Sandy Hook Hoax: Were Websites And Facebook Groups Published Before The Massacre?
Sandy Hook hoax theories have been persisting on the web, beginning right after the Newtown school shooting and gaining momentum as Americans “question the official narrative” regarding the massacre — but one of the most pervasive bits of evidence involves websites seemingly published before the event expressing condolences or collecting funds for victims in the wake of the killings.
The internet collective known as “Sandy Hook truthers” have pointed to some pretty compelling evidence such as a United Way site devoted to victims in Connecticut as well as a Facebook page memorializing slain Sandy Hook teacher Victoria Soto — published several days before the shooting that killed 26 students and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary.
How could this be? How could website be published to the internet before the event in question? Isn’t this evidence of advance knowledge of the attacks and perhaps collusion on behalf of the US government to cover up what appears to be a false flag attack?
To understand the Sandy Hook websites that seem to have been published early, you must first understand the way the internet reconciles dates as well as how Google crawls them. If a page is repurposed to host other information than it originally displayed, it may show up as having been “published” earlier.
Further, servers and sites often have incorrect dates. Having used a number of WordPress panels in my career, it is a job to keep track of where dates and times are set in order to avoid publishing in the past when scheduling a post, something that could be at play and an easily explainable factor not often acknowledged by Sandy Hook truthers.
And given the fact material can run afoul on an individual computer, a site’s panel and then a search engine, sites like the United Way’s Sandy Hook page could easily register as a prior date on Google.
(Reddit breaks it down in minute detail on this thread — even explaining to Sandy Hook truthers that source code from the United Way’s page indicate it was indeed repurposed for the Newtown incident after it was initially created for a different reason.)
But what about the Vicki Soto Facebook page, created days before her death? Much like the situation with Sandy Hook sites on Google, Facebook’s dating system can be messy in establishing a timeline.
Everyone looking to make money off Facebook seeks the next big social story, and the Newtown incident was very, very well trafficked. A person seeking to create a group that is simply popular could have easily converted an existing group to a memorial page for Victoria Soto and the time stamp wouldn’t match the timeline.
Much has been made of the Sandy Hook websites allegedly published early, but the simplest explanation is often correct — and Sandy Hook truthers have perhaps selected the most unstable bit of “evidence” to support their conspiracy theory.
