User:330highflyer/sandbox2

Andy Parker

Education
INFO: In the case of Parker's daughter Alison, conspiracy theories have alleged that there was no shooting, it was all faked and that Alison had plastic surgery and moved to Israel. Parker has been accused of being a "crisis actor," merely playing the role of a grieving father. He has received messages from trolls telling him, "I loved watching your daughter die."

"Mr. Parker and his family suffered a truly tragic loss. There is no place on YouTube for content that glorifies violence or harasses the families of victims. We use a mix of technology and human review to remove content that includes graphic violence, such as the video of Ms. Parker's death. Our systems aren't always perfect, but our goal is to catch inappropriate content using technology as quickly as possible. We have taken measures to address the issue of harassment of victims' families ... We remove videos that target victims or their families and claim these events were 'hoaxes' or didn't happen. We do not allow ads to run on videos about tragic or sensitive events and we do not monetize or profit from such content in any way."

After Alison's death, Parker reached out to Pozner, who offered to take on the job of flagging the videos of Alison's murder, so Parker wouldn't have to see those images.

"Grieving requires silence and reflection. All of the noise created by the endless harassment and defamation makes it very difficult to process the loss," Pozner said.

Ultimately, Pozner says that in order to combat this, "Social media and internet service providers have to become much more vigilant in adhering to their own terms of service, investing revenue into developing better protections for users, and taking a stand against their platforms being used for illegal activities."

Some grieving parents have turned the grim task of tracking down hoax theory videos into a daily job. In 2014, Pozner, whose child was killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, founded the Honr Network, an organization dedicated to holding conspiracy theorists accountable. Hundreds of volunteers now help monitor the offensive content online. With YouTube, Pozner uses different tools to argue that videos should be taken down: invasion of privacy, harassment and, in some cases, copyright infringement. Often, it feels like he’s arguing with a robot – one that makes arbitrary decisions. Sometimes, the flagging process gets results. Other times the videos remain. The whole system, Pozner said, was frustratingly opaque. “If I’ll report something for privacy, they’ll [sometimes] say: ‘We’ve decided not to take any action on this.’ Who do you appeal to, who do you contact, who do you pick up the phone and call?” Parker talked to Pozner about his work, and Honr began flagging the Alison Parker hoax videos. But the conversation only reinforced Parker’s frustration with Google. “I am so grateful to these folks that are doing this … but the problem is, to me, we shouldn’t have to be doing this piecemeal,” Parker said. “It’s like trying to kill roaches with a fly swatter. You kill a couple and a bunch of them come back. What we’re doing is demanding that they be responsible corporate citizens.” Parker said YouTube should pay a team of humans to proactively remove content: “The burden shouldn’t be on us to prove that this content is bad … They’re not acting like a human company.” Parker finally had a call with Google executives in October to discuss the problem, and he said he was now more optimistic that the company would work closely with the Honr network to address harassment. It’s true that it might not be a huge expense for Google to hire one person to deal with Sandy Hook and similar hoax theory videos, said David Karger, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist, who researches online harassment. But, he said, “would they need to hire someone else to handle all the white supremacist harassment, and someone else to handle all the gender harassment? It’s an issue of scale.” YouTube, however, has no policy against conspiracy or hoax theory videos in general. In the wake of concerns from Parker and Pozner earlier this year, it clarified internally that hoax theory videos that targeted the victims or family members of public acts of violence would count as harassment, and could be taken down. “Our hearts go out to the families who have suffered these incredibly tragic losses,” a YouTube spokesperson said in an email. “We recognize the challenging issues raised by the victims’ families, and that is why we updated the application of our harassment policy last summer. As a result, we have removed hundreds of these videos as they have been flagged to us and we will continue to do so.”

Perhaps talk about misunderstanding of free speech; with regards to the government and prosecution for speaking out about it. Lenny pozner says this in interview with KJZZ, possibly other useful info in it too: psychology of conspiracy theory, expert says "perhaps consider for a moment that you're wrong..."

