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Comment by adevine | Hacker News Reader

I'm kind of saddened and dismayed by the number of comments that need to be downvoted into oblivion in this thread. I really appreciate that Hacker News is a place where I can learn something from other points of view, and where even if I disagree with someone, a lot of times I will gain an appreciation for their way of thinking.

But now with a number of comments insinuating that somehow this story is invalid because it's reported by NYT, and NYT is the real fake news, is baffling and infuriating. I think the NYT may have some problems, but blithely and falsely reporting that a presidential candidate is running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor isn't one of them.

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What the NYT gets wrong is that #pizzagate is an Internet phenomenon, not something from the "alt right".

The internet is basically slandering a certain network of people in DC but few really care because the whole network seems to benefit from rampant influence peddling. I mean we're talking about David Brock's former partner--he may be innocent, of course, but Brock is hardly a bystander in the internet wars.

I think it's a mistake to see these people only as victims--they're associated with pretty vicious propagandists, big power-brokers, and the like... Being the (brief) target of the hivemind almost has a poetic justice to it.

It will go away if they don't feed the trolls.

No, you're wrong and the NYT is right. It's not "the internet" doing it, it is a specific political faction in an echo chamber reinforced forcing a particular ideological basis creating and magnifying a politically-motivated fantasy.

Well, as an anecdote, I have been following this since day one and I'm absolutely not a member of the alt-right (if you do a search, you'll find that I'm the first person to ever mention "pizzagate" on HN).

Not saying that I believe any of the claims about Alefantis (I just have a fascination with conspiracy theories), but defgeneric is correct IMO to say that this is not solely a product of the alt-right.

There's a difference between following it and committing the slander, and it's absolutely a politically-motivated faction, and not "the Internet" in a general sense, doing the latter.

What I'm telling you is that I, as someone who has observed this happening from the beginning, am under the impression that the people posting this stuff don't come from a single uniform ideology. It's not totally baseless speculation -- I read through people's post histories all the time to get a sense of who they are. Where's your evidence to the contrary?

EDIT: Here are the profiles of the reddit users that currently have the top 5 submissions on r/pizzagate (excluding one brand new throwaway account). I looked through them a bit, but you tell me.

https://www.reddit.com/user/JackeyWhip

https://www.reddit.com/user/Truth_Bomb_69

https://www.reddit.com/user/bloodfist45

https://www.reddit.com/user/conspExec

https://www.reddit.com/user/iamkats

The first user just posts about Dota all the time. The second has only a few posts. As far as I can see only the last user has posts in r/The_Donald and seems to fit the bill of being alt-right.

It's true that it spun out of the right when the daily Podesta email dump was happening, but they quickly took on a life of their own. I watched it happen--the right wingers tolerated them to an extent because Wikileaks wasn't really yielding much and slandering Podesta and his network was a sort of substitute for that. But concerns about credibility were raised on the right as well. It took on a life of its own.

(I'm not myself on the right but watching it unfold this election was fascinating.)

This particular story is reinforced in a particular (alt-right) echo chamber.

Other false stories are reinforced in other echo chambers, some of which - anti-vaxxers, for example - are considered left wing.

Pizzagate has a disturbing laywerlike blow-by-blow rebuttal https://www.reddit.com/r/pizzagate/comments/5ebh01/a_blowbyb...

I guess the comments about the new right being technocrats may be true.

Here's the archived thread:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161122173600/https://www.reddi...

That reddit group was just banned, 23 November, 00:01 UTC

Wow, I saw that this morning. I really wonder what effect it will have. For now the discussion will move to r/conspiracy, and possibly voat.co.

Will they ban r/conspiracy too? I'll delete my reddit account instantly and never visit the site again if they do.

I guess the comments about the new right being technocrats may be true.

Why do you think the comments are representative of the "new right"? I don't know that they are not, but I haven't seen much evidence that they are.

My instinct --- based on the apparent assumptions of a universal morality and the horrified reactions to the 'provocative' art --- is that a sizable number of the posters are religious and socially conservative, traits I associate more with the "old right" than the "new right".

More generally, I don't think a "right"/"left" split is the right lens to view this with. What sort of insight do you think it provides?

Stories like this tend to come with a brigade of new accounts and posters filling the threads with as much nonsense as possible almost as if it were a mandate they're following from elsewhere.

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