lot of traction. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security is investing in those studies so that we can prevent other people from adapting to hardcore conspiracy theorists before they start, before diving. down the rabbit hole.
MICHAEL MORELL: He’s Elizabeth Williamson, and the eBook is “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy in the Battle for Truth. “Elisabeth, thank you so much for joining us.
ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON Michael, it’s a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.