Disinformation, Not Fake News, Got Trump Elected, and It Is Not Stopping
I made a mistake on Twitter on Sunday night. When I learned that a man with an assault rifle had stormed into a Washington pizzeria to “self-investigate”
an online conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence — that the
restaurant is a front for child sex abuse involving Hillary Clinton — I
decided to confront some of the alt-right bloggers who had played a role
in spreading the hoax on the social network.
The gunman, Edgar M. Welch, surrendered after telling the police
that he had discovered that there were no child sex slaves being held
at the pizza place, Comet Ping Pong, despite the lurid fantasies he had
read online about a made-up scandal known as “PizzaGate,” which surfaced just before Election Day.
Those who had worked diligently to spread the hoax — and others who
had a hard time accepting that it was obviously not true — had by Sunday
night started to claim that Welch himself was part of the plot. He shot
up the pizzeria, they said, as a “false flag” attack to distract
attention from the (entirely imaginary) scandal they claimed to have
uncovered by reading between the lines of hacked emails published by WikiLeaks.
