The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

These amateur investigators soon came to believe that they had detected a code hidden in Podesta’s lunch orders. Starting from “cheese pizza,” which has the same initials as “child prostitution,” they created a translation manual: “hotdog” meant “boy,” “pasta” meant “little boy,” “sauce” meant “orgy,” and so on.4 A discussion board soon appeared on the website Reddit with the title “Pizzagate,” where these allegations were discussed and new “evidence” was brought to bear; other discussions continued on websites popular with right-wing youths, such as 4chan. In a particularly baffling inference, this community somehow reasoned that since pizza-related terms were involved in their “code,” the prostitution ring must be run out of a pizzeria. (Yes, a real pizzeria—that one was not code!) Soon they identified a location: D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong, which was owned by a man with links to the Clintons (he had previously dated the CEO of pro-Clinton media watchdog Media Matters for America) and which Podesta was known to frequent. (Their investigation also determined that Podesta practiced witchcraft and drank the blood of his human victims.) These bizarre and evidence-free allegations soon spread beyond the dark underbelly of the internet to relatively mainstream rightwing media such as the Drudge Report and Infowars.