How Disinformation Linked Pizza to a Secret Pedophile Ring
By: Megan Parada
Tags: 2016 Election, Conspiracy Theories, Pizzagate

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

The date is December 4, 2016. You decide to grab a slice of pizza at your favorite restaurant called Comet Ping-Pong in the outskirts of Washington, DC. Little do you know that a man named Edgar Maddison Welch is about to enter the restaurant open carrying an AR-15 in hopes of saving children in the back room who are trapped in a nonexistent satanic pedophile ring led by Hillary Clinton.

While this whole situation may seem like it’s straight out of a movie and that no reasonable human being would believe such claims, the conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate had millions of loyal followers. How does such so-called “fake news” spread? Who is fact-checking these claims? How do people get so involved in rumors that they decide to bring an AR-15 into a pizza shop? The answers to these questions are rooted in disinformation.

Disinformation, Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories

I’m sure everyone has heard of at least one conspiracy theory. In fact, in a study done by the University of Chicago, it was found that 19% of Americans believe that the US government had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. Other popular theories include the belief that the moon landing was fake and that JFK’s murder was an inside job. Conspiracy theory popularity has peaked in the last few years as Americans have become more and more skeptical of the news being fed to them. Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 preached the spread of “fake news,” and many people, Trump supporters or not, felt unable to trust their news sources. In fact, it was the paranoia of the spread of disinformation and misinformation that led people to question news outlets.

The most common way we see conspiracy theories start is from the spread of misinformation or disinformation. Misinformation is false information that is normally spread unintentionally. For example, an online news source may accidentally misprint who won the artist of the year at the Grammys. The article will normally get taken down or edited as a result and sometimes the news source will even come out with a statement. However, the situation is not as easily resolved when it comes to disinformation. To spread disinformation is to intentionally feed people false claims, making it difficult for them to decipher the truth. Disinformation does not get taken down; instead, it sits and waits for a vulnerable audience to absorb the information and then wring it out like a wet sponge onto their followers.

Pizzagate was developed through the use and spread of disinformation. Disinformation is information that is “deliberately false or misleading.” This means that whoever is spreading the information knows that it is false, yet most of the time they continue to spread it to elicit fear in others. In the case of Pizzagate, disinformation was most likely spread to make Americans question the authority of the politicians fighting for the next presidential position. Trump and Clinton supporters alike wanted to diminish the other candidate, since many Americans did not want to cast a ballot in 2016 due to the seemingly incompetent contenders. Even one small, dirty secret on either candidate could create massive sway in the polls. With Pizzagate, we saw people fabricate claims about Clinton, and their perpetuation could have been a reason for her downfall in the 2016 election. Disinformation led to the outbreak of Pizzagate because the false claims were being spread in echo chambers, people were processing these claims with low involvement, and trust was given too easily to politicians when it came to their perspective regarding these claims.

Echoing Lies

Now, it may seem unclear why the Pizzagate rumors were not shut down quickly if they were so clearly prime examples of disinformation, but the truth of the matter is that these lies were never fact-checked. The disinformation was spread in what is called an echo chamber. An echo chamber can be referred to as a setting, most likely online, in which a user “only encounters information or opinions that reflect and reinforce their own.” To only see information that you believe is true without counterclaims only strengthens your own view, whether or not your view is considered the “correct” one. This is often how people become manipulated and potentially radicalized, making echo chambers very dangerous areas in online communities. Radicalization can lead to people taking action outside of their online community, and that is why we saw Edgar Maddison Welch show up to Comet Ping-Pong with a loaded gun. The information being spread about Pizzagate often ended up being propagated by people who believed the same ideals without any fact-checking whatsoever, making this disinformation easily disseminated.

Now how was this disinformation originally spread? In the case of many conspiracy theories, bots constantly use the same hashtags on sites such as Reddit and 4chan in order to get a “real” person to pick up on the information and share it with their followers. The case is not much different when we observe Pizzagate. A user on 4chan, FBIAnon, held a question and answer forum on July 2, 2016 and they claimed to be spilling highly guarded government secrets. When a member of the 4chan community asked whether or not “Hillary has sex with kidnapped girls,” FBIAnon responded with a simple “Yes.” While this conversation was not the only mention of Pizzagate on Reddit and 4chan before the conspiracy completely exploded, it is one of the many examples of bots planting the seed for Pizzagate and simply waiting for a vulnerable person to come across it.

