Hillary Clinton Conspiracy Theory

Comet Ping Pong used to be just an ordinary pizza restaurant in an upscale neighborhood of Washington D.C., but the events that unfolded during the 2016 United States Presidential Election forever changed this restaurant’s perception. An anonymous Twitter user under the handle @DavidGoldbergNY claimed that Comet Ping Pong ran “a pedophilia ring and @HillaryClinton is at the center” (Fisher). This rumor arose in late October of 2016 when then-FBI Director James B. Comey found new emails relating to then-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State. The new emails were found on the computer of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose then-wife was a top Clinton aide. Because Congressman

This rumor, which was dubbed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, was not just contained in the online community. Comet Ping Pong received hundreds of threatening calls, and the restaurant was inundated with individuals seeking to prove this conspiracy theory. This rumor culminated with Edgar Welch entering the restaurant on December 4, 2016 armed with an assault rifle and opening fire in an attempt to prove the Pizzagate theory. The rumor was able to spread so quickly because of social bots, which are “a computer algorithm that automatically produces content and interacts with humans on social media, trying to emulate and possibly alter their behavior” (Ferrara et al. 96). The Pizzagate story shows how fake news can influence actual people and events, but it also points to a deeper issue of the growing influence of social bots who propagated this false

It is estimated that at least fifteen percent of Twitter users who tweeted about the presidential election were bots and that those bots were “responsible for 3.8 million tweets, roughly 19 percent of the total volume” of tweets relating to the 2016 presidential election (Bessi and Ferrara 5). With one in five tweets coming from social bots, these bots had a huge impact on the discussion surrounding the election. Nathaniel Persily believes that social bots helped to disseminate fake news “through the automated promotion of hashtags, stories, and the like” (Persily 70). Specifically, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory provides an example of how social bots can facilitate the spreading of false information online. The web traffic surrounding the Pizzagate conspiracy theory shows that “a disproportionate number of the accounts generating traffic on Pizzagate appeared to originate in Cyprus, the Czech Republic, and Vietnam” (Woolley and Guilbeault 10). Through this information, it can be implied that social bots were spreading the fake news. There is no other logical reason why there would be such high web traffic surrounding the Pizzagate issue in those countries. Social bots were used to spread many other false stories during the 2016 presidential election. By spreading these false stories, social bots had a negative influence on the