On December 14, 2012, Scarlett Lewis experienced something that no parent should ever have to endure: she lost her son Jesse in an act of unimaginable violence. The day started just like any other, but when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Scarlett’s life changed forever. However, this isn’t a story about a massacre. It’s a story about love and survival. It’s about how to face the impossible, how to find courage when you think you have none, and how to choose love instead of anger, fear, or hatred. 
 
 Following Jesse’s death, Scarlett went on an unexpected journey, inspired by a simple three-word message he had scrawled on their kitchen chalkboard shortly before he died: Norurting Helin Love (Nurturing Healing Love). It was as if he knew just what his family would need in order to go on after this horrible tragedy. Bolstered by his words, Scarlett took her first step toward a new life. And with each step, it became clearer how true Jesse’s message was. She learned that love was indeed the essential element necessary to move forward and that taking the path of love is a choice. We can live in anger and resentment, or we can choose love and forgiveness. 
 
 With her decision made, she found some peace and began to believe that choosing love was the key to creating a healthy, safe, and happy world. She began the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation to develop programs to teach children about the power each of us has to change our thoughts and choose a life without fear and hate. 
 
 Nurturing Healing Love is Scarlett’s story of how choosing love is changing her life—and how it could change our world. A portion of the proceeds from sales of this book will be donated to the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation. To learn more about the foundation or to make a donation, go to www.jesselewischooselove.org. ||||| Organized groups are using the Amazon review system to push political and social agendas often only tangentially related to the products being sold. 
 
 Most book authors know they need to endure critics, even comments that may be malicious and personal. 
 
 But the venom that runs through more than three dozen reviews on Amazon.com of Scarlett Lewis’ latest book are particularly scathing. 
 
 “This Scarlet Lewis person is a real sick human being,” writes one reviewer named Kevin. 
 
 “Scarlett Lewis is a fraud and a sellout to all of humanity,” writes another, anonymously. 
 
 “Scarlett Lewis is a lying traitor,” writes a reviewer named David Weiss. 
 
 Those reviews might suggest that Lewis is a polemic politician, treasonous spy or scurrilous financier. She’s none of these. Lewis is the mother of Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old boy who was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago. 
 
 She wrote “Nurturing Healing Love: A Mother’s Journey of Hope and Forgiveness” to describe her journey after the massacre and help others choose love and forgiveness instead of anger and resentment in their darkest moments. 
 
 The rage in those reviews is fueled by the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook shootings were a hoax, perpetuated by the government to push for tougher gun-control laws. Several were posted after a YouTube user who goes by the handle “RadMc02” uploaded a video on Oct. 18 encouraging viewers to “Truth Bomb the Shit Out of Amazon Reviews!” 
 
 Reviewers have long used Amazon as a platform to vent about products that failed to live up to their expectations. Some have even used it to attack authors whose views differ from their own. 
 
 Increasingly, though, people are launching coordinated campaigns to push political and social agendas through negative reviews often only tangentially related to the product for sale. They are able to do so because Amazon welcomes reviews regardless of whether the writer has actually purchased the product. 
 
 Lewis isn’t the only target of the Sandy Hook tragedy deniers. “We want to hit this woman as hard as we can,” says a narrator in a YouTube video as he walks viewers through posting 1-star ratings and negative reviews for “Choosing Hope: Moving Forward from Life’s Darkest Hours,” by Sandy Hook Elementary first-grade teacher Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis. The video, posted by “Peekay22,” even guides viewers to click a “Yes” button indicating they found other negative reviews helpful. 
 
 Since Peekay22’s video posted on Oct. 16, “Choosing Hope” has received more than 170 1-star reviews out of just over 250 total reviews. That’s tanked the book’s rating down to 2.1 stars out of 5. 
 
 “Amazon is giving these people a forum … ,” Lewis said. “Obviously, Amazon should remove (the reviews).” 
 
 But Amazon appears to have no intent of doing so. To the company, as long as the reviews are “authentic,” they have a place on its website. 
 
