“It feels like I’ve been proven right – hoaxers need to be handled, not ignored. It’s like a brushfire: you need to shape it and direct it. But if you leave it alone, it will burn down your forest, and it has reached all the way to the White House,” he says.
Since 2014, when he started to engage with the world again, Pozner has been trying to shape his brushfire. At first, he tried to engage with the hoaxers and some, he found, were young mothers who simply couldn’t allow themselves to believe someone could look a six-year-old in the eyes and shoot them in the head. Pozner had a lot of sympathy with them, as he felt the same way. Others, he says, are “just kids who get sucked into this world and they feel more confident about themselves, more certain, and they feed off the echo chamber of info, usually from websites. And they get taken in, hook, line and sinker.” One such hoaxer recently posted a comment beneath one of the online tribute videos to Noah: “You criminals need to be boiled in faeces.”
Pozner says that, if he hadn’t lost Noah, he might well have believed the pizzagate conspiracy: “I would not have been as immediately dismissive of it, that’s for sure. History books will refer to this period as a time of mass delusion. We weren’t prepared for the internet. We thought the internet would bring all these wonderful things, such as research, medicine, science, an accelerated society of good. But all we did was hold up a mirror to society and we saw how angry, sick and hateful humans can be.”
So what can we do, I ask, now that more of us are realizing we can’t just ignore these people?
“It’s too late, and things have gone too far. The whole Amazon is on fire. When I was dealing with these people in 2014 and 15, you could utilise their stories and turn them around. I don’t know if you can even do that now,” he says. “Lawmakers don’t know how to deal with this. Police don’t know how to police the internet, they haven’t been trained, they just tell you to turn off the computer. And people who do police the internet, they are looking for credit card scams worth millions of dollars. For 4Chan trolls, this is their playground.”
He pauses for a moment: “I used to be able to change the channel when stories about these kinds of people were on. I now don’t have the luxury to do that, and when I lost Noah, I woke up and realized that people who spread these stories are more interested in propagating fear than getting at the truth. And the human cost of that is phenomenal.”