There's a decent amount of circumstantial evidence for it, but I personally still think a bit of a stretch.
Six years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh-dNAby174
Four years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5LyzuVUweU
Eight years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_C75RO6LL4
Once the conspiracy theory exists you're going to get a mix of people who really believe it finding subreddits to share "proof"; trolls who like the lulz; people who don't know and don't care but who hate that politician and will share anything negative about them; and baffled people on the outside who can't tell the difference and can't understand how anyone can think that politicians order children for abuse by email.
Every case has to be considered on its own merits, of course.
Of course 2 or more people participating in certain acts, or even assisting a pedophile means "conspiracy".
In PizzaGate, I am keeping an open mind, and not scoffing; mainly due to some rather weird Instagram pictures and comments that used to be publicly available, that were linked to Comet Ping Pong and/or the owner. They were quite... unusual.
Neither NYT article that I found, directly address what the innocuous meanings of hash tags like #killroom (with pic of enclosed windowless room) and #chickenlover (pic while holding a young boy) are. Like I said, I found this unusual.
No, because the Instagram pictures are faked. Snopes debunked this. http://www.snopes.com/pizzagate-conspiracy/
Snopes has not "debunked" anything. Once, the couple who run the Snopes blog were good at investigating urban legends and such. In recent years they have gotten more political and more obvious in their selective coverage to fit an agenda.
Note, I am 100% against harassing the guy and his business, but you cannot deny his instagram had the pictures on it. Does that justify a barrage of internet hate and accusations of criminality? No. But lying about Instagram pictures being faked when they weren't is also not helpful.
More 'fake' instagram posts tied to comet ping pong that make the conspiracy nuts raise their eyebrows:
[NSFW] http://archive.is/S6jzu
Unless you are suggesting archive.is is a malicious actor or has any known cases of editing or changing archives made using its service. To my knowledge, there is no evidence or reason to believe either accusation.
The archive.is links are not "created" by 4chan or Reddit users. The links are created by request of the service. It shouldn't matter who requests the service as long as the service is reliable.
If the NYT investigative report team claims the archive.is links are doctored - I'd lose my faith in the NYT's ability to investigate as they have clearly failed in their duty.
I frankly cannot believe we are even debating this here.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/pizzagate-shows-how-...
The snopes page doesn't even use simple photoshop methods to show how the images were modified.
Who is Holly Greig?
What was the Cleeveland Ritual Abuse Scandal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_child_abuse_scandal (See also Rochdale, Orkney, Broxtowe, etc.)
Those historic scandals don't stop misreporting today, see the coconut shell reported by police and media as being a skull fragment -- even after it had been tested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_child_abuse_investigati...
The sad fact is that child abuse is fantastically common, and by devoting so much time to bogus bullshit we're failing to protect children who are being harmed right now, mostly by their relatives.