YouTube has bolstered conspiracy theories about my daughter’s murder. It must stop.

By Andy Parker March 6 at 6:02 PM
Andy Parker is the author of “For Alison: The Murder of a Young Journalist and a Father’s Fight for Gun Safety.”

A deranged gunman shot and killed my 24-year-old daughter, journalist Alison Parker, on live television in the summer of 2015. He ended her promising young life and changed mine forever.

In the depths of my grief, I pledged to honor Alison’s memory in the best way I could. My wife, Barbara, and I started a nonprofit group to fund arts programs for underserved children in Southwest Virginia, and I began advocating sensible gun-safety reforms.

My goal was — and still is — to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous, unstable people so others won’t suffer the same fate as Alison. In response to my fervent advocacy, however, countless people have targeted me and my family online, claiming that Alison’s death was faked as part of some diabolical conspiracy to seize their guns. They have taken the gruesome footage of my daughter’s murder, edited it into videos selling these lies and flooded YouTube with hate-filled diatribes maligning my family.

The vitriol directed at me and my family has been unbearable. So I was outraged to discover that recommendation algorithms for YouTube and its parent company, Google, have bolstered these conspiracy theories.

It started when I searched “For Alison,” the name of our nonprofit, on Google. The search returned a YouTube video posted by an anonymous conspiracy theorist alleging that our foundation was a scam. This prompted me to search our daughter’s name, which led me down a rabbit hole of painful and despicable content, including claims that Alison had plastic surgery and was living a secret life in Israel.

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