Darragh Worland:

Welcome back to Is that a fact? brought to you by the education nonprofit News Literacy Project. I’m your host Darragh Worland. In part two of our two-part 10^th-anniversary special on the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, we speak with Lenny Pozner, who lost his six-year-old son, Noah, on that dreadful day.

When Lenny and his former wife Veronique got word of the shooting, they both rushed to the school to collect their three children. Their two daughters soon appeared along with most of the school’s other children, but they waited for hours for word about Noah in a nearby firehouse until news of his fate finally came.

Over the next few days and weeks, as the reality of his murder slowly sank in, the false narrative started to swirl all around them and the other Sandy Hook families. With a background in tech and a fascination for conspiracy theories, Lenny instantly knew he was in for the fight of his life, and he’s kept up that fight for the past 10 years. Here’s Lenny’s story.

Darragh Worland:

Thank you for joining me today, Lenny, especially to talk about such a difficult subject. Noah had just turned six when the tragedy happened, and I know as a parent that a child can live a lot in six short years. Can you tell our listeners about Noah?

Lenny Pozner:

Well, Noah was, he was just a regular six-year-old boy. He was enjoying school. He was enjoying making new friends in school. He was planning all of the different things that a six-year-old has enough attention to plan. He had a birthday party to go to the weekend after the shooting, and he had other play dates that he was planning, and he was having a great time living his life. Like any other six-year-old, he went to school one morning in his classroom and that’s where his story ends. His birthday’s coming up on the 20th, and of course, Noah is a twin, so it all happens in almost a surreal way because his sister is now going to be 16 and Noah is forever six. He was just a regular little boy that never got a chance to get past being six.

Darragh Worland:

I have five-year-old twins, so I can only imagine maybe more so than other parents. How is she doing? How is his sister doing?

Lenny Pozner:

She’s doing well. I don’t know what Noah’s sisters would’ve been like had they not lost a brother and also, been right there where people were dying and hearing everything. So they’re doing well. I don’t know if they would’ve grown up differently. They probably would have, but they’re teenagers, 15 and 17, soon to be 16 and 18. Noah was basically five. He had just turned six. He was just six for a few weeks, so he didn’t really even earn his being six. You can understand that he was a five-year-old that just lost his tooth and then had a birthday.

Darragh Worland:

His sisters as well had both gone through the trauma of living through that shooting. I can’t imagine what that was like for your family to go through and then to have the reality of it denied. Can you remember the first time that you heard the Sandy Hook shooting described as a hoax?

Lenny Pozner:

I probably became aware of it right away. I was tuned into some of the alternative views and conservative views like Alex Jones and Info Wars and other things. So, right after the tragedy, I cut myself off of all news and all information. I wasn’t paying attention to anything. But as soon as I started paying attention, I became aware of that right away. These weren’t ideas that were unfamiliar to me, so I knew exactly what was happening. I knew exactly where they were going with this and how absolutely dangerous this is going to be.

Darragh Worland:

Were you someone who was an adherent to any conspiracy theories, or did you follow them for entertainment?

Lenny Pozner:

Yeah, I would say it would’ve been more entertainment. I wouldn’t say that I am or was like today’s hoaxer who’s really committed, and this is almost like their religion. I enjoyed it. Anything like about UFOs or some weird geopolitical idea I found interesting and that was fun back then. Of course, my life changed, and when some of those ideas get directed towards you, that alters the enjoyment factor. So that particular brand of science fiction was no longer entertainment for me.

Darragh Worland:

At what point did you decide to respond to the hoaxers once you’d tuned into them? It sounds like you called them hoaxers more than conspiracists.

Lenny Pozner:

Yeah. Well, I started using that term very early on, I think, in 2013. Of course, that term existed, I think it just was applied to different people in a different way. As I became aware of it, I immediately responded to it right away. So, I sent an email out to in Info Wars in January of 2013, so that was just weeks after the tragedy and was very polite, let him know that I’m aware of what they’re saying and what they’re doing, and that I’m familiar with his show and that he really needs to knock it off.