 “All authentic reviews, whether the reviewer bought the product on Amazon or not, are valuable to customers, helping them make informed buying decisions every day,” Amazon spokesman Tom Cook wrote in reply to questions about its review policy. He declined to address questions about specific reviews. 
 
 Critics long welcome 
 
 Amazon’s reviews system has long been a source of pride for Chief Executive Jeff Bezos. In his 2003 letter to shareholders, Bezos crowed about ignoring critics who wondered why the company would allow negative reviews that might discourage shoppers from buying products on Amazon’s site. 
 
 “Though negative reviews cost us some sales in the short term, helping customers make better purchase decisions ultimately pays off for the company,” Bezos wrote. 
 
 Still, Amazon has cracked down on some bogus reviews. Earlier this month, it filed a suit — the second this year — against reviewers who post positive product evaluations in exchange for payment from third-party sellers on the site. 
 
 “We continue to use a number of mechanisms to detect and remove the small fraction of reviews that violate our guidelines,” the company said after filing the most recent suit. “We terminate accounts that abuse the system and we take legal action.” 
 
 But Amazon doesn’t view coordinated campaigns to flood its review system with negative comments as abuse. 
 
 “We terminate accounts that abuse the system and take the appropriate legal action, whether it’s a 1- or 5-star review,” Cook, the Amazon spokesman, wrote. “The issue isn’t whether the reviews are negative or positive, it’s whether they are authentic or not.” 
 
 Forum for activists, too 
 
 It’s not just angry conspiracy theorists who use Amazon’s review system to air their views. Grass-roots political activists have figured out how to turn Amazon.com into a bullhorn as well. 
 
 A year ago, PepsiCo launched a new mid-calorie soda called Pepsi True exclusively on Amazon. That caught the attention of activists at the Rainforest Action Network and SumOfUs, who have condemned PepsiCo for its use of so-called “conflict palm oil,” the harvesting of which is causing deforestation, in its snack products such as Doritos. 
 
 The two groups decided to target Pepsi True through Amazon’s review system because they knew it was a low-cost way to make a high-impact statement. SumOfUs called for a “Pepsi True Amazon.com takeover!” on its Facebook page, and the Rainforest Action Network called on its Twitter followers to “Join in” the effort. 
 
 And it worked. Nearly 4,000 followers gave Pepsi True 1-star ratings and posted negative reviews that, among other things, ripped Pepsi for supporting “rain forest destruction by buying unsustainable palm oil.” Pepsi was caught so off-guard that it asked Amazon to take down the page. 
 
 “We totally sabotaged their product launch,” said Laurel Sutherlin, a Rainforest Action Network spokesman. 
 
 Pepsi, which eventually decided to revive the product page despite the negative reviews, said in a statement that Pepsi True was “subject to an orchestrated effort to post inaccurate information” about the company’s palm-oil policy. A spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the statement. 
 
 Even one of Amazon’s own products has been targeted by a coordinated, agenda-driven campaign. Greenpeace has long criticized Amazon’s lack of transparency regarding the type of energy it uses to power the massive data centers that run its cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services. 
 
 Greenpeace brought that concern to last year’s debut of Amazon’s Fire Phone, launching an email campaign that encouraged users to post negative reviews and leave 1-star ratings on Amazon’s own website. 
 
 Gary Cook, Greenpeace’s senior IT analyst, said the group stopped counting reviews related to its environmental concerns after the number reached 1,500. 
 
 “We got an overwhelming response,” he said. “People enjoyed having the opportunity to talk to Amazon where it lives.” 
 
 While the Fire Phone failed on its own, the Greenpeace-prompted comments — including “Make a ‘smarter’ phone supported by clean, renewable energy!” from IT-Berater — remain on the site. 
 
 These campaign-driven negative reviews may promote agendas, but they often add little to the discussion about the product itself. That’s because the vast majority of reviewers responding to those calls-to-action have never used the products they are critiquing, a point they often acknowledge in their reviews. In the process, those reviews often overwhelm comments from customers who have read the book or used the product. 
 
