Repost: Can One Person Make a Difference?
I am re-upping this post in order to provide a concrete example of something I believe is important—the damage that can be done to people’s lives via online platforms that do not vigilantly moderate lies and hate speech (as we know, hate speech and lies, via conspiracy theories, often go hand-in-hand), much of which was done by white supremacists in fear of changes to gun laws. Look at the list below of what one private citizen, Lenny Pozner, and a ragtag group of volunteers had to do on their own, for free, in order to take a stand for truth. Although it is a difficult read, especially the first few chapters, I cannot recommend Williamson’s book enough. These are real things that happened to real people and it took way too long for many social media platform to help them.
Yesterday I wrote about a trip to the home of poet W.S. Merwin, who, over the course of 40+ years, planted and entire forest with his wife. Today’s entry will feel like a dramatic shift, but the common thread is my interest in individuals, or small groups, who effect important change in the face of towering opponents and long odds.
We need to hear these stories.
I’m not talking about celebrities, the extremely wealthy, or elected officials who have ample funds or the ability to craft legislation—I am talking about people largely unknown, about people often thrust into situations they never wanted and would have, if in their power, avoided at any cost. Maybe this is someone like you. So today I’m writing about Leonard Pozner.
I learned about Lenny Pozner while reading Elizabeth Williamson’s Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth. Williamson herself is a difference maker—investigating this incredibly painful topic to focus not on the tragedy itself, but the compounding tragedies of its aftermath. I would normally recommend this book without reservation (an incredible and brave piece of work) but given the subject matter I will pause in doing so. The attack itself is covered in the first few chapters, but the book then transitions into an urgent subject for everyone living in our online world: disinformation, lies, harassment, cruelty from an anonymous distance, and the undermining not only of democratic and social institutions, but the very notion of truth. (I declined to use quotation marks, even while pointing to truth as a word.) Williamson’s book was published before the recent AI explosion and yesterday’s decision by a Louisiana judge arguing that the first amendment makes it unconstitutional to try to prevent the spread of disinformation. (If this were true, there would be no requirement to speak the truth in courtrooms and no such thing as perjury.)
Here’s a short version of an unbelievable story: on the very day that Sandy Hook occurred, there were already people denying that the event was real, with Alex Jones and Infowars leading the charge. To be clear, the people we are talking about elevate the term “conspiracy theorist” to pathological levels, with one of the symptoms being inflicting intolerable cruelty on people who had already suffered the intolerable.
Sometimes it takes one person to stand up and say “no.” To throw themselves into the teeth of a machine significantly larger than themselves, no matter the cost. Lenny Pozner, who lost his son at Sandy Hook, is one such person.
As disinformation and lies about Sandy Hook began to spread online, with people who has just lost their children literally being pressed to “prove” that their children weren’t alive, or were even real and not “crisis actors,” Lenny Pozner drew a line, stood at that line, and never wavered. Basically, he fought tirelessly to remove every single online post saying that his son’s death was a hoax. In other words, one man decided to fight the internet and won. How is this possible?
Here’s an abridged list of Pozner’s efforts:
He met with a private Facebook group of Sandy Hook “truthers,” offering to, in good faith, answer any questions they had about his very real son. He tried to change their minds.
He craftily relied on copyright law to have posted images of his son taken down by the hosting platforms. (As the photographer, he held the rights to the images of his son.) This became his primary form of attack.
People who saw what Pozner was doing began to join him, volunteering their time, in a group known as HONR. They would search exhaustively for images and content related to Sandy Hook and Pozner’s son, conducting what Williamson calls “copyright strikes,” including against Alex Jones. (Think of the number of hours this must have required.)
He organized HONR’s volunteers to keep records of “takedowns” so as not to duplicate efforts, including taking down a site hosted in the Netherlands.
Their efforts, the sheer quantity of takedown notices, as Elizabeth Williamson writes, caught the attention of big tech companies: “YouTube eventually opened a back channel for Lenny to report content directly. HONR got GoFundMe and PayPal to nuke [a hoaxer’s] accounts.” (Emphasis mine.)
He and his former wife wrote an open letter, published in The Guardian, directly to Mark Zuckerberg detailing their experience and calling out his hollow promises of content moderation. (Facebook had been particularly unhelpful.) According to Williamson’s reporting, within days, Facebook’s share price quickly dropped and they took down Alex Jones’s Facebook page.
Ten years after starting this work, Facebook named Pozner—this one person (!)—a “trusted partner”; YouTube named him a “trusted flagger”; pre-Musk Twitter met with him specifically to get feedback on their content moderation policies.
He finally sued Alex Jones and Infowars—the first of a number of cases to make it to court. The dominoes fell from there, with Jones losing multiple cases and millions and millions of dollars.
Lenny Pozner did all of this while he and his former wife were doxed repeatedly and regularly received death threats. According to the New York Times, they had to move nearly 10 times.
If you find the above remarkable, consider this: Lenny Pozner started engaging with these people because, like them, he had once listened to programming like Infowars and had entertained conspiracy theories when he was younger. In other words, he had to change himself before moving on to change others.
Sandy Hook happened on my birthday, a fact which is utterly unimportant. I’ve long passed the age where I think much about my birthday except in relation to my children. Without fail, as my children are still young-ish, I look forward to a card, handmade and handwritten, speaking something to me. So I awoke that day looking forward to gifts from the hands of my children, one who was a first grader and the other in kindergarten.
I tell the story of Lenny Pozner because the enemy he decided to take on is, with rapidly advancing technology, more Protean than ever. Lying is not protected speech, and there aren’t “both sides” to lies that somehow magically balance them out. I have a feeling Lenny Pozner’s example will be one we need to refer to more and more.
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Notes:
Elizabeth Williamson, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth (Basically, I learned everything about this by reading Williamson’s work.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/04/business/federal-judge-biden-social-media.html
https://apnews.com/article/arts-and-entertainment-shootings-austin-texas-education-7f41616ffbe55514c1370c19ce77558b
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/us/politics/alex-jones-sandy-hook.html