Their response was denial. “We’re not doing that. Of course not, that’s not us. We’re absolutely saying that it’s a real event.” That kind of response. There were several more emails back and forth. I let him know how I felt about it, and I also contacted some of his guests that had gone on his show, people that had been on a show, people that had been on Fox News, people that had been in other places and said, “Well, how can you be participating in a show like that knowing that they’re absolutely lying. They’re talking about something that’s so tragic in my own life?” The response I got was, “Well, that’s show business.” That was it. It was that was simple and that clear.

Darragh Worland:

It’s interesting that they would choose to respond at all if that’s what they’re going to say. That’s so callous.

Lenny Pozner:

Yeah. It was a private conversation I haven’t really shared actually, and haven’t really mentioned that I think before. It just popped into my mind now, but that’s that world of alternative news and-

Darragh Worland:

And profiteering.

Lenny Pozner:

Yes, a lot of profiteering. You’re right about that.

Darragh Worland:

Your first point of contact was with Alex Jones. Then I think I’ve heard you talk about going onto some groups on social media where a lot of the members are moms, for example, with young children who are maybe not the ones who are propagating the hoaxes or the conspiracy theories, but they’re the believers, the adherence, and that you were on these groups and doing what you could to try to dissuade them and … tell them what really happened. Can you tell me about that?

Lenny Pozner:

I responded to misinformation right away, and I was dealing with a lot of other misinformation. I wasn’t just dealing with entities like Info Wars and closed groups of deniers and people that were mocking the victims and all the families. I was also dealing with regular media as well because there were mistakes. There were mistakes as it related to my own family and my own experience. I spent a lot of 2013 battling that actually, because that took priority.

Darragh Worland:

Reaching out to the news media and reporters who were spreading misinformation but of a different kind, not disinformation in the sense that they’re deliberately spreading falsehoods?

Lenny Pozner:

They’re spreading falsehoods about a considerable historical event, information that will reside on the internet forever.

Darragh Worland:

What kind of mistakes or what kind of falsehoods?

Lenny Pozner:

Well, as an example, there was one article that was published within weeks of the shooting that stated that Noah was shot 11 times, which took the extreme of that tragedy and assigned it to Noah, and so it brought more attention to Noah. He was then being used as an example of extreme gun violence, and politicians were including his name and that number in speeches, and at that took on a life of its own. It happened to be wrong. I took issue with that and I contacted the outlets, and I had them make the change and correct it, and they didn’t want to.

They said, “No, we’re not doing it.” I needed to go and get Noah’s medical examiner’s report and his autopsy report, documentation from the state showing what his wounds were and how he was killed to prove to them that I was right, even though I had come in contact with Noah at the funeral, and obviously I understood his wounds. So those were the kinds of things. Then, of course, there were photographers videoing Noah’s actual burial, and that got released, and that seemed like an intrusion. I was dealing with getting that removed. So I started learning about social media companies and how that removal and privacy, how all of that works, and it was a lot. It was a lot of stuff. So …

Darragh Worland:

That sounds like a full-time job.

Lenny Pozner:

It was just really weird. I’ve said that after that tragedy, really, really gotten this meta perspective about news and how information is reported to people because I became a spectator to my own tragedy, because it was being so reported on in all media. There were a lot of conflicting reports, there was a lot of misinformation, and it took a very long time until the actual Connecticut State Police report came out with all information. There were a lot of people who, you can think of them as true crime fans who were triggered by this tragedy, which, how can people not be triggered?

If your children are not protected in their classroom in school, then what’s the last thought that people have in the morning when they put their kids on the bus? That was some of the people that I had come across when I’d entered a closed group. As I was dealing with the regular media and the way they were reporting on things that were part of my life that I was trying to get corrected, I was doing the same with alternative media, people who were saying things about me and my then wife, Noah’s mother, that were completely untrue and wrong.

Darragh Worland:

At some point you decided to release Noah’s death certificate and the medical examiner’s report publicly, and that was one of your attempts to push back against the hoaxers. Can you talk about why you decided to do that and then what the outcome was? Did that work in convincing them?

Lenny Pozner:

I started releasing documents. I started presenting factual information because I knew that ignoring this is absolutely the wrong thing to do and that will not benefit anyone, and these ideas won’t just die on the vine. They will continue to replicate as we know that they did, which is what happened at the time. Unlucky for everyone, that was the period of time where social media was at its maximum expansion. Everything that I did back then worked, of course. People who were denying this and need to deny it and really have this faith that they’re tapped into a truth outside of what everyone else thinks, there’s no way to change those people’s minds. But it took a while for me to release the medical examiner’s report and the death certificate.

