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
Tag: Pizzagate
SWOT analysis of the influencer dimension in the Middle East
Everyone who is somehow involved in social media networking has certainly heard about the term influencer. As the word might suggest, an influencer is someone who has enough power in a relevant niche to persuade his/her audience to make a decision usually through regular dedicated posting on their preferred social media channels (e.g. buying a unique clothing brand or voting for a specific political party) (1). Their clout is pivotal not only in marketing, where these people collaborate with brands to work on brand recognition or to market brands’ products and services but also in other dimensions such as political
A timeline for main fake news incidents and how it was handled
Fake news is nothing new. But, especially during the last presidential election in the United States in 2016, it has become something big. Here are some of the biggest fake news stories around the world over the past few years. “The War of the Worlds”, Orson Welles’ masterpiece, 1938 Before weighing on the most well known fake news in the past few years, let us go back to a significant event that may be considered as one of the first fake news of the contemporary era. During a cold evening of late October 1938, in the United States, an American
Cyberbalkanization
In this article, I will try to go through a topic that has been gathering a lot of attention in the last years, and that personally fascinates me: the study of Internet echo chambers, and how information is spread through them. A study by the Anti-Defamation League focused on the instant messaging app Telegram as a source and safe haven for echo chambers. Telegram, a cloud-based online social networking, and messaging app count more than 200 active users, and hosts around 221 thousand between groups and channels. Some are private, some public and some require a digital “key” to access, rendering
How “social media phenomena” influence social behavior: “pizzagate” conspiracy theory
Currently, in the IDare community, we are dealing with some phenomena which are occurring nowadays within social media and all kinds of online communication, and which are having strong psychological effects on people, especially on their way of thinking and acting. This article aims at showing one of the most concrete examples of the negative and serious consequences that these phenomena recently caused, leading some members of the social community to carry out extreme reactions. Starting from the beginning, we saw in the previous articles how fake news –it means, stories which are provably false- have an intensive “mental appeal”