The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway · 2 Oct 2017 · 305pp · 79,303 words
over the world to optimize production to this Facebook machine. They create crazy fake stories that serve as clickbait for the left and the right. Pizza Gate—the story about Comet Ping Pong, a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.—got a lot of momentum around the 2016 election. It claimed that
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Platforms 2016.” Pew Research Center. May 26, 2016. http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/. 34. Briener, Andrew. “Pizzagate, explained: Everything you want to know about the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria conspiracy theory but are too afraid to search for on Reddit.” Salon. December
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10, 2016. http://www.salon.com/2016/12/10/pizzagate-explained-everything-you-want-to-know-about-the-comet-ping-pong-pizzeria-conspiracy-theory-but-are-too-afraid-to-search-for-on-reddit/. 35. Williams
The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words
,” Gates boasted. “It was day and night.” They would program until they were starving, then walk across the street to a hippie hangout called Morningtown Pizza. Gates became obsessed. His room at home was strewn with clothes and Teletype printouts. His parents tried to impose a curfew, but it didn’t work
The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher · 5 Sep 2022 · 439pp · 131,081 words
a campaign to topple American democracy. At first, it organized under a name that made it hard to take seriously: Pizzagate. DiResta, alert to the danger of oddball Facebook causes, googled “Pizzagate.” The search engine, privileging results from YouTube, its golden goose, returned a series of videos from the platform that mostly
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me. One day the conspiracy was “everywhere,” he said, especially on Facebook, where after years of inactivity, some pages reemerged simply to repeat the phrase “Pizzagate is real.” But it was on 4chan’s politics board, the internet’s petri dish for pathogenic conspiracies, that he’d watched its genesis. Conspiracy
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threads. Curious web users who googled for information were, like DiResta, directed to YouTube videos affirming the conspiracy or, if they searched on Facebook, to Pizzagate discussion groups. Fake-news sites like YourNewsWire repackaged the posts into articles, which they posted back to Facebook. The site’s algorithm treated them as
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. In the week before the election, the social web was dominated by polls, campaign stories, and Pizzagate. “It really was jarring to see it unfold,” Adam said. People he knew from real life were sharing Pizzagate memes on their Facebook pages. It was as if a wall separating the mainstream and extremist
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was ‘Trump’ or ‘Clinton,’” he wrote. “A large proportion of these recommendations were divisive and fake news.” Of those, some of the most popular promoted Pizzagate: the FBI had exposed Hillary Clinton’s “pedophile satanic network” (1.2 million views), evidence of Bill Clinton sexually assaulting a child had surfaced (2
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a friend: Raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing the lives of a few for the lives of many. He had been bingeing YouTube videos on Pizzagate. Someone, he’d concluded, had to act. He grabbed his AR-15 rifle, a shotgun, and a revolver, and drove to Washington DC. Bursting in
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pointed the rifle at an employee, who fled, with customers streaming out behind him. Welch turned to a locked side door, which he recognized from Pizzagate videos as the entrance to the basement where Democratic conspirators locked up their child victims. He fired several shots through the door, then kicked it
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Yelp and Facebook to be “responsive.” But YouTube, Alefantis has said, refused to act, insisting it was a mere neutral platform with no responsibility for Pizzagate, and that if Alefantis wanted refuge from the videos that had urged Welch into storming his restaurant and might be radicalizing others still, he was
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their own gratification. And for every Mackey, there were another thousand conducting mass disinformation unwittingly. Yoga moms spreading vaccine conspiracies on Facebook, YouTubers tumbling down Pizzagate rabbit holes, Twitter users joining outrage mobs over a misrepresentation. Leaderless, agendaless, and all the more influential for it. DiResta called it “peer-to-peer
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users, then tried to kill himself. Rodger remains widely lionized as a hero among incels. The movement was a fringe of a fringe, dwarfed by Pizzagate or the alt right. But it hinted at social media’s potential to galvanize young white male anomie into whole communities of extremism—an increasingly
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politics board under the username Q Clearance Patriot. The user implied they were a military-intelligence official within an operation to arrest the participants in Pizzagate, the conspiracy alleging that Democratic leaders ran a global child-trafficking ring. The user, who claimed to hold a Q-level government clearance, announced that
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thousands would be arrested: cultural elites, financiers, “deep state” bureaucrats and spies. For generations, this cabal had secretly controlled American life, responsible for travails from Pizzagate to the unfairness of the economic order. Now they would be executed, the National Mall converted into a death camp. Some had already been replaced
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’s help, QAnon belief now infused all of these separate causes, much as Renée DiResta had discovered Facebook’s groups feature blurring anti-vaxxers with Pizzagate (the QAnon predecessor conspiracy) as far back as 2016. Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher, stumbled into a typical pathway that summer. She would search Facebook