The vulnerable person in this case ended up being a Facebook user named Carmen Katz. On October 29, 2016, she posted a strongly worded message claiming that her “NYPD source” had more incriminating evidence against the Clintons, such as their involvement in an “international child enslavement and sex ring.” It is unclear who Katz’s NYPD source was. In all likelihood, she did not actually have an NYPD source. Instead, she presumably was in the depths of platforms such as 4chan and Reddit, found posts such as those by FBIAnon, and decided she needed to share these publicly. Therefore, disinformation was not only used to strengthen the conspiracy, it was also used to start it.

Not only did Katz add the human touch to this conspiracy, but she also sent most of Facebook and Twitter into mass hysteria. Within 12 hours of Katz’s post, a Twitter account with the handle @DavidGoldbergNY reposted her image claiming that he “heard the same thing from his NYPD buddies.” While this account was later found to be part of a bot system used to spread disinformation during the election, this tweet was shared 6,369 times and seen by more, meaning that the Pizzagate conspiracy was now on thousands of people’s radar. Disinformation had won another battle in the war of Pizzagate, and down the echo chamber we went.

Preying on Weak Minds

In instances such as Pizzagate, information is constantly being updated, and people barely know where to start digging into it. The state of being bombarded with information is called information overload. The term information overload was originally coined by Alvin Toffler in 1970 and he believed it to be an extension of sensory overload. Toffler also believed in the idea that information overload inhibits one’s ability to think clearly, and “sanity, itself, thus hinges.” Now, we may ask ourselves, why would too much information cause us to unhinge? According to the elaboration likelihood model, there are two ways the human brain can process information. The route that the brain chooses to go down largely depends on a person’s motivation and their ability to process information. First, the brain can choose to process information with high involvement, which is physically costly due to the amount of glucose the brain needs to have motivation and focus. High involvement processing requires a cognitive response from the person, meaning that they are not passively ingesting information. Instead, they are critical of what is being presented to them. For example, a professor is able to explain the basics of gravity to his students by dropping objects of different masses on the ground. Since the professor is showing multiple instances of gravity, his students have the ability to process this information at a high cognitive level and understand why gravity is real and used in everyday life.

With low involvement processing, a person is not criticizing the information being presented to them. Instead, they are absorbing it passively, which is very dangerous in regard to manipulation. For example, a celebrity posts about how a new fast food chain is so amazing and how all of their followers need to try it. If a person viewing this post immediately believes that they need to try this restaurant, low involvement processing is taking place. The person is not critically digesting the information the celebrity is shoving down their throat, making it clear why disinformation and misinformation are such powerful ways to manipulate the masses. We saw low involvement processing occurring too often in the case of Pizzagate, because people were not comparing the information they found with other evidence that may contradict it, which would allow them to critically ingest it. The echo chambers where Pizzagate spread only propagated the dissemination of disinformation due to the low involvement processing that was taking place. No one thought to question whether or not the claims about Clinton were false or not; they simply went along with the information presented.

Fully processing information is very expensive in an online economy where attention is being spent instead of money. Processing based on shortcuts that allow you to decide and judge faster, also known as heuristics, is very cheap in the scheme of things given that it will provide the person with a correct conclusion most of the time. Yet, cognitive biases and low involvement processing can be harmful in the long run, as we see in the passage of disinformation within the Pizzagate conspiracy.

Gates and Pizza: What’s the Correlation?

