HONR Network is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2014 by Leonard Pozner, father of Noah Pozner, a six-year-old victim of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, with the mission of protecting individuals from online harassment, defamation, and related abuses through content reporting, legal advocacy, and victim support services. The organization operates by identifying and submitting illegal or harmful digital content—such as hoax narratives, hate speech, and personal attacks—to platforms and authorities for removal, claiming to have facilitated the deletion of tens of thousands of such items since its inception.
Leonard Pozner is an American activist recognized as the father of Noah Pozner, a six-year-old victim murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. In response to persistent online harassment from conspiracy theorists who baselessly denied the shooting's occurrence and accused grieving families of fabricating the event, Pozner relocated his family for safety and ceased public attempts to debunk misinformation directly.
Prior to December 14, 2012, Sandy Hook, a picture-postcard pretty, three hundred-year-old village in Newtown, Connecticut, itself a bedroom community for affluent New Yorkers, was largely unknown. But on that chilly, winters day, the name Sandy Hook become synonymous with mass-casualty shootings, the death of innocent children, and inexplicably with conspiracy theorists’ most aggressive, vitriolic hate campaign in the history of the internet.
While publicly taking the brunt of the attacks from conspiracy theorists, behind the scenes, Lenny was amassing a small army of volunteers who helped him to locate and remove posts and pictures of his son and other victims from hoaxer and hate sites. Calling the loose knit community of volunteers the HONR Network, by mid-2014 Lenny and co had removed thousands of posts, blog sites, photos, and videos dedicated to intimidating the family and desecrating the memory of Noah and other victims. The success of these endeavors brought condemnation for the conspiracy theorists, hate groups, and individual harassers, who decried the removals of defaced photos of the six-year-old, personal details about the family, and calls to physically harm the Pozner family, as violations of their right to free speech.
Today, the fight to protect the memory of Noah Pozner and the other victims and families impacted by the Sandy Hook massacre, continues. But over the past six years, countless others impacted by mass-casualty tragedies and widely publicized violence, individuals targeted with online hate and harassment campaigns, as well as officials baffled as to what to do about the proliferation of online hate, have reached out for advice and assistance.
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