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astrology to coronavirus conspiracies to QAnon. Facebook’s largest anti-vaccine network filled with Q dog whistles. TikTok surged with Pizzagate conspiracies. One twenty-year-old TikToker, who’d helped spark the Pizzagate resurgence, said she’d learned about it from a viral YouTube video. When Plandemic’s producers released a sequel
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a core belief: President Trump and loyal generals were on the verge of a glorious military coup that would overturn the cabal that had orchestrated Pizzagate and that secretly dominated American life. In the subsequent purge, the military would execute tens of thousands of traitorous Democrats, Jewish financiers, federal bureaucrats, and
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. Sutton, and Aleksandra Cichocka, Current Directions in Psychological Science 26, no. 6, December 2017. 2 “Cheese pizza,” one suggested: A beat-by-beat chronology of Pizzagate’s rise, including references to individual posts, can be found at “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Amanda Robb, Rolling Stone, November 16, 2017; and
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“How the Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Behind ‘Pizzagate’ Was Spread,” Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed News, December 5, 2016. 3 14 percent of Trump supporters: “Trump Remains Unpopular; Voters Prefer Obama on SCOTUS Pick,” Tom
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, November 27, 2016. 16 Raiding a pedo ring: Welch’s attack and YouTube’s response are detailed in “John Podesta Is Ready to Talk About Pizzagate,” Andy Kroll, Rolling Stone, December 9, 2018. 17 His team scraped half a million: The methodology and results detailed in these pages were first published
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, 2020. “Seven: ‘Where We Go One,’” Kevin Roose et al., New York Times, May 28, 2020. 59 most popular downloads: “Apple, Google Cashed in on Pizzagate-Offshoot Conspiracy App,” Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, NBC News, July 16, 2018. 60 reached #2 on Amazon’s: “How a Conspiracy Theory about Democrats
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: “Facebook Bans One of the Anti-Vaccine Movement’s Biggest Groups for Violating QAnon Rules,” Aatif Sulleyman, Newsweek, November 18, 2020. 40 TikTok surged with Pizzagate:“‘PizzaGate’ Conspiracy Theory Thrives Anew in the TikTok Era,” Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel, New York Times, June 27, 2020. 41 That summer, ninety-seven: “Here
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words
that Obama secretly supported the Islamic State. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, conspiracy theories gained alarming traction. One of the most infamous was Pizzagate, promoted by Alex Jones and other right-wing provocateurs. The theory alleged that high-ranking Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of
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: Finnegan, “Donald Trump and the ‘Amazing.’ ” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT promoted by Alex Jones: James Doubek, “Conspiracy Theorist Alex Jones Apologizes for Promoting ‘Pizzagate,’ ” NPR, March 26, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/26/521545788/conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-apologizes-for-promoting
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-pizzagate. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The intel on this”: Hank Sanders, “Man Convicted in Pizzagate Shooting Is Killed in Confrontation with Police,” New York Times, January 9, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com
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/2025/01/09/us/pizzagate-shooter-killed-police.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “against white people”: Don Gonyea, “Majority of White Americans Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination,”
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, 256–57 Pinker, Steven, 190 Pinkydoll, 223 Pitchfork, 38–39, 92, 109, 117, 125, 172–73, 212 Pitchfork Effect, 38 Pitt, Brad, 115 Pixies, 211 Pizzagate, 148, 191 Playboi Carti, 182, 222 Poarch, Bella, 215–16, 219 police brutality, 132, 144, 156–57, 200 political correctness (PC), 20, 23, 24, 148
Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson · 8 Mar 2022 · 574pp · 148,233 words
much,” FBIAnon wrote. “They get paid in children as well as money.” That and similar bizarre posts constituted the early traces of what grew into Pizzagate, a nutty web of total nonsense claiming that Hillary Clinton and top Democrats operated a child sex slavery ring from the basement of Comet Ping
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Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Although the Sandy Hook families had already suffered for years, Pizzagate jolted people awake to the real-world consequences of “fake news.” The term, defined by Hunt Allcott of New York University and Matthew Gentzkow of
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track record or reputation can in some cases reach as many readers as Fox News, CNN, or the New York Times,” Allcott and Gentzkow wrote. Pizzagate was stoked by twin events that damaged Clinton in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.[3] In early October, Wikileaks released thousands of pages
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its toppings, the theory went, were Clinton campaign code words denoting child sex trafficking. In this imaginary lexicon, “cheese pizza,” for example, meant child pornography. Pizzagate is the direct predecessor of QAnon, the false worldview that several years later caught fire among some Americans. Both delusions rest on a pastiche of