Pozner hoped to build the HONR Network into an organization capable of changing how we deal with digital harassment and equipped to file lawsuits like the one he brought against Halbig, which is still ongoing. But he was having enough trouble simply keeping up with the day-to-day task of protecting his son’s memory to have much time for long-term planning. The HONR Network had more than a hundred members, but only a handful were actively helping him. Others had been scared away by hoaxer threats or simply didn’t have the motivation to dive into the muck with Pozner, who was planning to relocate again, now that I knew his address. The heartlessness of the internet’s darker corners had only compounded the senseless cruelty that took his son’s life, and he found it impossible to move on. Until proved otherwise, Lenny said, “for me, everyone is a hoaxer.”

Pozner was compelled to start HONR Network after hoaxers said his son was not actually killed in the shooting. He and his family have moved several times to avoid threats and in-person harassment from conspiracy theorists who allege the Sandy Hook massacre never happened. "It isn't just one person attacking you online. It's hundreds, sometimes thousands of followers making posts about you, defacing pictures, attacking you via email, or on social media," Pozner told Out in the Open. "Conspiracy theorists and hoaxers typically believe that the mass casualty incident is staged by the government in order to sway public sympathy to deprive people of their civil liberties," he added. Parker has never seen the footage of his daughter's death and, at first, he avoided social media. But he felt compelled to search Alison's name on YouTube after trolls accused him of trying to make money off of a non-profit foundation created in her honour. Hundreds of hoaxer-related posts came up in the search results, many of them dissecting the footage of Alison's murder. He says it violates YouTube's own terms of service to allow those videos to remain on the site ー its "moment of death" policy states that such videos should be flagged for removal. But when Parker requested that YouTube take down the content, he says he was told that the onus was on him to report each individual video. "It's up to you to go through each one of these, to flag them, and send it to us. What kind of sociopath would do that?" Parker said of YouTube's response. YouTube declined to comment on the videos or other legal matters, but sent this statement to Out in the Open:

"Mr. Parker and his family suffered a truly tragic loss. There is no place on YouTube for content that glorifies violence or harasses the families of victims. We use a mix of technology and human review to remove content that includes graphic violence, such as the video of Ms. Parker's death. Our systems aren't always perfect, but our goal is to catch inappropriate content using technology as quickly as possible. We have taken measures to address the issue of harassment of victims' families ... We remove videos that target victims or their families and claim these events were 'hoaxes' or didn't happen. We do not allow ads to run on videos about tragic or sensitive events and we do not monetize or profit from such content in any way."

After Alison's death, Parker reached out to Pozner, who offered to take on the job of flagging the videos of Alison's murder, so Parker wouldn't have to see those images.

"Grieving requires silence and reflection. All of the noise created by the endless harassment and defamation makes it very difficult to process the loss," Pozner said.

Ultimately, Pozner says that in order to combat this, "Social media and internet service providers have to become much more vigilant in adhering to their own terms of service, investing revenue into developing better protections for users, and taking a stand against their platforms being used for illegal activities."

Lenny founded HONR network. "Lenny's been a life saver for me. He has almost single-handedly, with the help of a few volunteers, taken hundreds of videos down of alison's murder" There were pages and pages of thumbnails on youtube, and it was all hoax related. He approached google to get the videos taken down from youtube "The onus should not be on me to flag the content you should be monitoring and you should be patrolling and policing. Whatever troll or crazy person uploads this stuff, they need to convince you why it needs to be on the platform." Andy Parker on CNN interview. 90% of all content on youtube gets taken down. Twitter however still routinely refuses to remove content. After re-reviewing Lenny's posts they have decided to remove some of the tweets that he reported earlier. Google and facebook have heard the complaints of families, and are working to remedy the problem by investing in artificial intelligence. But for now the burden of searching and finding and flagging these videos remains on the users. Andy Parker talks of why it's so important to get these videos taken down. "No-one should ever have to look at them. You're victimised because you lose a loved one. On the back end you have this? It's just wrong." Lenny Pozner talks about why it's so important to defend his existence: "It's something i think that anyone of us would want someone else to do, if we no longer had a voice."

WROTE BOOK: "FOR ALLISON" CBC INTERVIEW at address above STARTED NON PROFIT FOUNDATION IN ALLISON'S NAME ADVOCATING FOR GUN CONTROL refer CBC interview at address above