It was definitely an emotional decision at that point, but I knew that it needed to be done, and I knew that I couldn’t not do it. So that was the trajectory that I was on, just continuing to move through my own grief and making sure that Noah’s story is accessible to people who do want to know the truth. So if they want to know how he was born, I released medical records. If they want to know how he did in school, I released school records. If they wanted to know how he died, I released the medical examiner’s report, which is very specific and talks about how his body was found and where his wounds are, and exactly what was observable. That is Noah’s story, so that wasn’t for me to hide, that’s for Noah. That’s really about him. So anyone that’s interested in him can know how he lived and how he died.

Darragh Worland:

So it did convince some people.

Lenny Pozner:

It definitely convinced a lot of people. There were people that were helping me while I was doing all of this. Many of them became volunteers. A lot of them were absolute deniers, and they were absolutely convinced after the work that I was doing, and they continue to be supporters and volunteers to this point on.

Darragh Worland:

Well, I definitely want to talk about that and the HONR Network later on in this interview. But we know from our interview with Elizabeth Williamson that the families were harassed mercilessly by those who could not be convinced that the Sandy Hook shooting did actually happen. When did that start for you, and what was the form of harassment that you experienced?

Lenny Pozner:

The harassment was immediate. Noah’s mother started doing interviews, talking about guns, and that brought attention onto her immediately. So the hate on social media started right away. Anywhere that they could attach hate, they would.

Darragh Worland:

She was talking about gun control.

Lenny Pozner:

Yeah, she had mentioned guns, and then a few interviews later, she became more specific in her message. She spent a few months into 2013 talking about that. That was her response to her tragedy, and she was likely one of the early people to talk about guns, and that brought more attention to her. Of course, an interview that she did with CNN and Anderson Cooper was an interview that Alex Jones focused in on and claimed that it was not a real interview. Things that are blowing in the wind behind her or are part of a green screen, that he knows that he could recognize that and he sees it.

At one point there was a digital glitch in Anderson Cooper as he moved, which turns out that the original video didn’t have that glitch. That glitch was created, I believe, by the followers of Info Wars or Info Wars when they converted the file from one digital format to another, and which is why I always call them hoaxers, because they are the ones that contribute to the hoax theories by faking their evidence and lying. People make the mistake of using the term “truther” because that’s a carryover from the 9/11 truth movement, but they are not about truth, they’re about lies, so they’re liars.

Darragh Worland:

Well, the 9/11 truthers weren’t about truth either. They were ultimately, about a conspiracy theory.

Lenny Pozner:

That part of it took over, whether the origin of it may have been some of the families that lost family members, (they) may have had the instinct to question what was going on and their search for truth. That quickly got taken over by people who were using this for their own political messages and style and brand of denialism. I never wanted to use that term “truther” because it doesn’t belong there, so “hoaxer” is the right term. They believe it’s a hoax, and then they falsify their evidence to further promote the hoax idea, and that really makes them hoaxers.

Darragh Worland:

They were claiming your wife was an actor or crisis actor in that interview, and then what other forms of harassment? Was that online?

Lenny Pozner:

Yes, that was all online. In that interview she made one statement. She said that it takes seconds for an AR-15 to take a life and it takes how many months of ultrasounds to welcome a new child to your family. She made that statement and that immediately got seized on that she’s attacking the AR-15 weapon and she became a villain in this make-believe world that hoaxers construct for themselves and then reinforce from one another in their communities. So they started to vilify Noah and they started to vilify her. One of the things that they did is they consider themselves “citizen investigators.” They had background checks on everyone in the community, in the town, anyone that was interviewed, anyone that was visible, because in their world, this is just one giant reality TV show and they get to pick it apart.

Darragh Worland:

How are they running background checks?

Lenny Pozner:

On the internet, it’s very easy to do. And remember, this is 2013. People don’t know that you need to not share as many photos of your kids on Facebook. People don’t know that you need to not share things with everyone globally, that you need to start tightening those things up. People weren’t doing that back then. It sounds common knowledge now, but 2013 people didn’t even have their friends lists on Facebook private, so they had-

Darragh Worland:

Complete access.