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ancient tropes. Secret satanic meetings, the ravaging, selling, and killing of innocents by bloodthirsty elites—Pizzagate and QAnon contained elements of blood libel, the hateful, centuries-old falsehood that Jews murder Christian children as part of religious rituals. Days before the
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November 8 vote, Pizzagate popped up on the radar of Will Sommer, a reporter then working for the Washington City Paper, who had been covering the far right during
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viral way by online clout chasers followed by influential far-right outlets. Infowars was late to the game, but once Jones saw how much attention Pizzagate was getting, he jumped in with both feet. “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and, and, chopped up and
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alongside his girls, to morose and brooding. Welch had just gotten internet service and spent hours watching conspiracy-themed YouTube videos on his cell phone. Pizzagate’s false claims about tortured and wounded children struck a deep chord. Welch believed it all and searched for Comet’s address. On the morning
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had slept in a little that Sunday. He and his staff had been dealing with months of harassment. At one point, Comet staffers counted five #Pizzagate posts per minute on Twitter.[9] They were getting a total of fifty violent threats a day on social media and by phone. One caller
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, where the whole block is shut down and the police are storming the building.” Welch had set off from North Carolina intending to “self-investigate” Pizzagate.[10] But once he reached Washington a different impulse took hold. Carrying the handgun and knife, brandishing the AR-15 assault-style rifle, Welch walked
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’s lawyers sent Jones a letter demanding that he retract multiple statements he made on Infowars between late November and early December 2016, spreading the Pizzagate theory and telling his audience, “It’s up to you to research it for yourself,” comments they said inspired Welch to bring his high-powered
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my knowledge today, neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking, as was part of the theories about Pizzagate that were being written about in many media outlets and which we commented upon,” he said. “In our commentary about what had become known as
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Pizzagate, I made comments about Mr. Alefantis that in hindsight I regret, and for which I apologize to him. We were participating in a discussion that
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was an ever-evolving story, which had a huge amount of commentary about it across many media outlets.” Infowars also removed videos of Jones’s Pizzagate broadcasts, which had drawn millions of viewers. “To my knowledge today . . .” “We were participating in a discussion . . .” “This was an ever-evolving story
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. . .” Pizzagate was a viral lie, not an “ever-evolving story,” or a “discussion.” Jones’s shouting, weeping, on-air peddling of the lie, his exhortations of “
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fear, if not the memory, of Welch’s visit would eventually ease. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube began closing accounts and removing content using the word “Pizzagate.” But the Pizzagaters hadn’t gone away. They were devising other ways, new code words to discuss the imagined plot. In late January 2019, Ryan
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recorded the attack, and Jaselskis was captured a few days later after he assaulted a police officer near the Washington Monument. Law enforcement found a Pizzagate-themed video on his parents’ YouTube account, posted hours before the Comet arson. In April 2020, Jaselskis was sentenced to four years in federal prison
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.[11] Burning along the same social media fuse, and sparking on new platforms, Pizzagate begat QAnon, a new, more virulent mass delusion. QAnon, some of whose adherents see Trump as an avenging hero in a child-trafficking scheme led
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Facebook calling Sandy Hook a hoax, claims she has since renounced. Will Sommer, now a reporter at the Daily Beast, calls QAnon a “rebranding” of Pizzagate. “It’s fair to peg the Comet arson to QAnon,” he told me. “These kids are walking the same path tread by their
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it all starts anew.” * * * — I visited James Alefantis on a summerlike afternoon in late October 2020, exactly four years after he first heard the word “Pizzagate.” I wanted to learn whether he still believed that what happened was an aberration, a localized seizure induced by a short circuit in our political
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going to go out of business. And that’s it. It’s as simple as that. So they have no interest in policing at all. Pizzagate was a huge seller.” We had been talking for a couple of hours. The first families in Comet’s weeknight dinner crowd had drifted into
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, three days before Welch traveled to Washington, he sent a text message to his girlfriend, telling her he’d been researching Pizzagate and it was making him sick. Welch had watched Pizzagate videos for hours that day, YouTube algorithms sending him one after another. He visited Comet’s website. That night after
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8:00 p.m., Welch texted a friend a link to a YouTube video, writing, “Watch PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture on YouTube.” Alefantis searched for the video. It was an Infowars broadcast. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ ” Alefantis told me. “Like
