https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/how-a-survivor-of-the-florida-school-shooting-became-the-victim-of-an-online-conspiracy/2018/02/21/d54083a0-172e-11e8-b681-2d4d462a1921_story.html?utm_term=.71e8ced8b3ed

Conspiracy theories around “crisis actors” — feigning grief and working to build support for tougher gun laws — start with a premise that the event never occurred, according to Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor who runs a lab that tracks the spread of online rumors after disasters.

Starbird said her lab has documented both domestic sites and some tied to foreign governments in Russia and Iran amplifying the narratives, including after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in 2016.

“The goal seems to be to want to undermine the collective response to tragedy,” she said. They hark back to “a high-level narrative, which is the media is lying . . . and you can’t trust anything you see.”

Hogg’s mother, Rebecca Boldrick, an elementary school teacher, scoffed at the conspiracy theories growing online about her son and other Parkland students. She said her husband, a Republican, worked for the FBI as an agent at airports in Los Angeles and Florida before retiring from the bureau in October 2016.

Kevin Hogg, 51, left the FBI because he had been diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s ­disease several years earlier, Boldrick said. The family has not previously revealed this fact publicly because her husband is embarrassed, she said.

The wild allegations online have also taken on a more dangerous tone, she said. Boldrick said her family has received death threats online.

“I’m under so much stress,” she said describing her state a week after the shooting. “I’m angry and exhausted. Angry, exhausted and extremely proud.”