Lenny Pozner:

They had all of this information. So they would go to a Facebook account for a victim’s family member, and then they would download all of the friends list and then they would track everyone on the friends list.

Darragh Worland:

So you had just talked about how the harassment started from the particularly motivated hoaxers, and I wonder if you could just catalog what it was like over the years. I imagine it grew in intensity over time, just what it was like as a parent and how your life was affected by the harassment from these people?

Lenny Pozner:

Well, it’s the worst thing that you can imagine because your life is transformed and turned upside down by this unimaginably tragic event that happens. Now it is such a large event that you’re almost a spectator to your own tragedy because you’re seeing so many different angles of it being talked about. You’re seeing it talked about by the community. You’re seeing talked about by politicians. You’re seeing it talked about by hoaxers. You’re seeing it talked about by the main media. They’re making mistakes, and you’re just a spectator to all of this.

So it’s just compounding basically the same wound being re-injured. There were no photos of me at the time, and I wasn’t doing any interviews, so no one really knew who I was or what I looked like, and so they said that I didn’t exist. Then they started saying that I wasn’t even present at Noah’s funeral and just a bunch of other things like that. Of course, this all goes on social media, all of these things, and then all of the hate that gets thrown in. A lot of these people were enjoying mocking the victims for some reason that was just their version of dark entertainment.

Darragh Worland:

It’s so unimaginable, just the cruelty of it. It’s like the worst form of bullying you could possibly imagine. It’s very hard to imagine why someone would want to do this and what would drive them. I don’t even know if it’s worth thinking about it. But when we spoke to Elizabeth Williamson, she said that from the beginning you took a different approach to the hoaxers than the other Sandy Hook families. But this is what she said about in your prescience. Even back in 2012, you never saw this as a one-off by people who were opposed to gun control measures or even people who were somehow personally scandalized by this particular tragedy. “He saw this as emblematic of a new development in our culture and in our society, and he was absolutely right.” Can you comment on that? What was it that you were tapping into, and why did you have this prescience? I know you have a background in IT, so maybe that figured into it.

Lenny Pozner:

Yeah, I agree. I was working in it at the time. I understood technology. I understood how the internet was on this expansion. At the same time, I also was familiar with Info Wars and shows like him. I understood that those ideas are very powerful, that they absolutely cannot be left alone, that’s absolutely the wrong thing to do. Leaving them alone actually helps them grow and replicate. I knew that I needed to do everything that I’m able to do to help debunk, to help clarify, to tell my story as best as I can, which really is just telling Noah’s story. That part of it needs to be clear because it will only get more and more blurred with crazy ideas, which it continued to do. There were other events that happened that were incorporated into more conspiracy theories.

Oftentimes, in hoax theories, different theories don’t need to fit together like a puzzle that you can have contradictory theories. That’s a phenomenon of conspiracy theory where you can have multiple theories that don’t hold together as a whole, but just create more noise, and then that’s evidence for the people who follow those things. So for them, he didn’t die and he died twice. He was used as an actor in Pakistan, or he was hiding out in Pakistan, or he was living in Pakistan, or he was, whatever you can think of, that opened up the floodgates for them. I’ve had people say that to me in person, as evidence that Sandy Hook was not a real shooting. They would say, “Well, what about that kid that died in Pakistan?” I’ve had that said to me in person.

Darragh Worland:

I guess the idea is their theories and they’re just trying to poke holes in reality, ultimately. They don’t have to have evidence, they’re just asking questions.

Lenny Pozner:

Right, and that’s their evidence, the fact that they have all of these facts that they can run through. But all of these things have been debunked. For some people, when they get debunked, that turns those people around, and that’s what those people need to hear. They need to see real evidence. But for some other people who have a faith-based opinion about reality, that won’t make a difference for them. I don’t think it’s important to try to debunk for those people, but all of those people have other people in their life who will deal with them, where it could be their family members. This hoax concept has really torn families apart. At the HONR Network, we get so many different messages, but we’ve gotten messages from people who say that this topic has ruined their relationship with their significant other because they are so consumed by it, and they refuse to accept anything other than their belief system that their relationship is permanently damaged.