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social media oxygen supply. James Alefantis’s legal threat forced a stilted apology from Jones. But Alefantis’s lawyers also demanded that Jones remove his Pizzagate videos, including the one the Comet gunman sent to his friends, from YouTube and other platforms. This was serious: Infowars posted its broadcasts to social
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by personal calamity or by large-scale events like 9/11, the pandemic or a mass shooting, they seek order amid frightening instability. This describes Pizzagate gunman Edgar Maddison Welch, a young father beset by guilt over a car accident in which he nearly killed a child, duped by Alex Jones
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17, 2015, https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2015/03/man_accused_of_bomb_threats_at.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 CHAPTER SIXTEEN Amanda Robb, “Pizzagate: Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Rolling Stone, November 16, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/. BACK TO
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-wikileaks.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Gregor Aisch, Jon Huang, and Cecilia Kang, “Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, December 10, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/10/business/media/pizzagate.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Benjamin Weiser, “Anthony Weiner Gets 21 Months in Prison for
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.hbo.com/documentaries/after-truth-disinformation-and-the-cost-of-fake-news. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann, “Pizzagate: From Rumor, to Hashtag, to Gunfire in D.C.,” Washington Post, December 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local
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/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Cecilia Kang, “
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, Hillary: “alt-right” speech of, 262–65; and conspiracy theories, 241, 258; and Infowars’ interview with Trump, 213–14, 215; and Jones, 243, 429; and Pizzagate, 240–41, 242–43; and QAnon, 250–51; and Wikileaks’ email dump, 241–42, 253 CNN, 16–17, 96, 98, 118–20 Cohn, James, 221
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, 246–48, 251–54; arson attempt at, 250, 251; gunman at, 244, 245–47; and Infowars’ video, 243, 249–50, 254–56, 277, 320; and Pizzagate, 241, 242–43, 245, 250 Comey, James, 242 conspiracy theorists: claims massacre was a hoax, 72, 73, 83–84, 93, 99, 103, 106–8, 111
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Lanza house site, 29; Miller on three types of, 124; in Newtown, 102–4, 147–48, 184; and NSA Utah Data Center, 268–69; and Pizzagate, 242; Pozner’s attempts to engage, 124–25, 142–43, 147, 148–50, 153–60, 166–69; and Pozner’s counteroffensive, 162–65; predictors of
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–10; and games countering misinformation, 424; and Infowars, 342, 343, 345, 375; and Jones, 166, 342, 343, 345, 370, 375; as news source, 258; and Pizzagate, 243, 250; and Pozners’ open letter to Zuckerberg, 343–45; Pozner’s trusted status with, 421; and QAnon, 250–51, 252; Sandy Hook Hoax Facebook
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, 302; and Parker’s press conference, 95–98, 118, 196, 198, 238–39, 267–68; and Parkland school shooting (2018), 308–9, 313–14; and Pizzagate video, 243, 249–50, 254–56, 277, 320; and Pozner, 77, 81, 121–22, 198–99; and presidential election of 2016, 271–73; and September
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, Morgan, 272 Pelley, Scott, 37 Pence, Mike, 433 Persily, Nate, 418 Petty, Ryan and Kelly, 338–40, 389 Pieczenik, Steve, 104–5 Pinto, Jack, 65 Pizzagate, 240–56; and Infowars’ video, 243, 249–50, 254–56, 277, 320; and QAnon, 242–43. See also Comet Ping Pong Podesta, John, 241–42
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on, 194; influence/impacts of, 165, 286; Infowars deplatformed from, 374–75, 377; lack of regulation/standards, 193–95, 209; as news source, 385; and Pizzagate, 243, 250, 253; and QAnon, 250–51, 252; reluctance to remove abusive content, 194, 239, 375–77; and Section 230 protections, 422; and Senate panel
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; and Twitter: bad actors on, 208; disinformation on, 420; and First Amendment protections, 206; and Infowars’ Chobani coverage, 279, 280; Infowars removed from, 374; and Pizzagate, 243; and Pozner, 164, 165, 421; and QAnon, 252; and Section 230 protections, 207; and Trump, 213 U United Way, 51–54, 231–34 “Unraveling
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; disinformation on, 420; and First Amendment protections, 206, 209–10; hoaxers’ profiting from conspiracy content on, 194; and Infowars’ Chobani coverage, 279, 280; and Infowars’ Pizzagate videos, 243, 244, 249, 250, 254–56, 277, 320; Infowars removed from, 374; and Infowars’ takedown notices, 199, 200, 290, 297, 306; Infowars’ videos/channels
Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking · 15 Mar 2018
was real.” But it was no aberration. Welch’s ill-fated odyssey could be traced to a flurry of viral conspiracy theories known collectively as #Pizzagate. Arising in the final days of the 2016 U.S. election, the hoax claimed Hillary Clinton and her aides were involved in satanic worship and
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determined the heart was a secret sign for child predators. It was actually the symbol of a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. #Pizzagate blazed across social media, garnering 1.4 million mentions on Twitter alone. On the Infowars YouTube channel, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones told his 2 million
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, we’re in the hands of pure evil.” Spying opportunity, the Russian sockpuppets working in St. Petersburg also latched onto the #Pizzagate phenomenon, their posts further boosting its popularity. #Pizzagate not only dominated far-right online conversation for weeks, but actually increased in power following Clinton’s electoral defeat. When polled after
