On September 21, 2016, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung ran a page-three feature by Hakan Tanriverdi titled “Noah lebt nicht mehr” (“Noah is no longer alive”) about Lenny Pozner, whose six-year-old son Noah was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, along with 19 other children and six school staff members.
About 30 days after the shooting, the YouTube video “The Sandy Hook Shooting – Fully Exposed” appeared, claiming the massacre was only a show; it had been viewed 12 million times when the article was written. When staging claims appeared on Alex Jones’s website, Pozner emailed Jones to say he was very disappointed by how parents who lost children in Newtown were being treated; Jones invited him onto his show, and Pozner declined. In May 2014 he posted more than 100 photos of Noah online and began helping debunkers answer hoaxers’ claims. When he wrote to Wolfgang Halbig asking to talk, a reply sent for Halbig said Halbig would not speak with him unless he exhumed Noah’s body.
Pozner told the paper he stopped debunking at the end of 2015, after publishing the medical examiner’s report, after realizing that arguments do not help against hate. He now reports hoax content to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, and he faults the companies for putting profit ahead of protecting users. University of Miami researcher Joe Uscinski told the paper that conspiracy theories grow when an event is too horrific.
Read the article (PDF, German).