Darragh Worland:

I want to come back to that, but I want to talk first about the social media companies. Did you contact some of the social media companies where these lies about Noah and the shooting were spreading? What was their response when you did?

Lenny Pozner:

I started dealing with social media companies right away. There was the private video of Noah’s funeral that somehow had leaked out, which did not belong. It was not for public consumption. Then there was the burial video that leaked out and was being repeated everywhere. So I started dealing with video hosting platforms, some of them that don’t exist anymore. Some of them, they’re still around and learning about how you can flag content and what the rules are, what the parameters are. Are there any guardrails for these social media companies? I found that most companies ignored what was going on. It was not being addressed. Later on, I had heard from some of the meetings that I had had with social media companies that some of the reporting went to email addresses that were really not even monitored by humans. These things were set up to be automated, and it was never expected to be used in this ugly way, so they didn’t plan to have to put that many resources to dealing with these things.

Darragh Worland:

They didn’t anticipate this kind of vitriol being spread and these kind of hoaxes being spread on their platforms, and so they didn’t have the resources available to address it? Is that what they were saying?

Lenny Pozner:

It was a combination of that and that they just didn’t care, and their focus was on growth and expansion. This content, that social media content is their inventory, so why would they want to reduce it? They want to expand their footprint in all types of content, so that was really not their interest, but I was persistent. I kept calling them out in interviews, and eventually, they couldn’t look away and pretend that it doesn’t exist. They started to address it. They started to respond. They started to work with me. They started to listen to my feedback. They started to adapt my feedback to what they were doing. They started to recraft their policies and their terms of service and their harassment policies.

Early on, I think in ’14 or ’15, I was repeating this message that victims of tragedy need to be a protected class online because it seems like there’s this online world where we don’t have the same rights as we do in the real-world. I was trying to find a way to communicate that to social media companies that can’t have this completely unregulated space. There’s literally no one to turn to when something happens on the internet. That’s true to this day because we have so many people that contact the HONR Network for help with their own unique story of how their life was altered by something that happened on social media, something that was a lie, something that took on a life of its own suddenly and they could never go back to how their life was, and it’s all because of social media.

Darragh Worland:

You were successful in getting a lot of the harmful and false content about Noah taken off of social media sites, blogging platforms, I think, like WordPress, Facebook, maybe even Twitter. Can you tell us about the approaches that you took? I think you used copyright law in some cases?

Lenny Pozner:

Well, I was successful in all of it, and we still are as a group, continue to be successful with it. The approach really was to not give up. So copyright was one of the few things that existed with platforms like YouTube and platforms that would not remove content for any other reason. Platforms like GoDaddy, copyright is one of the few things that they need to respond to, and there’s a structure there. They have to respond within a certain amount of time, so that was something that I learned early on.

Darragh Worland:

So if you report it, they’ll take it down or they’ll have it taken down?

Lenny Pozner:

Now they will, or they’re supposed to. A lot of it is automated, but WordPress did a phenomenal job with that. It was almost overnight that hundreds of thousands of pieces of lies just disappeared, so they were very good with that. Google was another platform that changed their terms of service for harassment and bullying, including the targeting the next of kin of major tragedy and denying real-world events. They had incorporated that. It took a while, but they had incorporated that. Facebook had their own version, which they, I think, rolled out.

I don’t remember which year, but the title is “Mocking Victims.” I think that’s how you can report it. So you can report any content. You click on “report” and you select “other,” and then there will be “Mocking Victims” as one of the things. They’re not always effective in removing the content, so oftentimes I have to escalate this, but we keep lists and lists and lists of links for volunteers, find content. I add it to a list and it doesn’t leave the list until it’s removed, so we’re pretty persistent about it. Twitter as well now has a policy of denying real-world events, image privacy, and of course, copyright.

Darragh Worland:

When you say, “We,” you’re talking about the HONR Network that you founded in 2014?

Lenny Pozner:

Yes.

Darragh Worland:

Can you tell us about the organization’s mission and how it relates to what you’d been already doing?