 Rainforest Action Network’s Sutherlin believes removing reviews would limit the expression of opinions. But Amazon has always retained the right to control the information posted on its site. Its “General Review Creation Guidelines” include plenty of restrictions, including barring reviews with “profanity or spiteful remarks,” as well as “advertisements, promotional material or repeated posts that make the same point excessively.” 
 
 It would be hard to argue that some of the posts about Scarlett Lewis aren’t spiteful. And the very purpose of these coordinated campaigns is to make the same point excessively so as to drown out positive appraisals. Amazon’s Cook declined to respond to questions about the company’s process for determining if reviews violate its guidelines and how they are taken down. 
 
 One way to stifle the coordinated outrage would be to limit reviews to those who have actually purchased the product they want to evaluate on Amazon. The company already lets shoppers filter reviews by “Verified purchase only,” though that’s not the default. Sutherlin acknowledges that such a limit would have made the campaign against Pepsi True impossible. 
 
 “I doubt that most people weighing in would buy the product,” Sutherlin said. 
 
 “System is creaking” 
 
 But don’t expect Amazon to make that change. Cornell University science and technology professor Trevor Pinch, who has studied Amazon’s review system, said the company benefits from as many shoppers posting on its site as possible. 
 
 “The reason Amazon cannot just use verified reviews is simple. Most of the content at the site is from free customer reviews, and it would mean it would lose most of its content,” Pinch said. 
 
 And while some of those reviews are spiteful, repetitive and off-topic, the vast majority are not. 
 
 But Pinch also cautions that coordinated campaigns of negative reviews, as well as bogus paid-for positive reviews, can’t help but take a toll on the system’s credibility. 
 
 “These are signs that the whole system is creaking,” Pinch said. “As cases of abuse mount up, it does lead to more distrust.” 
 
 For her part, Scarlett Lewis is living her book’s message of compassion and understanding. She refuses to be upset by the hateful reviews or Amazon’s decision not to remove them. 
 
 “Once you’ve had a child murdered, shot in the forehead, there’s not a lot that can ruffle your feathers,” Lewis said. ||||| Buzz Aldrin salutes the U.S. flag on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. 
 
 The sheriff of Douglas County in Oregon where a mass shooting occurred on Oct. 2 is in hot water after the discovery that he posted a "Sandy Hook truther" video to Facebook in 2013. Now, a new study casts doubt on the psychology blamed for belief in such conspiracy theories. 
 
 Contrary to popular opinion, the research finds, people who think conspiratorially aren't more likely to assume everything happens for a reason, rejecting the likelihood of random chance, than people who don't hold conspiracy beliefs. 
 
 "What we show is that the psychology of conspiracy theories is located in a rather high level of cognition, perhaps at the level of beliefs and ideology and not at the level of a deeper personality or perception mode," said study researcher Sebastian Dieguez, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. [Top 10 Conspiracy Theories] 
 
 The spread of conspiracies 
 
 In the Sandy Hook shooting, 20 children and six adults were killed at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Almost immediately after the news broke, conspiracy theorists, some calling themselves Sandy Hook truthers, began claiming that the shooting never really happened, and that the supposed bereaved parents were hired actors. Similar conspiracy theories have sprouted up over other high-profile shootings, including the August on-air killing of a television reporter and cameraman in Virginia and the October shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. 
 
 A common theory for why people believe in these sorts of conspiracies is that they can't accept that, sometimes, bad things happen for no good reason. In other words, they're primed to see patterns everywhere — and, in fact, find it comforting to think that someone's in charge when tragedy strikes. 
 
 A few indirect studies bolstered this notion, including a 2008 study showing that people who felt they had less control were more likely to believe in conspiracies than people who felt more in control of their lives. But no one had ever tested the link between a rejection of randomness and conspiracy belief directly, Dieguez told Live Science. 
 
 "It was not clear whether 'nothing happens by accident' is something conspiracy believers say or whether it's how they think," he said. "That's what we wanted to test, whether this is a rather deep psychological disposition they have." 
 
