Blog #7- Fake News

Before I get into my thoughts, I will first repost the resource that has provided me a lot of the information I’m reacting to and I feel does an excellent job of encapsulating the story. The link is to a 2017 Rolling Stone article on the topic of Pizzagate: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/anatomy-of-a-fake-news-scandal-125877/

Plenty has changed in the years since Pizzagate was a thing. We started and ended the disastrous presidency of Trump, fake news as a concept continued to grow and escalate at his behest, and real life violence has been incited on multiple occasions. But, in my eyes, it truly began with Pizzagate. Never before did such a ridiculous conspiracy theory gain such mainstream traction and frankly, it began a cultural shift to the hyper-political and partisan internet culture we know today. People who I knew had absolutely no interest or knowledge of politics and prominent figures were suddenly flooding social media with their thoughts about Hillary Clinton. The obsessive toxicity that had existed around celebrity culture and worship was overtaking politics on the internet. The article details the beginnings of the story, in a cycle that is all too familiar to anyone versed in social media news at this point. Back then, Facebook tended to be the spawning point. Now, things have changed in some ways and we likely would associate seedy anon Twitter accounts with being the primary sources of conspiracy stories. But, Facebook is still an Internet home for many in the baby boomer generation, and with fewer Internet-savvy people around there, it can be easier for it to sink into a cesspool of alt-right propaganda. I think the most remarkable aspect of it all is that things didn’t really get better after that. It got way way worse. A guy brought a gun to a pizza shop and somehow we let things get worse from there. The internet, specifically radical part of it, incited a riot in our capital where people were hurt and killed. And the seeds of this event were sewn by conservative “influencers” who spread their interpretations of almighty Trump in much the same way as Pizzagate spread. Reddit, 4chan, and message boards turns to Facebook and Twitter and there we are. It’s a story we’ve become accustomed to. So does it get better, or does it continue to get worse?