6/4/2023 0 Comments Conspire 2016![]() ![]() The conspiracy theories jumped over to Reddit, where the popular Trump subreddit r/The_Donald championed it Twitter, where pro-Trump tweeters (including the son of Trump’s pick for national security adviser) have continued to promote it and Facebook, where fake news outlets have written and shared articles about it.Īnd Alex Jones, the head of the fake news InfoWars who once argued that President Barack Obama and Clinton are literally demons, also boosted the conspiracy theory, saying on his show (in a video that was published in early November but later taken down) that “Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children.” That video earned more than 420,000 videos before it was removed. After Podesta’s emails were hacked ( likely by Russian agents) and WikiLeaks published them, 4chan users in October found emails between Podesta and Alefantis about a Clinton fundraiser that happened early in the campaign.įrom there, people began speculating without any evidence that the restaurant was part of a broader child trafficking ring run by the Democratic Party - a popular but entirely false conspiracy theory on the fringes of conservative media. Like many ridiculous things on the internet, Pizzagate appears to have begun on the troll haven and message board 4chan. Really love that this #pizzagate infographic bothers to say “it’s not actually that crazy" /AcZBC2SR0Q- Nick Wing December 5, 2016 ![]() Pizzagate has been pushed by Trump supporters and white supremacists Bryce Reh, Comet’s general manager, characterized trying to take down the conspiracy theory online as “trying to shoot a swarm of bees with one gun.” Yet as Pizzagate continues spreading online, it becomes more and more clear just how big of a problem fake news now poses - and how difficult it may be to address. Alefantis has worked to get the FBI and local police involved in an investigation to stop the conspiracy theory’s spread, and requested that social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit take down messages and pictures related to the false conspiracy theory.īut it has persisted. Things have gotten so bad that the general manager’s wife asked him to quit. Cecilia Kang reported at the New York Times that the restaurant’s staff and its owner, James Alefantis, have faced a barrage of abuse and death threats on social media as a result of the conspiracy theory. The Sunday shooting was far from the beginning of threats that Comet Ping Pong has faced over the past few weeks. Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump supporters and white supremacists on social media have pushed the conspiracy theory - leading to headlines like “Pizzagate: How 4Chan Uncovered the Sick World of Washington’s Occult Elite” on fake news websites. The totally false conspiracy theory claims that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign chair, John Podesta, ran a child sex ring at the basement of a pizzeria in DC, Comet Ping Pong (which doesn’t even have a basement). Instead, it was the result of a fake news story about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign that proliferated on social media in the weeks before Election Day. ![]() The scene, thankfully, was not another example of a mass shooting - no one was injured or killed. On Sunday, a man walked into a pizzeria in Washington, DC, with an assault rifle and fired one or more shots. ![]()
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