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arrest, “the intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” Welch’s use of the word “intel” was eerily appropriate. Among the key voices in the #Pizzagate network was Jack Posobiec, a young intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve. Although Posobiec’s security clearance had been revoked and he’d
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been reassigned by his commanding officers to such duties as “urinalysis program coordinator,” on Twitter he was a potent force. Posobiec was relentless in pushing #Pizzagate to his more than 100,000 followers. He’d even livestreamed his own “investigation” of the restaurant, barging in on a child’s birthday party
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, informing his followers that the DC police chief had concluded, “Nothing to suggest man w/gun at Comet Ping Pong had anything to do with #pizzagate.” It was, like the rest of the conspiracy, a fabrication. The only thing real was the mortal peril and psychological harm that opportunists like Posobiec
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validation. Posobiec and his messages were retweeted multiple times by the most powerful social media platform in all the world, that of President Donald Trump. #Pizzagate shows how online virality—far from a measure of sincere popularity—is a force that can be manipulated and sustained by just a few influential
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regard for the truth. Indeed, why should they? The information of truth is less likely to draw eyes. In the past several years, episodes like #Pizzagate have become all too common, as have fabulists like Posobiec. These conspiracy-mongers’ influence has been further reinforced by the age-old effects of homophily
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, each of which could reach orders of magnitude more users. He took particular joy in using his army of fake accounts to disseminate lies, including #Pizzagate. “I can make whatever claims I want to make,” he bragged. “That’s how this game works.” MicroChip lived in Utah. Where bots became truly
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fears about a well-known but then mysterious disease. The internet, and especially its memetic elements, enables this further. For instance, as bizarre as the #Pizzagate hoax may have seemed, it effectively leveraged a canon of Clinton-linked controversies that stretched across every social media platform for over a decade. So
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nonsensical it sounds. Even as they complain about how big it has gotten, they make it bigger. Shortly after the election, Jack Posobiec, the infamous #Pizzagate architect and urinalysis officer, provided a perfect illustration of this dynamic at an anti-Trump protest in Washington, DC. Posobiec would later be captured in
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.com/news-politics/videos/a51152/trump-surrogate-no-such-thing-as-facts/. 127 shielded their terrified children: Marc Fisher, John Woodrow Cox, and Peter Hermann, “Pizzagate: From Rumor, to Hashtag, to Gunfire in D.C.,” Washington Post, December 6, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local
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/pizzagate-from-rumor-to-hashtag-to-gunfire-in-dc/2016/12/06/4c7def50-bbd4-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.c84c2847b899. 127 customers made a
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run for it: Amanda Robb, “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” Rolling Stone, November 16, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/pizzagate-anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-w511904. 127 an employee holding pizza dough: Fisher, Cox, and Hermann
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tiny computer room: Ibid. 128 “lucid, deadly serious”: Spencer S. Hsu, “Pizzagate Gunman Says He Was Foolish, Reckless, Mistaken—and Sorry,” Washington Post, June 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/pizzagate-shooter-apologizes-in-handwritten-letter-for-his-mistakes-ahead-of-sentencing/2017/06/13/f35126b6-5086-11e7-be25
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-3a519335381c_story.html?utm_term=.63e54b2d390d. 128 tearful farewell: Grace Hauck, “‘Pizzagate’ Shooter Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison,” CNN, June 22
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, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/22/politics/pizzagate-sentencing/index.html. 128 sentenced to four years: Ibid. 128 For James Alefantis: Ibid. 128
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known collectively as #Pizzagate: Fisher, Cox, and Hermann, “Pizzagate.” 128 1.4 million mentions: Robb, “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal.” 128 “Something’s being covered up”: Ibid. 128 Russian sockpuppets working: Ibid. 128
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7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake-news.html. 129 Posobiec was relentless: Fisher, Cox, and Hermann, “Pizzagate.” 129 “They want to control”: Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “ANNOUNCING: My next book 4D Warfare: How to Use New Media to Fight and Win the Culture
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. 129 “Nothing to suggest”: Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “DC Police Chief: ‘Nothing to suggest man w/gun at Comet Ping Pong had anything to do with #pizzagate’” (tweet deleted), available at Scoopnest, https://www.scoopnest.com/user/JackPosobiec/805559273426141184-dc-police-chief-nothing-to-suggest-man-w-gun-at-comet-ping-pong
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-had-anything-to-do-with-pizzagate. 129 livestreaming from the White House: Jared Holt and Brendan Karet, “Meet Jack Posobiec: The ‘Alt-Right’ Troll with Press Pass in White House,” Slate