 Accepting randomness 
 
 The researchers conducted three very similar studies in which they asked participants to look at randomly generated strings of X's and O's and gauge how "truly random" each was. In two of the experiments, participants were told that they were on the hunt for a cheater who was supposed to write down the results of a coin flip, but just wrote results without actually flipping the coin. In one experiment, the X's and O's were presented without any suggestion of human intentionality behind them. 
 
 The first two experiments involved 107 and 123 psychology students, respectively, and the third involved 217 French speakers recruited online. Each participant filled out a survey about their conspiracy beliefs, which they were told was part of a separate study. 
 
 Then the researchers looked for a link between people's perceptions of randomness and their conspiratorial mindset. They found nothing. 
 
 "This finding, although it's a negative finding, was actually pretty interesting, because in our study we had very strong findings [otherwise]," Dieguez said. "Pretty much everything worked except the main hypothesis that we wanted to test." 
 
 Complex conspiracies 
 
 The researchers found that people are actually quite good at detecting random-seeming character strings (as determined by a mathematical algorithm). They also found something that other scientists have noted, which is that people who believe in one conspiracy theory tend to believe in many conspiracy theories, even those that have nothing to do with each other (or even contradict one another). Someone who believes the moon landing was faked, for example, is likely to believe that Princess Diana was deliberately murdered. 
 
 But the researchers couldn't find evidence that a deep-seated need to see patterns is linked to conspiracy beliefs. [10 Persistent Kennedy Assassination Theories] 
 
 Other modes of thought have been linked to the conspiratorial mindset. Anxiety is one. "Anomia," feelings of powerlessness and distrust, is another. People who believe in conspiracies also seem prey to the conjunction fallacy, which is a cognitive "oops" that involves believing that a more specific thing is more likely than a general one. This bias was illustrated in a 1974 paper with the "Linda problem," which describes a 31-year-old single woman interested in social justice and anti-nuclear protests. It then asks whether it's more likely that a) Linda is a bank teller, or b) Linda is a bank teller and an active feminist. 
 
 Mathematically, it has got to be more likely that A is truer than B. There is always a greater likelihood that one thing will happen than that two independent things will happen. If, for example, there's a 1 in 10 chance that Linda is a bank teller, A has a 10 percent chance of being true. If there's also a 5 in 10 chance that Linda is a feminist, the likelihood that she is a bank teller as well is 5/10 times 1/10, or 5/100 — only a 5 percent chance. But because B seems more descriptive of a person like Linda, people often fall prey to thinking B is more likely than A. 
 
 Ultimately, the new research — published Sept. 21 in the journal Psychological Science — suggests that conspiracy thoughts are complex and subject to outside factors, Dieguez said. 
 
 "It shows that, well, perhaps conspiracy theories are really associated with ideology, with our worldview, and not really to more basic cognitive factors," he said. 
 
 Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. ||||| Sandy Hook truthers have swarmed the Amazon reviews of a book written by the mother of a 6-year-old massacre victim, accusing her of “Fraud, Treason, And Tyranny.” 
 
 Scarlett Lewis is the mother of Jesse Lewis, a first grader who was murdered along with 25 others — mostly little children — when a mass shooter went on a rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary in December of 2012. She penned a book about her grief journey, called Nurturing Healing Love: A Mother’s Journey of Hope and Forgiveness. 
 
 But according to the Seattle Times, instead of receiving support after enduring an unthinkable loss, conspiracy theorists have come out in force to malign Lewis. 
 
 A quick scan of her Amazon page reveals numerous comments claiming Lewis is lying and urging readers to watch the conspiracy theory video, “We Need to Talk About Sandy Hook,” which is posted to YouTube. 
 
 One poster on Amazon calling themselves “Operation Truth,” wrote: 
 
 “DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK !! This book is based on pure lies. The Sandy Hook Elementary did not have a school shooting, this was a Hoax that was used to create laws under false pretense !! Instead of buying this book, research the video called “We need to talk about Sandy Hook” And here’s the best part… It’s FREE to watch the video. These people are profiting off of LIES, and they are erasing truth from history. This is Fraud, Treason, And Tyranny.” 
 