Lenny Pozner:

The mission has adapted over time. Originally, in 2014, I started reporting a lot of content, and I was doing it under my own name. I realized that YouTube was letting people know who reported the content. Even after the link was no longer working, you would still get a link saying, “This item was removed because of a complaint by so-and-so.” So I didn’t think it was useful to have my name out there that much. I owned the domain name honr.com, and I repurposed it for this. It seemed like it fit honoring the victims. I started reporting things as the HONR Network, which is just a network of volunteers that are like-minded and believe in combating these lies, so that started in 2014. Of course, Info Wars then published my name repeatedly in 2014 on their blog saying “He keeps removing things. We moved it from one server to another server to another server, and it keeps getting taken down by this per person, apparently a parent of one of the apparent victims.” That was what they were blogging, and so that made me a bigger target by a lot of the haters.

I knew that I needed to report material under another name. Eventually, Info Wars also found out that HONR was me. Then they published that and then vilified me that much further in front of their then giant audience, but that’s how it started to be used. After a while of reporting content, and not only were we reporting content, we also had a closed Facebook group where we would welcome in people who had questions about the tragedy, who were denying it or who were curious about it, and volunteers would walk them through it and point them in the direction of debunking information that we had made available that other volunteers created. So there was this active effort, and after a while, the people that were curious and coming to get fact clarified started to thin out, and it was just more abusive people. So at that point, I realized that content removal really needs to be the focus of our work, and that morphed into becoming the HONR Network that was the title of that type of work, the content removal work.

Darragh Worland:

When did you decide to take on Alex Jones?

Lenny Pozner:

Well, I took him on basically right away because I emailed him in 2013 and let him know that I was aware of what he was doing, and he was on notice.

Darragh Worland:

Well, what about legally? When did you decide to sue him?

Lenny Pozner:

Well, I decided to sue everybody probably the next day, but that was the original mission statement of the HONR Network. If you go to archive.org and you look up the original website it was, I think the first sentence sounded a little bit like a rant, but it said to bring awareness to hoaxer activity and then to provide consequences for them, and not just provide consequences, but to redirect them towards entities that can better assist them with whatever it is that’s causing them discomfort in a way that they’re acting out and to move them away from acting out against victims because victims are not equipped to deal with (the questions), but government agencies are equipped to deal with their questions. That was the intent. The consequences part, of course, was to bring civil or criminal action against anyone that was doing this to victims of tragedy.

That really was at the very beginning of it. Of course, there were so many other things going on in my life, not to mention the fact that just the basic healing part of a tragedy, it takes a lot of energy to do a lot of basic things, so suing people is a complex thing. But I did start speaking with people in the community about taking legal action. I started to speak with a lot of different attorneys to see what can be done. I started that early on. That was in 2014, I believe, when I started to speak with attorneys. One of the original ideas with the HONR Network was that it would be a network of volunteers with a legal background that could be like a victim support network. So those were some of the ideas I had, but we were so inundated with content removal that all of those things took a backseat to the expansion of the offensive work.

Darragh Worland:

Your case against Jones will finally go to trial either later this year or early next year, correct.

Lenny Pozner:

I think it’s supposed to go to trial next year at some point. I’m not clear on when, because there are a number of courts that need to decide on that, but we’ve already won. We just need a court to rule or a jury to award damages as has been done in some of the other cases that we’ve seen, so it’s just one small step.

Darragh Worland:

Congratulations on winning. It was a defamation trial, right?

Lenny Pozner:

It was. It was, yeah. It’s a win for everyone. It really is. It’s a win for the community. It’s a win for all of the families, and it’s a win for truth and anyone that’s ever been accused of something online, it’s a really significant win because especially the way the legal system in the U.S. is based foundationally on prior cases, this gives people confidence that this is something that you can take to court and you can win and you can make a difference. A lot of people who come to HONR Network to try to get content removed about themselves and their family and their children and get help, they may have legal stuff going on, and that helps for social media companies. That makes a difference when there is something that’s domestic in this country because a lot of the hosting companies are here.

Darragh Worland:

Was the case ultimately about Alex Jones and Info Wars defaming Noah by denying that he existed and was shot to death? If you could summarize what the defamation was, and I’m sure it’s very complicated.