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, 2017, 10:28 A.M., https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/861996422920536064. 129 retweeted multiple times: Colleen Shalby, “Trump Retweets Alt-Right Media Figure Who Published ‘Pizzagate’ and Seth Rich Conspiracy Theories,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-updates-everything-president-trump-retweets-alt-right
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Jack Posobiec Who Took ‘Rape Melania’ Sign to Rally,” Independent, January 15, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-jack-posobiec-pizzagate-rape-melania-sign-twitter-conspiracy-theory-far-right-a8159661.html. 129 “power law”: Emma Pierson, “Twitter Data Show That a Few Powerful Users Can Control
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), 186–93 Peretti, Jonah, 178–79 Peskov, Dmitry, 203–4 Pheidippides, 29, 52 Philippines, 140 Phillips, Whitney, 191 Photobucket, 46 PhotoDNA, 227, 237 Pinterest, 194 #Pizzagate, 127–37, 144, 209 Plato, 272 Pliny the Elder, 45 Poe, Edgar Allan, 110 Poe’s Law, 174 polarization, 126, 132–33, 160, 202 politics
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, 168–69 detox from, 222 disinformation campaigns, 241 fake accounts (botnets), 143 fake news, 131 Macedonian disinformation, 119 memetic warfare, 192 Pepe meme, 186–93 #Pizzagate incident, 127–28 real vs. fake news, 135 regulation, 251 Russian trolls, 111–14 transparency, 268 U.S. State Department, 185, 217, 255–56, 264
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attraction of, 153 authenticity, 165–67 community, 169–73 emotion, 161–65 hijacking, 191 inundation, 173–79 Mosul attack, 5, 150 narrative of, 156–61 #Pizzagate incident, 129–30 study of, 178–79 vs. veracity, 137 VKontakte (VK), 74, 94, 202, 205 volunteers, 244–48 Voz das Comunidades, 67 W wallbanging
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-earthers, 123 flight MH17, 72 Google and, 49 Google Brain project, 249 “Macaca” moment, 55–57 military training and recruitment, 9 origin of, 218–19 #Pizzagate incident, 128 regulation, 230, 250 Russia Today (RT), 107–8 terrorism and, 151–52 training videos, 9, 198, 234 Tunisian slaughter, 85 war in real
Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
by Kelly Weill · 22 Feb 2022
ranks of conspiracy theorists committing real-world harm in an effort to prove their beliefs. Chief among this dangerous crowd are adherents of QAnon and Pizzagate (a sort of QAnon predecessor that specifically accuses Trump’s foes of participating in child sex trafficking under Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, DC, pizzeria
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day.” The video was the completion of a conspiratorial cycle. Earlier that day, Welch had mainlined YouTube videos on the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which made him “sick,” he later told investigators. Pizzagate had been thriving on YouTube, where far-right vloggers had uploaded hours-long videos explaining why they believed Hillary Clinton
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parlor. Shortly before leaving to drive to DC, Welch tried to enlist two friends to the conspiracy theory, urging both to watch YouTube videos like “PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture.” The video he made from the road mimicked the style of his favorite conspiracy theorists, with Welch speaking directly into the camera
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irate officer announced while Welch mumbled into the pavement about a pedophile ring. “He’s talking about Pizzagate.” After the shooting, Pizzagate’s highest-profile advocates denounced Welch as “controlled opposition,” because they’d found a web page for an amateur actor of the same name. And
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this wasn’t 100 percent,” he told the New York Times. A judge called it “sheer luck” he didn’t hurt anyone. Unchastened and unchecked, Pizzagate carried on, eventually transferring much of its momentum to QAnon, which borrows many of its foundational claims. In January 2019, twenty-two-year-old Ryan
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large. As it surged in popularity during the Trump presidency, I’d seen the Flat Earth movement grow increasingly entangled with political conspiracy movements like Pizzagate and its successor, QAnon. The Flat Earth Facebook groups I monitored had become awash not just in globe skeptics, but in ones who now accused
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, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/do-planes-fly-over-antarctica/. 158 “I hope you understand that one day” “Edgar Maddison Welch, ‘Pizzagate’ Gunman,” video, “Pizzagate’s Violent Legacy, Washington Post, February 16, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/16
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/pizzagate-qanon-capitol-attack. 158 “PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture” United States of America v. Edgar Maddison Welch, affidavit filed December 12, 2016, in US District Court for the District of Columbia,
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https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/pizzagate-affidavit.pdf. 158 “in our own backyard” Merlan, Republic of Lies, 60. 158 actor of the same name Nathan Francis, “Edgar Maddison Welch
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PizzaGate Theory: Was the Comet Ping Pong Shooter a Crisis Actor? New Conspiracy Theory Takes Hold [Debunked],” Inquisitr, December 6, 2016, https://www.inquisitr.com/3772621/
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edgar-maddison-welch-pizzagate-theory-was-the-comet-ping-pong-shooter-a-crisis-actor-new-conspiracy-theory-takes-hold-debunked/. 159 “wasn’t 100 percent” Adam Goldman, “The Comet
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, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake-news.html. 159 “sheer luck” Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, “Gunman in ‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison,” New York Times, June 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us
