People think she’s a Parkland ‘crisis actor’ – it’s terrifying

The strangers mocked her on social media. They called her old boss, saying she should be arrested. Now she feared one was stalking her.

Emma Gonzalez became an internet obsession after a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day. She no longer felt safe walking home in her neighbourhood of four years.

‘‘Do Americans really fall for it when you talk about being a victim of a school shooting in Florida?’’ someone had messaged her on Facebook, joining dozens of others who doubted her identity.

But she wasn’t that Emma – the Parkland, Florida, student leading a national gun control movement who has appeared on CNN, the Ellen Degeneres Show and the cover of Time magazine.

She was another Emma, a 31-year-old vegan chef in Brooklyn.

Sure, she used to star on a lowbudget cooking series. She was not, however, what they called her: a ‘‘crisis actor’’.

Gonzalez was at her cafe, thinking about how weird it all was – the emails, the phone calls, the way her life changed because of something that happened 1250 miles away – when she noticed a man pointing his phone at her.

Normally, she wouldn’t worry about a guy who might have just been taking a selfie. She’d focus on her job, which, at this April moment, was fetching dill for black-eyed pea fritters.

These days, though, fear clouded the mundane. A customer sipping coffee registered as a threat. Was he taking her picture?

‘‘Emma,’’ he called to her. ‘‘Emma, you’re real.’’

She knew then who he was. This is the other side of a conspiracy theory. After the tragedy in Parkland – like after the tragedies in Las Vegas, Orlando and Sandy Hook, New Jersey – amateur sleuths on Reddit, Twitter and Wordpress questioned the stories of those who publicly grieved. They called the victims ‘‘fakers,’’ political operatives, employees of a ‘‘deep state’’ bent on disarming Americans.

The torment caused by these conspiracy theories is at the heart of a lawsuit filed last month by three parents whose children died in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. They’re suing right-wing talk radio and Youtube star Alex Jones, who had suggested the rampage was a hoax that the families had helped perpetuate. The parents said they have suffered ‘‘severe degree of mental stress and anguish’’, according to the lawsuit, and a ‘‘high degree of psychological pain’’.

The paranoia around the Florida teenagers who have called for tighter gun control (and amassed millions of Twitter followers) has grown just as mighty. Facebook and Google recently pledged to delete any post calling the kids ‘‘crisis actors.’’

But 2 months after the shooting, misinformation still slips through the cracks, creating another kind of victim.

– Washington Post