Lenny Pozner:

It is complicated, and then I’m far from an expert on that part of it. I can tell you that it is legal to defame the dead. That isn’t the case. You can say anything you want about anyone that’s dead, and there’s really nothing that anyone can do; however, I think in Jones’ case, there was the intentional infliction of emotional duress, which is something else. I think that was used in Connecticut. But again, this is not my area of strength, the legal understanding of the case is. I just know that he lied about me. He lied about my family. He caused a lot of damage, damage that still to this day cannot be repaired. He knows that he has caused people to suffer, and he knows that the more of his resources he throws at this to slow the process down and delay it and stretch it out over another decade if he can, causes that much more suffering. It’s pretty obvious that he’s really not sorry, and he doesn’t care about hurting anyone.

Darragh Worland:

He’s out there already trying to fundraise from his audience to pay the damages in the other trials. Yeah.

Lenny Pozner:

I think he’s done pretty well with that as well.

Darragh Worland:

Yeah, it’s unimaginable. After some of the victories and the lawsuits against Jones, including yours, where do you think we stand in what Elizabeth Williamson refers to as the battle for truth in her book on Sandy Hook? Do you think we’re winning?

Lenny Pozner:

I don’t think we’re winning the battle. I think that really with the way social media continues to evolve, I think we’ve lost truth. I think that people say post-truth. I think it’s post, post, post-truth. There really is no more truth any longer. It’s just who you’re speaking to that becomes the truth. It’s very relative now. I don’t see it getting better at any time soon. Social media companies have a lot to blame here. They created someone like Alex Jones. They are part to blame, but they are still protected. They still to this day are protected, and at some point, that has to evolve.

Darragh Worland:

You think that there needs to be some sort of legislation putting up some guardrails around social media to protect families?

Lenny Pozner:

I think all of that is inevitable, and it’s not just families, it’s anyone. Lives get ruined. People’s lives get ruined. Relationships get ruined, people’s careers get ruined, and it could be over a lie. It could be over a deep fake. It could be over anything. People believe it. People repeat it. People will get thrown out of college for it, and there does not need to be any truth around it. It’s quite damaging and quite dangerous, but the companies have become so powerful in such a short period of time that fines don’t really matter, so I think there has to be more than that.

Darragh Worland:

You said that you’re going to have to protect Noah’s honor for the rest of your life. Do you still believe that to be the case, or do you think the situation has improved, at least as far as Noah is concerned?

Lenny Pozner:

I think the situation has definitely improved compared to where it was in 2013; however, Noah’s story will always need to be told because they’ll always be someone misusing it. Since Noah became this topic on the internet, for people who are obsessed with Noah, they incorporate Noah in other weird things. So yes, I will have to protect his story for a long time.

Darragh Worland:

Well, Lenny, the work that you’ve done is truly remarkable, and what you’ve done for Noah’s honor and his memory is very admirable from one parent to another. Thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it.

Lenny Pozner:

I appreciate that. Thank you very much.

Darragh Worland:

It’s easy to understand why Lenny is pessimistic about the state of things, but there’s been movement in the past 10 years, and we owe at least some of that to him. Despite facing relentless harassment by the Sandy Hook conspiracists, he’s managed to defend Noah’s honor and ensure that when anyone searches his son’s name or sees a mention of him on social media, what they encounter is the true story of his little boy’s life and not the distorted lies of hoaxers. In the process of fighting this fight, he’s made the online world a little more factual for the rest of us. Today, Noah would be 16 years old, more than two-and-a-half times the age he was when he died. He might be eagerly awaiting his driver’s license. There might be a “Do Not Enter” sign taped to his bedroom door. He might be dating and rolling his eyes at his sisters. We’ll never know.

One thing we do know is that he too would have to contend with the vast world of misinformation we all confront on a daily basis. He would have to learn how to separate fact from fiction and know what to share and not to share on social media. He would have the best guide you could ask for in Lenny.

Thanks for listening.

Is that a fact? Is a production of the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education non-profit helping educators, students and the broader public become news literate so they can be active consumers of news and information and equal and engaged participants in a democracy. I’m your host, Darragh Worland. Our producer is Mike Webb. Our editor is Timothy Cramer, and our theme music is by Eryn Bush. To learn more about the News Literacy Project, go to newslit.org.