Rebuilding an Enlightened World by Bill Ivey

Author:Bill Ivey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

STORIES

JUST BEFORE THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2016, JAMES Alefantis, owner of a family-oriented pizza shop in suburban Washington, suddenly noticed menacing messages posted by dozens of new Instagram followers. The often threatening posts cited an astonishing accusation—that his restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, was headquarters for a child abuse and abduction ring headed by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta. The claim was false, but when Alefantis searched online, he located dozens of invented newslike stories about kidnapping, trafficking, and molestation of children—all tied to Secretary Clinton, Podesta, his restaurant and its kid-friendly atmosphere.

As reporter Cecilia Kang explained in the New York Times, the false narrative popped up in the weeks after John Podesta’s personal email account had been hacked and some of its contents organized and made public on the Wikileaks website. Podesta and Alefantis had communicated online about a possible Clinton fund-raising event, and that slender link was enough to prod users of the online message board 4Chan to invent a connection between Comet Ping Pong and long-standing right-wing speculation about the existence of a Democratic Party child-exploitation ring. The rumor spread to social media sites like Twitter and Reddit, where it launched a popular discussion thread called “Pizzagate.” Despite contact with DC police and the FBI, efforts to suppress, counteract, deny, and thwart the expanding online presence of the fake story and the menacing and abusive responses it inspired were ineffective. As Kang notes in her report, “Mr. Alefantis’s experience shows it is not just politicians and internet companies that are grappling with the fake news fallout. He, his staff and friends have become a new kind of private citizen bull’s-eye for the purveyors of false articles and their believers.”1 Nobody could halt the progress of the online story, and in the end a deeply troubling invasion of privacy organized around an invented tale nearly produced tragedy. As the Washington Post reported, a few weeks after the Times deconstructed the fake tale of child trafficking, Edgar Maddison Welch, a twenty-eight-year-old man from North Carolina, drove to Comet Ping Pong presumably to get a firsthand look at dark backrooms, hidden tunnels, and the painted-over sign that supposedly represented an international symbol for pedophilia. Welch was armed with an AR-15 assault-style rifle and other weapons and fired shots into the floor and ceiling. The restaurant was evacuated, the Washington neighborhood locked down by police, and the subject arrested without incident. He claimed to be investigating allegations he’d encountered online.2

During the fall campaign, candidate Donald Trump had deployed the phrase “fake news” to challenge the credibility of established sources like the New York Times and Washington Post. That was a ploy. Real fake news has nothing to do with mainstream media. Communications scholar Russell Frank, writing in the Journal of American Folklore, characterizes the phrase as digital folklore: “Fake news is a story generated in a non-professional social context that uses the style of news either to parody that style, satirize issues and personalities in the news, or perpetrate a hoax or prank.

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