The worst high school shooting to ever happen in this country was the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018 that led to 17 deaths and 17 serious injuries. The shooting came a few months after the worst shooting in this country killed 60 people and another one killed 26. So the country was at a heightened opinion and conflict surrounding the issue of control. After the shooting, a group of students were outraged and came together to create an organization called NeverAgainMSD. The organization called for stricter gun control to try to prevent more attacks from happening. A few of the group members gained a lot of national praise, earning them a Time Magazine cover as well as criticism for their work.
One of the group members, David Hogg, was harassed the most. His harassment came from the idea that was circulating on social media which accused Hogg of being a crisis actor and making up that he was a part of the shooting. People were trying to argue that he was hired by anti gun networks. The theory hit a peak when a video with that theory became one of the most trending on youtube. It was then taken down by youtube for violating its “policy on harassment and bullying.” But as the title of an op-ed in the Los Angles Times stated “The David Hogg ‘crisis actor’ video wasn’t bullying. It was propaganda”
Although you might not think that a conspiracy theory on the internet could be that harmful, David Hogg has been permanently tied to this damaging idea. In June 2018, just a few months after going through one of the most traumatic things a person could go through, his house got swatted which is when someone lies and calls 911 to say that there is a hostage situation going on at a person’s house and there’s an extreme emergency response. IN the first year after the shooting, he had 7 assassination attempts on his life. Even to this day, literally to this day, Hogg gets messages that the shooting he went through was a hoax. Today, David Hogg is still very active on social media and didn’t let the trolls stop him. He has popped back up in the news due to the Nashville school shooting this past week.
If you hear all of this and don’t understand why this is harmful to a person, I don’t know what else to say. After suffering extreme trauma and having his classmates die all around him, he decided to subject himself to even more trauma to honor their lives and fight for it to not happen to anyone else. Propaganda in this case is extremely negative and does long lasting effects to not only discredit David Hogg but discredit school shooting victims as a whole.
Reflection
I knew that I wanted to focus on a gun control-related issue when it came to this project because it was a topic that I felt very passionate about. I felt even more strongly about this topic after the past week with the Nashville school shooting. After rereading the prompt about propaganda being harmful, I thought about how David Hogg has been accused of being an actor. I then found on the propaganda database the example that conspiracies were circulating about Hogg.
I did not realize just how bad it was for Hogg until making this presentation. It gave me so much more sympathy for him and all of the trauma that he has gone through. It has also scared me to see how cruel people can be to further their own platforms or propaganda.
For my creative process, I started by reading more about David Hogg and getting background info on the little information that I already knew about him. As I wrote my script, I saved images that I found to go along with my points. It was then pretty simple after writing the script to pair my audio with complementary pictures. I wanted to make sure that the pictures gave some visual context to what the audience would hear.
Works Cited
Chavez, N. (2018) School shooting survivor knocks down ‘crisis actor’ claim, CNN. Cable News Network. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/21/us/david-hogg-conspiracy-theories-response (Accessed: March 30, 2023).
Heffernen, V. (2018) Op-ed: The david hogg ‘crisis actor’ video wasn’t bullying. it was propaganda, Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times. Available at: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-heffernan-hogg-video-20180222-story.html (Accessed: March 30, 2023).
Morton, V. (2018) David Hogg targeted by ‘swatting’ prankster as police descend on home, AP NEWS. Associated Press. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-parkland-florida-school-shooting-david-hogg-49f3abd697a8c136257175f67b0b2f85 (Accessed: March 30, 2023).
Mutasa, T. (2023) Parkland survivor David Hogg “exhausted” after Nashville School shooting, CBS News. CBS Interactive. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/parkland-school-shooting-survivor-david-hogg-gun-control-nashville/ (Accessed: March 30, 2023).
Ottesen, K.K. (2019) Parkland’s David Hogg: ‘children having to go through active shooter drills is not what Freedom looks like to me’, The Washington Post. WP Company. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/parklands-david-hogg-children-having-to-go-through-active-shooter-drills-is-not-what-freedom-looks-like-to-me/2019/06/24/ee5c8982-8182-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html (Accessed: March 30, 2023).
☮️ David Hogg (2023) Judge Us by our enemies. I would post without blocking his info but he put his phone number and I don’t want anyone saying awful stuff to him. PIC.TWITTER.COM/RYWIE6Q7BR, Twitter. Twitter. Available at: https://twitter.com/davidhogg111/status/1641573341927448577?s=20 (Accessed: March 30, 2023).
