The internet's more terrible corners were quick to plot how they could best cause further injury to the nation's latest mass shooting survivors.
A Washington Post review of thousands of posts on sites such as 8chan, 4chan and Reddit showed how people on online forums worked aggressively to undermine news reports about a troubled teen accused of killing 17 people, most of them students. [...]
Reddit is typically regarded as more mainstream, but the individual message boards, including “r/The_Donald” and “r/conspiracy,” hosted harsh attacks on the Parkland students. The site in 2016 closed its thriving “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory message board, a leading source of allegations that a child molestation ring run by Democratic Party luminaries operated out of a Washington pizza shop that led to a real shooting in which no one was hurt. Reddit declined to comment.
The conspiracies they produced included, of course, racism (asking posters to photoshop images of the shooter to make him look more "non-white") and the rote paranoid claims, after every news incident, that all involved were "crisis actors" hired to something something something. As always, the main debate to be had is whether the denizens of such conspiracy pits even have a social agenda, or are doing it for the sake of sheer maliciousness. Either way, even the most brazen conspiracy theories will find a ready home with somebody, somewhere. It almost always tends to be the same somebodies, too.
The claims about Hogg also spread to conservative websites such as Gateway Pundit (headlined “EXPOSED”), the social network Gab.ai (“spread it everywhere, this is the proof”) and Reddit forums like “r/The_Donald.” One post there, a photo of Hogg, carried a caption suggesting he was smiling because he saw his “fellow students get murdered but [he] got famous from it.”
Few would argue that the Gateway Pundit crowd earnestly believe the conspiracies they peddle—the Dumbest Man on the Internet didn't get his name for nothing. Why so many other conservatives are so very quick to fall for those conspiracies, however, remains a mystery.