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/pizzagate-attack-sentence.html. 159 torched a pizzeria across town Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, “ ‘Pizzagate’ Video Was Posted to YouTube Account of Alleged Arsonist’s Parents before Fire, NBC News, February 14, 2019
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, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/pizzagate-conspiracy-video-posted-youtube-account-alleged-arsonist-s-parents-n971891. 160 “can’t live in this reality anymore” Sara Jean Green, “ ‘God Told Me He
Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
by Annalee Newitz · 3 Jun 2024 · 251pp · 68,713 words
-Bernie conspiracy wasn’t the only narrative to emerge from the social media storm unleashed by the IRA on Facebook. The leaked emails inspired the “#Pizzagate” conspiracy, a precursor to QAnon. People frequenting online community 4chan’s right-wing forums identified “secret messages” in Podesta’s emails. They believed they had
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to kidnap children and rape them in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a DC pizza joint popular with DNC workers. Late in 2016, a #Pizzagate believer drove to Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. He threatened customers with it, searching the premises because he believed the Clinton
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campaign was raping children in the basement.28 Ten months after the #Pizzagate attack, a shady figure named “QClearancePatriot” (later just Q) started posting in the /pol/ (Politically Incorrect) forums on 4chan, and the QAnon movement was born
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last decade to explain random violence inspired by online media. The gunman who showed up at Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15, inspired by #Pizzagate, is a stochastic terrorist, as are members of the January 6 mob at the US Capitol and many mass shooters, like white supremacist Dylann Roof
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and nothing else. . . . Nothing is innocent; nothing is pleasurable; everything is connected with his diseased apprehension of power.”45 Here Linebarger might easily be describing #Pizzagate and QAnon acolytes, who find liberal and “woke” conspiracies woven into everything. Every political speech is a potential secret message. And every online troll is
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Clinton’s Campaign,” Washington Post, October 23, 2021. 28. Aisch, Gregor, Jon Huang, and Cecilia Kang, “Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, December 10, 2016. 29. Miller, Michael E., “The Pizzagate Gunman Is Out of Prison. Conspiracy Theories Are Out of Control,” Washington Post, February 16, 2021. 30. Perlroth, Nicole
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personhood, 99–100, 195, 203 See also scapegoating persuasion as goal of psyops, xv, 77 Peurifoy, John, 123 Phillips, Rufus, III, 10 Pioneer Fund, 109 #Pizzagate conspiracy, 85, 93 Plenty Horses, 57 Podesta, John, 83 Pohl, Frederik, 14 Pollock, Jackson, 24 Pomerantsev, Peter, xvii Powell, J. W., 172–73 Pratt, Julius
We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin · 1 Oct 2018
past sixteen months. They knew what he’d been dealing with on the site recently, namely all the harassment that had accumulated thanks to Pizzagate. The r/pizzagate subreddit was only two weeks old, but it was extremely fast-growing in terms of subscriber numbers. It had launched on November 7, the
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subscribers of The_Donald to comb through and disseminate information from the Wikileaks files of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Upon its launch r/pizzagate was dedicated to discussing the bizarre theory that attempted to link the Clinton Foundation to a pedophilia ring based in the basement of a pizza
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of being a hub of international child trafficking and tied to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, satanism, triangular symbols, and punk bands. Breaking down how the Pizzagate theory emerged is an exercise in absurdity, but essentially a message board on 4chan attempted to link mentions of the word “pizza,” and other foods
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, and even was tweeted by soon-to-be national security adviser Mike Flynn. On Reddit, members of conspiracy-theory-heavy subreddits piled onto r/pizzagate. R/pizzagate’s problems were not limited to disseminating fake news and wild theories, as well as spoofs of these theories, provided by lulz-seeking trolls. The
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doxing—and warned moderators their community could be subject to a ban. Five days later, personal information was still flying. Reddit admin Susie Vass sent Pizzagate’s moderators a note, midday on the twenty-second: “We recognize that you feel this is an important investigation, however as it has become clear
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that this community is unable to stay within our sitewide rules we will be banning the subreddit at 4:00 PM PST.” On r/pizzagate, as hours ticked down to 4 p.m, a mass effort to archive “important threads” began. So did the name-calling—primarily aimed at u
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Reddit in-box was piled full of these on-site mentions. Plus, he didn’t like that they propagated a vibe on T_D and Pizzagate that he was out to get them. Huffman knew the reality was the opposite: While he despised these users’ posts, their attitude, and their politics
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were operating. Level: troll. So Huffman went into the site’s code, and navigated to The_Donald’s front page, where a thread about r/pizzagate being banned was taking off. In the thread, he saw a line reading, “’Member when reddit thought u/spez would completely revamp this shitty website
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/spez” comments, replacing “spez” with r/the_donald mods for about an hour. It’s been a long week here trying to unwind the r/pizzagate stuff. As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly. As the
