Why conspiracy theorists harass traumatized Texas church shooting survivors

Communities that suffer mass shootings have much to deal with in the aftermath, all of it heartbreaking.

But one of the most pointless miseries involves being afflicted by fanatics who accuse survivors — including people who had family members shot dead in front of them — of making the whole thing up.

We saw another example this week, when conspiracy theorists Robert Ussery, 54, and Jodie Mann, 56, were arrested Monday in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where 26 people were shot dead at a church last November. The pair confronted people at the church, claiming that they had fabricated the massacre, local media reported.

Ussery allegedly threatened to hang the church’s pastor, whose 14-year-old daughter was among those who died in the shooting.

He “continually yelled and screamed and hollered …  kept trying to bait us to do something dumb,” Frank Pomeroy told the San Antonio Express-News.

Ussery and Mann, who has an online persona of “Conspiracy Granny,” operate a site that claims that several mass shootings, including the Sutherland Springs one, were staged by “crisis actors.”

We won’t link to it, but you can find it easily enough if you want.

“There’s a tendency for people to want to find some way to rationalize and explain tragic events that potentially could threaten their way of life,” says University of Toronto sociology professor Jooyoung Lee, who is an expert on gun violence. “In the aftermath of these mass shootings, there’s always this kind of renewed movement to talk about gun control.”

“It becomes easier to buy into these ridiculous stories when you have guys like Alex Jones and the president pumping out this message that the news is lying to everyone, that this is all part of a liberal conspiracy to take peoples’ guns away to make people impotent and weak.”

Snopes interprets confrontations like this week’s in Texas as an attempt to gain status in a narrow online community. Snopes described seeing a YouTube video, since removed, in which Ussery records himself tormenting a person who lost a sister and niece in the Sutherland Springs shooting, and ended up having to identify them both in a morgue.

“I think people who are doing this stuff are also craving attention, and they want to piggyback on the tragic attention being given to survivors of these terrible events.”

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“I see it as very self-interested behavior, where people come up with something that is too ridiculous for most people to accept or believe, and then get into a state where they can document their actions so that they can get followers, or people to take note of them.”

Another category involves fragile people who, although their actions cause misery, are also in a sense, victims of toxic media which they’re consuming without filters:

• Last summer, a 57-year-old Florida woman was sent to prison for repeatedly threatening a man whose six-year-old son was murdered in the Sandy Hook school massacre in Newtown, Conn. Lucy Richards believed that the killings were a hoax, an assertion made by, among others, InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Earlier in 2017, a 26-year-old man was arrested after allegedly harassing a Connecticut state medical examiner who he claimed was part of the alleged hoax. Both had issues with mental illness, court proceedings showed.
• Also last summer, Edgar Welch, a North Carolina man who subscribed to the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, was sentenced to four years in prison after showing up with an assault rifle at Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza restaurant that he had been led to believe was the centre of a child sex ring, and firing several shots. Welch had only recently been connected to the internet, and alarmed one of his girlfriend’s friends when he decided she was afflicted with demons, and demanded that they come out of her.

“These people may already be susceptible to things like paranoia or other mental-health conditions that would make them especially suspicious about things that they’re hearing, and these kinds of dramatic events can sometimes propel people into their mental illness,” Lee says.

In fake news news:

• U.K. information commissioner Elizabeth Denham will publish a report on voter analytics on platforms like Facebook this coming May. Ten people in her office have been investigating the issue full-time, looking at the role of 30 different organizations in the Brexit referendum, among them Victoria, B.C.-based AggregateIQ. Denham, a Canadian, used to be B.C.’s privacy commissioner. (Thanks to @profcarroll, who gets up early in the morning in New York to livetweet British parliamentary committee hearings.)
• A rally in Charlotte, N.C., just after the U.S. 2016 election, appears to have been orchestrated by Russian trolls, local media report.
• And Russian troll accounts pretending to set up a business directory extracted personal and business information from thousands of Americans in 2017, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• Buzzfeed’s Craig Silverman looks at how publishers use constantly changing domain names to keep one step ahead of Facebook blacklists. (The referring Facebook page doesn’t change.) Sarah Palin’s Facebook page cycles through linking to half a dozen domain names: govsarahpalin.com, officialsarahpalin.com, sarahpalinnews.com, and so forth.
• Advertisers are abandoning Alex Jones’s Infowars Youtube channel, CNN reports.
• The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab reminds us that we know what we know about Putin’s troll factories largely because of Russian investigative journalists. Russian reporters started writing about the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency back in 2013, when it was focused on Russian domestic public opinion. Dozens of Russian journalists have been killed in this century, so the reporters are taking serious personal risks.
• There are lots of takes on a study out this week that shows that falsehoods spread faster than truths on Twitter. “A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does,” the Atlantic explains. “Twitter users seem almost to prefer sharing falsehoods.” Why? As far as the authors can tell, it’s because fake news tended to be more “novel” than real news, and was designed to evoke stronger emotional reactions. (Obviously, it’s much easier to meet criteria like that with a fabrication.)