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 fact that we even have to clarify this is proof of how democracy continues to be fractured by people who manipulate and fabricate the truth. pic.twitter.com/cpSXnvLxdA
— pfpicardi (@pfpicardi) March 25, 2018
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.
Justy a sample of what NRA supporters are doing to teenagers who survived a massacre (real picture on the right). pic.twitter.com/czX7IHD8ur
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) March 25, 2018