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legal team proactively reached out to Warner’s office to introduce themselves. As part of the internal investigation, Reddit dug into an isolated conspiracy theory, Pizzagate. Its data scientists found no evidence at the time of suspicious Russian domains orchestrating the dissemination or analysis of
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Pizzagate on the subreddit. That was all regular Redditors. The spread of political disinformation by regular users wasn’t what Congress was investigating—it was primarily
Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball · 19 Jul 2023 · 317pp · 87,048 words
a whole new scale, with the people playing having no idea they were playing a game and instead believing they were solving real crimes. The Pizzagate conspiracy was born.45 People had been motivated to make death threats and even launch potentially deadly SWAT raids simply because they didn’t like
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not-for-profit world (including the CEO of left-wing media watchdog Media Matters for America).47 The dark corner of the internet that was Pizzagate had now convinced itself not only that there was a child abuse conspiracy underway, but that they knew where it was happening – in the basement
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made its drops. Apparently motivated by a desire to see Q’s important message reach a wider audience – he had been an ardent believer in Pizzagate and was a lifelong conspiracy theorist9 – Furber was one of the people who in early November 2017 started seeding Q’s information across the internet
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a fringe YouTube figure who, according to NBC – all her online content has subsequently been removed from the internet – had previously posted videos analysing the Pizzagate conspiracy from a sympathetic viewpoint, alongside other WikiLeaks email releases. Diaz’s first video – posted on 3 November, less than a week after Q’s
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believe in the existence of Satan is not relevant. They do. And according to each and every eyewitness who has the guts to step forward, Pizzagate is real.’ You get the gist. By the time someone had watched this video, they would have been presented with a narrative weaving together the
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Democratic whistleblower, Seth Rich – a man who was murdered in DC in 2016 – claiming Obama had been behind the killing.22 Greene also pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy, shared Q posts and videos on social media, and called Q a ‘patriot’.23 MTG was not alone in running for office while at
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from school soon. He’ll find her, then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me.’3 As the Pizzagate-connected raid on Washington’s Comet Ping Pong showed, QAnon’s direct antecedents had an ability to mobilise and radicalise people into real-world violence
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Conservative Party on Facebook.13 There were numerous famous or semi-famous boosters of QAnon’s child abuse thesis and #SaveTheChildren – including one somewhat bizarre Pizzagate rant by none other than the pop star Robbie Williams, in an interview clip posted onto YouTube and Twitter in 2020.14 ‘Look, there might
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mass-detective event that is QAnon: the ability to be the hero in your own story. The specific theses of Anonymous, Gamergate, the alt-right, Pizzagate, QAnon, #SaveTheChildren, anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination are all different, but they share many (though not necessarily all) of the above traits, elements likely to
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QAnon continued to flourish.13 Journalists like me kept trying on the same tactic, ignoring that it had never worked. ‘Since QAnon first emerged – since Pizzagate first emerged – the assumption among journalists in the US, the impulse, was, “We just have to throw more facts at it, we have to give
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’, www.nytimes.com, 29 October 2016. 42. Associated Press, ‘Leaked DNC emails reveal details of anti-Sanders sentiment’, www.theguardian.com, 24 July 2016. 43. ‘Pizzagate: How a 4chan conspiracy went mainstream’, www.newstatesman.com, 8 December 2016. 44. Brian Patrick Byrne, ‘Minecraft Creator Alleges Global Conspiracy Involving
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“Manufactured Race War,” a Missing Tabloid Toddler, and Holistic Medicine’, www.thedailybeast.com, 28 August 2017. 45. Joshua Gillin, ‘How Pizzagate went from fake news to a real problem for a D.C. business’, www.politifact.com, 5 December 2016. 46. ‘Fake News Onslaught Targets Pizzeria
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. man told police he went to D.C. pizzeria with gun to investigate conspiracy theory’, www.washingtonpost.com, 4 December 2016. 49. Spencer S. Hau, ‘ “Pizzagate” gunman sentenced to four years in prison, as prosecutors urged judge to deter vigilante justice’, www.washingtonpost.com, 22 June 2017. 3 BREADCRUMBS 1. The
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, 21 September 2020. 14. Where it remains online (as at March 2022): https://twitter.com/BreesAnna/status/1275719028766621698. 15. Nick Reilly, ‘Robbie Williams suggests debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory is true: “The right questions haven’t been asked” ’, www.nme.com, 25 June 2020. 16. This account is largely sourced from Kaylee
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, here, here Perplex City, here Peterson, Jordan, here Petrie-Blanchard, Neely, here Pflugerville High School, here Phillips, Whitney, here, here, here, here Pirbright Institute, here Pizzagate conspiracy, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Podesta, John, here, here Polaris, here Poole, Christopher, here, here, here pornography, here, here, here
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