Pizza gate is an extreme. But also, yes, news has changed dramatucally over the last couple of decades and older generations maybe don't consume as defensively as younger generations. Over time this can make ridiculous things sound plausible.
I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time I saw that it looked sketchy as hell, but both of my folks (intelligent people, mind you) bought it hook, line, and sinker. In general, it's younger people that I saw citing it as a fake while older people shared it. Totally anecdotal, I'll grant you, but I hardly think my experience is unique
perhaps, but in today's political climate i think its a fair simplification. the vast majority of people take argue your side to mean that PizzaGate is real and that NYT stories critical of trump are all fake.
There is an interesting article in the NY Times today looking at how the #PizzaGate fake news story developed [1]. It was quite surprising to me how flimsy the "evidence" was, yet it convinced a lot of people. I had assumed that the people making this thing up had put some effort into making it believable, but no. I am at a loss now to understand how anyone could have believed that anything was going on at that pizza place.
This has serious implications. I don't think that people re going to limit their inability to recognize such fake things to stories about politicians they dislike. They will fall for equally ridiculous stories about medicine nd science. That is very bad.
That is a scary example of what we can look forward to. Now that people don't believe in "mainstream" journalism, they'll latch on to wild speculations with no actual research or journalistic ethics. That is net loss for the truth, no matter how much one dislikes the New York Times and other old media.
It didn't appear then, but it became a grave concern at that point. Meanwhile conspiracy theories have existed for ever. Pizzagate is nuts, but so is belief in reptilian aliens controlling governments, etc.
The energy to contain these stories escalated dramatically, with Zuckerberg being dragged in front of Congress, etc., after Trump's election.
Meanwhile the biggest "fake news" item of the past few years was Russiagate, which escaped your list along with widespread condemnation from establishment media.
I don't suggest that Pizzagate, etc., are true, merely that the sudden alarm about them is a symptom of elite anxiety.
By the way, i am not a Republican and am not parroting anything. Please don't poison the well. Just make your argument.
Yeah, this feels like the outcome of echo chambers. The whole idea of "repeating a lie often enough makes it true" is happening constantly on a personalized micro scale.
In the past you had one nutter yelling on the street corner about the pedophiles in the pizza shops, and everyone kinda walked on by, thinking man, that guy's nutters. Now he's in your house, 6 hours a day. And eventually, you're like, man, those pizza shops, we've gotta do something about.
That's a question that made me want an answer. It seems that, as of 2016, it may have been a lot:
> Among the questions asked by pollsters was whether respondents believed that leaked emails stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager and published by WikiLeaks prior to the Nov. 8 election “contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse — what some people refer to as ‘Pizzagate.’ “
> ...
> Specifically, 9 percent of registered Republicans who responded to the question said the allegations were “definitely true,” coupled with 40 percent of Republicans casting the claim as “probably true.”[0]
A different December 2016 poll[1] also seems to put "yes"/"definitely" at it at 14%[1] with a lot of "maybes".
Given the margins in US Presidential elections, it seems like the answer is "enough to matter". (Not that I think PizzaGate turned anyone from voting for Clinton or to voting for Trump, but fake news stories probably swayed a lot of voters overall.)
Everyone is downvoting you but the pizza gate conspiracy seemed ridiculous when it came out, and now it just seems like what they got wrong is that it probably wasn't happening at Cosmic Pizza, and was happening at a way more massive scale than they'd assumed.
I think the reason people are downvoting your comment (aside from the obvious reason, which is that it's a little low-effort) is that people didn't like pizzagate. It had an altright, Trumpy 'beware the deep state satan pedophile illuminati' feel to it that we oppose being true for identity reasons (ie, we are not those people who say trollish, unintellectual things like that!).
Although pizzagate is false, it's not as false (in a kind of Bayesian way) as it was before the Epstein island entered the public conscience.
Look at where it's got them - conspiracy theories about pedophile pizza parlours. I'm struggling to frame the events of the last two decades as "the story of how we realized that conservatives were reasonable people after all".
There's a weird parallel to the pizzagate kerfuffle. Lots of people who wanted to get to the "real truth" by only looking at online sources, like it's some sort of virtual escape room that's been pre-built with clues. Staring at google street view images and trying to find the pattern in all the store signs on the same block, coming up with bizarre circular logic around "cp" where references to pizza at a pizza parlor meant children were being abused.
Finally one of them bothered to show up in person (with a rifle, to "save the children") and found... a neighborhood pizza shop with no basement. And when he went back online and said "hey guys, I checked it out and there's nothing there" they all decided he was a government plant.
It's like people have forgotten the real world exists, and is the actual reality that's being referred to online.
>Because Pizzagate, along with other fake news, misinformation and slander campaigns, appear to have contributed in a nontrivial way to Trump's election, and all of them are by definition complete and utter bullshit.
While keeping this discussion respectful, I would like to propose another hypothesis: that the rise of fake news may correspond severe distaste towards the direction that the country is heading.
There are many people who disliked Obama's policies. There are many people who liked Obama but disliked the country's direction at the end of his second term. There are many people who disliked Trump's political opponent. And finally, there are many of the people who fall into these aforementioned camps who felt a level of entitlement among elitists whom casually dismissed their concerns.
Imagine hearing that your daughter lost the track and field state championships to someone who used to be a boy. Or seeing violent criminals get away from cops because the cops were too afraid to do their job. Or having your gun taken away from you in a high-crime neighborhood with a police response time of an hour.
Imagine people in those positions, who feel that bureaucrats in Washington D.C. are making what feel to be obvious stupid decisions. Can you imagine why they would be more likely to believe that those bureaucrats are involved in a child sex trafficking ring?
I don't subscribe to Pizzagate, but I suppose it's because the stories around both are _similar_ (international cabal of abusers), it's just that one was fake and a long term play to try to scare people out of voting for Hillary Clinton.
It's both. Especially the out of context tinfoil rage response. They always existed. But now it's so common to see some totally benign article about pizza, and the top comment is "don't let them tell you not to remember in 1995 when US implanted radios in Syrian babies".
The algorithm is being trained solely for engagement. It is horrifying.
You mean like when Hillary Clinton repeatedly invoked the existence of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her and Bill back in the 90's? Yes, that was comical.
Anyway, pizzagate is a well known hoax. Does that somehow cancel out all the other conspiracies that surround the Clintons? Logically it does not but most people are only thinking at a 3rd grade level so it's a great distraction.
Where there's smoke, there's fire and there's plenty of evidence to support the Clintons selling nuclear secrets to China, smuggling drugs with the CIA at Mena Airport and of course the infamous "body count".
I have no idea why people are worried about misinformation. The information that actually made an impact of the election was all completely true. Nobody except a handful of extremists took seriously things like pizza pedos and etc.
I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time I saw that it looked sketchy as hell, but both of my folks (intelligent people, mind you) bought it hook, line, and sinker. In general, it's younger people that I saw citing it as a fake while older people shared it. Totally anecdotal, I'll grant you, but I hardly think my experience is unique
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