Now, something that may still be confusing is what this whole political conspiracy has to do with pizza. Yeah, a random guy came into a pizza shop thinking that there were children being held in the back room, but how did the pizza shop even get in the mix? While there were claims floating around the internet that the Clinton’s were involved in a sex ring, the leak of John Podesta’s emails on WikiLeaks gave conspiracists their first piece of real evidence. During the election of 2016, there was mass concern with the contents of many politicians’ emails, one being John Podesta, the former White House Chief of Staff. Luckily for the citizens of America, WikiLeaks was already hacking into Podesta’s server and they posted thousands of Podesta’s emails for public viewing. While everyday citizens read and examined the emails, they found seemingly strange and out-of-place occurences of the word “pizza,” such as in the email sent by Podesta to Susan Sandler, an American writer. In this email, Podesta asks Sandler if she happened to leave a handkerchief with a “map that seems pizza-related” on it with a realtor. The emails also frequently referred to the pizza shop, Comet Ping-Pong. People then began believing that pizza was code for another deeper, darker political secret.

Online members of Twitter and Facebook took these emails and ran with them. We saw seemingly desperate attempts to connect the emails to an imaginary sex ring related to the Clinton family. Disinformation spread by conspiracists linked to the real emails, but using other unidentified or unverifiable sources to justify the rest of their claims. Fact-checking was simply nonexistent during this time as disinformation was spreading too fast for mainstream media to even try to claim that the information was false.

The Celebrity Touch

Another aspect of Pizzagate that made this conspiracy different from most is that it was interacted with by big names in politics. Douglas Hagmann, a high-profile private investigator, made an appearance on the largest conspiracy theory platform, InfoWars, four days after Katz’s post. InfoWars reportedly had “7.7 million unique visitors” every month. Hagmann released his statement saying that Clinton was involved with the activities that took place on the Lolita Express, the infamous private plane of the late known pedophile Jeffery Epstein. Brother of Betsy DeVos and large contributor to the Trump Administration, Erik Prince, released a statement two days after Hagmann, saying that Bill Clinton had visited Jeffery Epstein’s infamous island “more than 20 times.”

With the influence of many well-known names in politics promoting the disinformation surrounding Pizzagate, it became even harder to distinguish fact from reality. The truth is, many of us process with low involvement whenever we see celebrities post their own beliefs because we want to trust them. We want to think that celebrities are our friends and they would never lead us astray. Yet, this is exactly how conspiracies have the power to spread. Trust is given too easily to someone who is not even known personally, and then our ability to think for ourselves and consider other viewpoints goes out the window. We subject ourselves to being manipulated by disinformation by giving trust to well-known figures simply because we believe they want what’s best for us. Therefore, disinformation was able to spread even faster when affirmed by a celebrity.

Pizzagate reached its prime during December 2016, when many conspiracists wanted to move their platform offline and answer their “calls for action” to stand up against pedophile rings. One of these conspiracists happened to be the man we were introduced to at the beginning, Edgar Maddison Welch. While we already know that he entered a pizza shop called Comet Ping-Pong and fired rounds, he ultimately ended up serving 4 years in prison for his misdoings. During this time, we also saw platforms such as Reddit attempt to ban Pizzagate content. This, in turn, caused subsequent believers to have a harder time communicating and made them resort to other platforms that were more difficult to gain a following on. The ban of Pizzagate content from Reddit was greatly effective in its attempt to shut down Pizzagate, and many prominent followers began to disassociate themselves from the conspiracy.

Stopping the Spread of Disinformation for Good

Now, one question remains. How can online platforms and their users work together to prevent the spread of disinformation? This question is largely important as we see the rise of other conspiracy theories that can be damaging to our country, such as Qanon. I commend Reddit for being able to take control of their platform and ban content related to this conspiracy. Twitter has also made strides in its prevention of spreading fake news, such as highlighting fact-checked sources that share up-to-date information on COVID-19. They also have added #ThinkBeforeSharing, which alerts a user before they post an article, and they have found this has prompted users to actually read and deeply process the articles they are reposting. Facebook has dubbed a fact-checking initiative which claims to assess whether or not the information being posted is truthful. They also hope to institute a feature where users can rate a post as false. The post would then be flagged and further fact-checked.

While it is important that platforms are taking necessary measures to deny the spread of misinformation and disinformation, it is also important that we ourselves develop strategies for critically intaking information. Information literacy, the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the information presented to us, will ultimately be the greatest step we all can take. Having the ability to use high involvement processing on most if not all of the information we intake on the internet can prevent another scandalous spread of disinformation such as Pizzagate.