"I know that when he's sending it, he's getting more reception because you've got more and more people falling into this online believe-everything-on-YouTube," she says.Īnd she says they have gotten more and more inflammatory, including a video from a popular YouTube comedian who was misrepresenting statistics about COVID deaths. And then when they then share the videos, it gives new life to the lies. To avoid the spread of false information, NPR is not linking to the videos mentioned in this story.)īut even if she isn't reacting to them, others who follow his social media feeds, where he posts them, are. Disinformation is designed explicitly to change people's perception of something. (Misinformation is false but not necessarily intentionally false. "so I don't know how many he's watching." NPR reached out to Ekwoge's father for this story but received no response.Īlmost all of the videos her father sent her contain some version of mis- or disinformation, and all are still accessible on YouTube. "And those are just the ones that he's forwarding," she says. That term - "plan-demic" - comes from a viral video conspiracy that has been widely debunked.Įkwoge's father has sent her 50 videos related to various conspiracy theories since March 2020 - about one a week - to, he has told her, help protect her. This was mid-March, like a year ago, and he was already this is 'plan-demic,' you know, this is completely fake." "He believed that people were being injected with the coronavirus or the virus wasn't real. "And at that point, things started to happen more frequently," she says. People who thought otherwise, he told her, had their minds controlled. Then last year, she says, he told her he believed that the world was flat. When Ekwoge and her dad lived in the same state, they would take walks and talk about other things. Her father and mother divorced several years ago, and she remained close with her father.
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11, 2001 attacks, she says, he got "very into the 9/11 truther movement."įor years, Ekwoge's approach was to be polite when he'd talk to her about the theories and then change the subject. He would point to the sky on long walks and talk about chemtrails, wondering aloud if the government was spraying chemicals into the air. "That was just a thing that we did: You got up in the middle of the night and you watched a comet," she says.īut as she got older, her dad's sense of wonder turned in a darker direction. She also remembers her father as gentle and loving - and how she would revel in his unconventional parenting, like when the family watched the Hale-Bopp comet. He read books by David Icke, a British conspiracy theorist, and her parents chose to not vaccinate their five children. She describes her parents as "free-spirited hippie types" and remembers that their parenting style was a bit unconventional and that back then her father dabbled in amateur conspiracy theories.
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Growing up, Ekwoge, 39, knew her family was a little bit different. "It's like an 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.' This person looks like my dad, but all of a sudden where this loving, kind person was there's this snarky, dismissive, mean person that refuses to let anyone engage in dialogue," she says. She's tried pleading with him to stop watching them, but he only responds with more videos. They're all he can talk about with her, and she says it's left him seeming frustrated and angry, which in turn leaves Ekwoge feeling helpless.
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She says the false and misleading videos have changed her dad. Heimroth, he said, attacked Maria Lockrow with a wooden 2-by-4 board, hitting her on the head and back.National She Resisted Getting Her Kids The Usual Vaccines. As part of his plea deal, Reuter testified he hit Allen Lockrow in the head with a baseball bat then beat him on the head and back.
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Is currently on trial for two counts of first-degree murder, four counts of second-degree murder, burglary and grand larceny. "It was still in his wallet." SKIP DICKSTEIN Show More Show Less 143 of218 Buy Photo Jacob Heimroth "He had an uncashed $600 winning ticket," Pietrak said at the time. According to Maria Lockrow's brother, Thaddeus Pietrak, there was talk that Lockrow had hit it big on a race, though the amount was exaggerated. Sources with knowledge of the case said Reuter knew Allen Lockrow from the Lansingburgh OTB parlor to which Lockrow regularly went to bet on horse racing. Pleaded guilty first-degree manslaughter, second-degree burglary and fourth-degree grand larceny. 141 of218 142 of218 Buy Photo Daniel Reuter