PIZZAGATE:
The Fake News scandal
involving Hillary Clinton
                and Wikileaks

One of the most known conspiracy theories is that of Pizzagate.
This grew on forums like Reddit and 4chan, and it was fomented by the alt-right and Alex Jones (Texas-based host of Infowars.com), and then translated into a real-life dangerous situation. But what is Pizzagate?

Pizzagate was a widely discredited news story which linked Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign with a fictional human trafficking ring.

It’s so-called because the alleged headquarters of the operation was the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C, which – according to the conspiracy – was also a meeting ground for Satanic ritual abuse.

It all began in March 2016, when the personal email account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign manager, was hacked. The media company WikiLeaks published the emails later that year; conspiracy theorists claimed the emails contained coded messages that alluded to human trafficking and a child sex ring. The emails contained multiple references to pizza restaurants, but there is no evidence that they are “code” or refer to anything else. The story has been widely debunked by a number of fact checking and news organisations from across the political spectrum – even the right-wing Fox News has said the story is completely false.

Theorists claim that similarities between Comet Ping Pong’s logo contain symbols linked to Satanism and pedophilia; the New York Times noted these similarities could be found in the logos of completely unrelated companies if you looked hard enough. Claims of a secret underground network beneath Comet Ping Pong were proven untrue by the fact the establishment has no basement, and “evidence” that emerged purporting to show John Podesta played a part in the kidnapping of Madeleine McCann turned out to simply be sketches of a suspect taken from the descriptions of two eyewitnesses. No alleged victims of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory have come forward, and no physical evidence has been found.

Despite the theory having zero evidence evidence to support it, that didn’t stop those who opposed Hilary Clinton believing the story wholesale. That included gunman Edgar Maddison Welch, who travelled down from South Carolina to confront the owners of Comet Ping Pong. He entered the pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. – packed with families on a Sunday afternoon – and fired an automatic rifle. Thankfully, no one was injured in the disturbance; Mr. Welch told police he had driven from South Carolina to “investigate” the restaurant after reading online reports.

Source:[17]

The claim that Hillary Clinton was a pedophile started in a Facebook post, spread to Twitter and then went viral with the help of far-right platforms like Breitbart and Info-Wars. But it was unclear whether Pizzagate was mass hysteria or the work of politicos with real resources and agendas. It took the better part of a year (and two teams of researchers) to sift through the digital trail. Ordinary people, online activists, bots, foreign agents and domestic political operatives were found. Many of them were associates of the Trump campaign. Others had ties with Russia. Working together – though often unwittingly – they flourished in a new “post-truth” information ecosystem, a space where false claims are defended as absolute facts. What’s different about Pizzagate, says Samuel Woolley, a leading expert in computational propaganda, is it was retweeted and picked up by some of the most powerful faces of American politics.

Source:[18]

A poll conducted by Public Policy Polling on December 6–7, 2016, asked 1,224 U.S. registered voters if they thought Hillary Clinton was "connected to a child sex ring being run out of a pizzeria in Washington DC". Nine percent of respondents said they believed she was connected, 72% said they did not, and 19% were not sure. In an interview with NPR on November 27, 2016, Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis referred to the conspiracy theory as "an insanely complicated, made-up, fictional lie-based story" and a COORDINATED POLITICAL ATTACK.

Syndicated columnist Daniel Ruth wrote that the conspiracy theorists' assertions were "dangerous and damaging fake allegations" and that they were "repeatedly debunked, disproved and dismissed”. Despite the conspiracy theory being debunked, it continued to spread on social media, with over one million messages using hashtag #Pizzagate on Twitter in November 2016. On December 8, 2016, Hillary Clinton responded to the conspiracy theory, speaking about the dangers of fake news websites.

She said,

The epidemic of malicious fake news and fake propaganda that flooded social media over the past year, it's now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences.

                          Source:[19]