From The Guardian
Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media
By Charles Kaiser
Even in a country now completely inured to the horrors of mass shootings, the massacre at Sandy Hook remains lodged in the minds of everyone old enough to remember it. Ten years ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fired 154 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle in less than five minutes. Twenty extremely young children and six adults were killed...
Elizabeth Williamson’s new book is about that “American Tragedy”, but more importantly it is about “the Battle for Truth” that followed. In excruciating detail, Williamson describes the unimaginable double tragedy every Sandy Hook parent has had to endure: the murder of their child, followed by years and years of an army of online monsters accusing them of inventing this unimaginable horror...
[Hany] Farid heads the school of Information at the University of California Berkeley. He describes the perfect storm which is threatening democracy and civility everywhere: “You have bad people and trolls and people trying to make money by taking advantage of horrible things … you have social media websites who are not only welcoming and permissive of it but are promoting it, and then you have us, the unsuspecting public.”
Hany Farid is a professor of information and electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley.
