Greed 

Shooting Survivor to Melania Trump: Stop Donald Jr. from Cyberbullying Me

United States (Tasnim) – A 14-year-old survivor of the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has pleaded with Melania Trump to stop her stepson Donald Trump Jr. from bullying her and her family online.

“You say that your mission as first lady is to stop cyberbullying,” tweeted Lauren Hogg. “Don’t you think it would have been smart to have a convo with your stepson @DonaldJTrumpJr before he liked a post about a false conspiracy theory which … put a target on my back?”

“I’ve been getting all these horrible messages from Nazis and white supremacists and I woke up this morning and remembered that Melania Trump’s mission was to fight cyberbullying,” Hogg told Huffpost on Friday.

“That’s what’s happening to me: cyberbullying. I thought she could do something about Donald Trump Jr.”

Earlier this week, US President Donald Trump’s eldest son “liked” two tweets promoting a conspiracy theory about Lauren’s 17-year-old brother, David Hogg, another shooting survivor. The cooked-up conspiracy claimed he had been coached to speak out against guns by his former FBI agent father to “cover” for the agency’s failure to prevent the shooting. The ruse was backed up by the “deep state media,” claimed one of the posts.

The fake theories circulating about the Hoggs have resulted in death threats against the family, the siblings’ mom, Rebecca Boldrick, told The Washington Post.

A “like” by Donald Trump Jr. can have a tremendous effect because he has 2.6 million followers.

Melania Trump vowed shortly before her husband was elected president that if she became first lady, one of her key missions would be to combat online bullying. “Our culture has gotten too mean and too rough, especially to children and teenagers,” she explained in a speech in Philadelphia.

Lauren Hogg told the first lady in her tweet that the conspiracy theories are “re-victimizing” her family. “I’m 14 I should never have had to deal with any of this … I thought it couldn’t get worse [but] it has because of your family.”

Cyberbullying
By Marc Nozell from Merrimack, New Hampshire, USA – CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

The Hogg siblings are now dealing with an onslaught of social media hate after a gunman killed 17 people at their school.

“It’s unbelievable to me that these people are even saying this,” David Hogg told CNN. He called Donald Trump Jr.’s support for the conspiracies “disgusting.”

The 17-year-old has become a key target for conspiracy theories swirling around Parkland’s student activists. One conspiracy video that presented him as a paid “crisis actor” — not a student — hit No. 1 on YouTube’s trending page before the company took it down earlier this week.

Melania Trump got caught in another Twitter storm last week after she encouraged people to “test the power of kindness” on Random Acts of Kindness Day. “It’s an opportunity to teach our children the importance of taking care of one another,” she wrote.

A huge number of responses urged her to encourage her husband to be kind — or resign.

The first lady had not yet responded to Lauren Hogg’s tweets as of Friday evening.

This report prepared by Tasnim News Agency

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