Pizzagate conspiracy theories are back. In our 2017 feature, we went inside the web of conspiracy theorists, Russian operatives, Trump campaigners and Twitter bots who manufactured the 'news' that Hillary Clinton ran a pizza-restaurant child-sex ring
. Additional reporting: Aaron Sankin, Laura Starecheski, Michael Corey, Jaime Longoria and Jasper Craven.
Katz’s Facebook profile listed her residence as Joplin, Missouri. With a link to a story headlined “Breaking: Hillary Clinton strategy memo leaked: ‘Steal yard signs,’ ” Katz posted, “You know how we handle yard sign theft or tampering in South Missouri? With a 3 prong garden hoe buried in the middle of the back.” We found no record of anyone with the name Carmen Katz in the entire state.
On a pair of anonymous message boards, we found several possible seeds of Pizzagate. On July 2nd, 2016, someone calling himself FBIAnon, who claimed to be a “high-level analyst and strategist” for the bureau, hosted an Ask Me Anything forum on 4chan. He claimed to be leaking government secrets – á la Edward Snowden – out of a love for country, but it wasn’t always clear which country he meant.
Whether Katz repeated something a herd of bots was bleating, or repackaged tidbits found on other parts of the Internet, her Facebook post was the “human touch” that helped the fake news story go viral. The “tell,” says Watts, was what happened next. Most of us post into Internet oblivion. But about 12 hours after Katz shared her story, a Twitter user named @DavidGoldbergNY tweeted a screenshot of her post, twice – adding, “I have been hearing the same thing from my NYPD buddies too.
The campaign’s engagement went far deeper. We found at least 66 Trump campaign figures who followed one or more of the most prolific Pizzagate tweeters.
The story took off. Google Trends measures interest in topics among the 1.17 billion users of its search engine on a 0-100 scale. On October 29th, the day Katz posted the story on Facebook, searches for “Hillary” and “pedophile” ranked zero. Ninety-six hours later, when Hagmann “broke” the story on InfoWars, they scored 100.
When I asked if he had verified anything, Hagmann shuffled some papers, lifting one sheet by a corner, like a poker player. With apparent reluctance, he turned over a color copy of an image showing a clean, uninjured boy wearing a green T-shirt in a dog cage. The child could have been playing or held hostage. “That might be a disturbing image,” I said. “But I don’t see what it has to do with Hillary Clinton.” He shrugged.
The confusion was encouraged online by the likes of @DavidGoldbergNY. The e-mails on Weiner’s laptop had nothing to do with Podesta’s Gmail account, but one of his tweets of the Katz post included #podestaemails23. “That hashtag is a flag,” Woolley says. “It suggests that @DavidGoldbergNY is attempting to get people to look at something.” On message boards, amateur sleuths searched for encoded evidence in the Podesta e-mails.
It was just beginning. Even as the election came and went, several Twitter accounts tweeted exclusively about Pizzagate to a number of alt-right “influencers” – among them InfoWars and Brittany Pettibone, one of a handful of alt-right “girls” who regularly appear at the movement’s events. At least one single-minded account, @Pizza_Gate, likely caught the attention of Mehmet Ali Önel, a Turkish TV anchor.
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