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Comment by defgeneric | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.)

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.

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.

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