Some ways a pivotal moment when it comes to conspiracy theories. absolutely. the shooting occurred not only as we just discussed at this pivotal moment for the gun debate, but it also was a moment in which social media usage among americans had increased exponentially from the time of the last major school shooting which was in 2007 at virginia tech. there was none of that conspiracy theorizing around that shooting which was horrific, 32 people died in that shooting. but there just wasn t the uptake. and so in 2008 at the time of virginia tech for example there were 20 million global facebook users. five years later when sandy hook happened, there were one billion global users of facebook. twitter, there were 5,000 tweets a day in 2007. and five years later during