The Far Right’s Faking News to Attack Parkland Survivors

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On the left, the doctored image of Emma Gonzalez tearing up the Constitution that went viral on social media. Teen Vogue issued a clarification this weekend that the original image, on the right, featured Gonzalez ripping up a gun range target.

Parkland shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez has been on the receiving end of harassment online ever since she became a leading voice of the #NeverAgain movement.  This weekend, a doctored image of the 18-year-old ripping up the U.S. Constitution went viral on social media.  The fake photo left many people wondering what’s real and what’s fake.  Teen Vogue Chief Content Officer Phillip Picardi took to Twitter to set the record straight:

The original image showed Emma tearing a gun range target in half during a photo shoot for a recent Teen Vogue story.  The smear campaign against Parkland survivors is nothing new.  Both Gonzalez and her classmate David Hogg have been criticized by the far right, with many suggesting their age and inexperience make them ill-prepared to tackle issues of gun control and politics.  Just hours after the shooting at their high school, conspiracy theories abounded on Twitter claiming that Hogg was a “crisis actor”.  On Tuesday, Alex Jones and Infowars continued the attacks when they aired clips in which they spliced in footage of Gonzalez as a member of the Hitler Youth and dubbed over footage of Hogg speaking with audio from a speech given by Adolf Hitler.

Advocates say the voices of these students matter a great deal for the movement — which may be why the right wing continues to smear their names and falsify content to try to silence them.