Posted with his permission:

Hi Jon,

I imagine at this point with your new article going up about Justine Sacco that you’re receiving several more emails than usual. For this reason I might say something like “I’ll try to keep this short”, but I know that will be difficult.

Your article is particularly interesting to me. I don’t know if the severity of the online attack that targeted me matched Sacco’s, but perhaps that doesn’t matter.

In August 2013, while living in Brooklyn, I released a film called Tennessee Wonderland (shot in Tennessee in May 2013) on YouTube showing me walking around an uninhabited town in the Tennessee mountains. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfaTpunhJRs

For the last five minutes of the film I presented the history of the old town, and how it came to be empty. I’ve been shooting and editing video for years, so it was a thrill to present such a project that was created in my home state of Tennessee. A month later The Huffington Post and Yahoo News picked up the story and helped earn 250,000 views for the video. It was great, and I was appreciative of the support. What’s not to like, right? What can go wrong here?

For the next 13 months between September 2013 and the end of September 2014, things were quiet. I moved to San Diego in April. The video had several views coming in every day, but nothing too much. Then right around the beginning of October 2014 I noticed an abnormally large amount of YouTube subscribers flooding in. I checked real-time analytics and found that a website called Roadtrippers decided to run a story about the short film. 

https://roadtrippers.com/blog/hiker-discovers-an-abandoned-town-inside-tennessees-great-smoky-mountains-national-park

The headline: “Hiker discovers an abandoned town inside Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park”. I was thrilled. Then, surprisingly, The Huffington Post picked up the story…again. Great, right?

Then The Daily Mail picked it up. Then USA Today. RT. NBC, CBS and ABC affiliates, etc. It spread like wildfire. Then came the shocker… it was the #1 trending topic worldwide on Facebook for 12 hours straight. I was happy that my short film was receiving so much feedback and attention. Little did I know that the word “discovered” would be so scrutinized. The word had felt harmless for more than a year. People began assuming from sensational media headlines that I was claiming to be the first to find the area, and that I was claiming I was the first human to find the empty town in 100 years.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2779992/Hiker-discovers-abandoned-Tennessee-town-untouched-100-years-trekking-Great-Smoky-Mountains-National-Park.html

Angry emails began to flood in through my website. Angry Facebook comments were posted under every media story for local news and major blogs across the web. People were saying horrible things about me and making jokes about the headlines that targeted me. 

http://www.wbir.com/story/news/local/2014/10/06/elkmont-discovery-debunked/16803541/

Worst of all was this news report on WBIR in east Tennessee. It seems he was catering his report to the audience rather than properly researching everything, which was sad. I was baffled when I first saw the way he talked and walked in the report, mocking me. The online stories and comments all came from people who didn’t take the time to watch my entire video, including the ending when I explain the history of the area.

Mob mentality took over. The people who came after me didn’t read the stories or watch the short film. They saw the sensational headlines and dove straight for the comments and my email address.

I felt impacted emotionally, perhaps deeply for a short time, losing sleep while in bed, responding to angry emails and comments to let people know it was the media blowing things out of proportion. I remember several nights of not being able to sleep at all.

One of the main topics that comes from my story of media mayhem is that all of these local tv stations and big online blogs usually have to write and publish their stories in one day. They have deadlines. And they want to make their headline the most sensational so it looks most interesting, so it gets the most clicks for ad money, and so it lands at the top of the trending stories for that particular topic on Facebook. Clickbait. It’s just clickbait. And for the tv news reporter on WBIR, the theatrics of the reporter as he talks and walks seems very strange. 

http://www.wbir.com/story/news/local/2014/10/06/elkmont-discovery-debunked/16803541/

This is a man who likely attended a four year school to major in journalism, and when he gets a job reporting the news he squanders away an opportunity to report a story with proper research, all because the specific media field in which he works, television, does not allow enough time in one day to properly create a news report.

So now it’s 4-5 months later, and I’m ok. I’m still finding articles that were published at the time back in early October. CNN did an article. So did Weather.com. I mean even Coca Cola did a story for their website. The Daily Mail actually posted the wrong video in their article, which made no sense to me. And USA Today uploaded the affiliate story to their sports YouTube account. Strange stuff.

The internet can quickly become a scary place. People who you might see at church on Sunday, your job during the week or taking the kids to soccer practice… people who seem nice and look normal… can turn into monsters when they get on Facebook, or comment on a blog. They see a headline from a favorite news source, trust their every word and go straight for the comments section.

I had the best of intentions in releasing a film not about Elkmont, Tennessee, but about a small part of Elkmont that most people drive right past… a place up on a hill. I succeeded in getting people to watch it, but did I envision amassing nearly 2,000,000 views this way? No. But I am glad that more people now know about Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I am glad that the film does show truth. I just wonder how often this happens to other people. Seeing your story shine a light on the crazy nature of online outrage is refreshing. It’s like I have someone who might understand.