 Another user said Lewis should be jailed and claimed no one was killed at Sandy Hook. 
 
 “‘Scarlett’ should be put in jail! Zero Stars!! This book should be labled ((FICTION)) The Sandy Hook Event is *PROVEN* to have been a ‘drill’. If you are reading this and didn’t know that this event was a staged psycological operation… you should do some research. ;) …The good news is nobody died,” the unnamed user wrote. 
 
 Another poster named Justin Edwards echoed the same ideas. 
 
 “This woman is a liar no child died at Sandy hook. Sandy hook is a hoax, it was staged. Go watch “We need to talk about Sandy Hook” and pay attention. SANDY HOOK WAS A STAGED HOAX NO ONE DIED!” 
 
 Her TEDx talk about her son and her book has similarly callous comments, calling her a “crisis actor,” a term conspiracy theorists use to explain the grief-stricken survivors of mass casualties they don’t believe occurred. 
 
 “Scarlett Lewis, YOU ARE A LYING B*TCH!” Joe Jones posted to the YouTube video of Lewis talking to a TEDx audience about her book and slain child. Searching Lewis’ name on YouTube turns up videos made by people intent on besmirching her as a scam artist. 
 
 The coordinated attack on Lewis has Amazon users giving the book a one-star rating, which the Times says is a new tactic to silence people. Before the conspiracy theorists found the Amazon page, the book was getting largely positive reviews and five stars, the highest rating. 
 
 “Increasingly… people are launching coordinated campaigns to push political and social agendas through negative reviews often only tangentially related to the product for sale,” Times reporter Jay Greene writes. “They are able to do so because Amazon welcomes reviews regardless of whether the writer has actually purchased the product.” 
 
 There are several conspiracy theories surrounding the tragedy that took the lives of 20 small children and 6 school staffers, but perhaps the most commonplace is that the U.S. government fabricated the whole thing as a means of instituting tighter gun control laws. The bogus claim has been peddled by high-profile conservative personality Alex Jones. 
 
 Promoting the conspiracy theory is far from harmless, as believers have gone so far as to harass traumatized survivors of the massacre. 
 
 But Lewis is heartrendingly deadpan in regards to her feelings about the reviews. She tells the Times, “Once you’ve had a child murdered, shot in the forehead, there’s not a lot that can ruffle your feathers.” 
 
 Watch Lewis talk about her book and her son, Jesse, as posted online here: 
 

– The mother of one of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary has written a book about healing and recovery. Problem? A group known as the Sandy Hook truthers are using the Amazon reviews to trash author Scarlett Lewis—and to push their belief that the shooting was a hoax orchestrated by the government to get tougher gun laws, reports the Seattle Times. It's nasty stuff: “Scarlett Lewis is a fraud and a sellout to all of humanity,” writes one. “‘Scarlett’ should be put in jail! Zero Stars!! This book should be labled ((FICTION)) The Sandy Hook Event is *PROVEN* to have been a ‘drill,'" writes another. They're giving Lewis' Nurturing Healing Love: A Mother’s Journey of Hope and Forgiveness one-star ratings in an attempt to discredit it, which the newspaper says is an increasingly common tactic made possible by Amazon's policy of allowing reviews of products by people who haven't actually made a purchase. Raw Story notes that the hoax theory is the most common of several conspiracy theories floating around about Sandy Hook, and it's getting a high-profile push from the likes of conservative radio host Alex Jones. In fact, after the recent shooting at a community college in Oregon, the local sheriff got into hot water when it emerged that he'd shared a video spreading the idea. Lewis herself seems unfazed, telling the Times, “Once you’ve had a child murdered, shot in the forehead, there’s not a lot that can ruffle your feathers." So who on earth would believe such crackpot theories? Researchers once thought that conspiracy believers were generally people "primed to see patterns everywhere," in the words of Live Science, which reports a first-of-its kind Swiss study casts doubt on that. While it doesn't explain why theories such as the one about Sandy Hook gain traction, researchers say it debunks a commonly held explanation. (Another Sandy Hook parent found solace in music.)