An infamous case of fake news spread on online media platforms generated a crazy conspiracy theory that was very popular on social media outlets across the globe in 2016’s fall in correspondence of American presidential elections and in its aftermath. This case made history with the name of “Pizzagate”. But what is Pizzagate and how did the whole story begin?. To better understand it we have to go back to October 30, 2016, when a Twitter account linked to the white supremacist political area and alt-right party’s blogosphere reported that the New York Police Department (NYPD) had uncovered a pedophilia network linked to members of the U.S. Democratic Party. In March 2016, Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s email account was in fact hacked by an online phishing attack. John Podesta’s emails were later on released by Wikileaks: in some of his private messages, the head of the Clinton presidential campaign was talking with the owner of a Washington-based pizzeria, James Alefantis, about a fundraising initiative to support the democratic party in view of the upcoming elections.
On the internet, starting from 4Chain, the sentiment that there was something rotten began to circulate and the ‘alt-right’ activists, fully embraced this insane theory, to the point that they claimed that the term ‘pizza’ was a code word for a global network of pedophiles. Several conspiracy theories supporters’ afferent to the American alt right, that laid their hands on Podesta’s private content, claimed to have identified among those emails also coded references to an alleged child sex trafficking ring and some satanic rituals attended by Hilary Clinton herself and her political democratic entourage.
According to the BBC, these allegations began to receive wide circulation and gaining ground on the Internet in the days leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, after a Reddit user published a document “proving” Pizza gate. But The “Comet Ping Pong Pizza” wasn’t a random target. Alefantis was definitely a well-known figure in Washington, a gay man who has made his pizzeria “a haven for non-traditional families as well as for quirky artists, LGBT people and outsiders in general. Alefantis in addition had always been ideologically close to the Democrats and had been active in fighting online trolling, a cause for which he founded the “Correct the Record” an initiative with the purpose of debunking fake news and exposing internet trolls.
A gay leftist man, close to the Clintons and an enemy of trolling: there could not have been a better candidate to become the perfect nemesis of the alt-right, which soon began to perceive words like “pizza” as sinister and threatening. The story was picked up by other fake news websites such as InfoWars, Planet Free Will, and The Vigilant Citizen, and was promoted by alt-right activists such as Mike Cernovich, often defined by the New Yorker and the Washington Post on several occasions as the “Meme Mastermind of the American Alt Right”. Later on members of Reddit’s /r/The_Donald community created the /r/pizzagate subreddit to further develop the conspiracy theory.
The sub-community was banned on November 2016, for violating Reddit’s anti-doxing policy after users posted personal details of people connected to the alleged conspiracy. The “pizzagaters” created therefore a gigantic mud machine against the Comet Ping Pong and its manager, arriving to harass them with intimidating phone calls, counterfeiting entire Instagram posts where children – which in most of the cases were the kids of the trolls themselves – were portrayed in ambiguous attitudes and poses, and generally clogging their social medias with continuous and repeated accusations of pedophilia.
Data gathered by internet aggregator at the time were very clear; for instance, according to Crowd Tangle, a social media analytics company 512 thousand Pizzagate-themed Facebook interactions were made just in the first week of December 2016. The situation got quickly out of hand, to the point that a few weeks after the November 2016 election, a man in his thirties, Edgar Welch, traveled all the way from North Carolina to Washington D.C. with the goal of freeing the kids allegedly held kept captive in the basement of the pizza shop.
In an attempt to make his way into the back of the Comet Ping Pong, the man also fired several machine gun shots, thankfully not injuring anyone. He was arrested and shortly afterwards sentenced to four years in prison. Given the situation and the extreme ramifications of Pizzagate, all major platforms, starting with YouTube, decide to suspend the accounts of anyone promoting this theory and to clean up the related content. After experiencing its moment of glory during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory seemed to have fallen into oblivion, and the related Facebook interactions quickly went down to an average of less than 20 thousand per week over the next three years.
But something changed again the scenario in 2020: in the first week of June of that year in fact the numbers of social interactions related to Pizzagate reached new peaks: 800 thousand on Facebook and nearly 600 thousand on Instagram. On TikTok, posts with the hashtag #Pizzagate have been viewed more than 82 million times in recent weeks. That all this is happening just a few months before the new presidential elections is no coincidence. More recently in 2020, the Canadian popstar Justin Bieber was the catalyzer that made the whole theory re-explode on the Internet.
In the beginning of a video posted on Instagram by the star, Justin Bieber leaned toward the camera and adjusted his black beanie, the New York Times reports. “For some of his hundred millions of followers, it was a signal. In comments on the video, someone had in fact asked Bieber to touch his cap if he had been a victim of the child trafficking ring held at Comet Ping Pong Pizza”. It matters little that it was a very random gesture. And it is highly unlikely that Justin Bieber could have seen that comment amidst the thousands flooding the page. Yet it was enough for him to touch his cap to re-explode an old conspiracy theory that was already gradually coming to the surface. The singer’s notoriety and the “proof” he provided of the existence of Pizzagate were in fact exploited to create hundreds of videos with millions of views, in which Bieber’s gesture is dissected and analyzed in every way.
Fans immediately left thousands of comments under Justin Bieber’s posts, asking if he was safe, the NYT continues. “Within days, searches for ‘Bieber and Pizzagate’ exploded on Google, while the hashtag #savebieber began trending.” And so, just as the campaign for the upcoming presidential election gets into full swing, one of the most libelous conspiracy theories of all time is also back in the news. This thing leads us to the intuitive realization that, ake news especially when they cater to the most volatile and emotional parts of people, just as the Pizzagate did, seem to age very well, even if they were previously debunked and exposed.
Alessia Lorenzon
