4 December 2016. A bearded man armed with a Colt AR-15 assault rifle burst into the Comet Ping Pong Restaurant located at Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Families seated at the restaurant were horrified, but the intruder was not after them. In fact, he was there to protect them, or so he thought. After all, he was a 28-year-old firefighter and a father of two girls.
Believing that the restaurant was a front for Hillary Clinton’s underground paedophile ring after being fed a barrage of conspiracy theories and other “evidence” online, he decided to play hero and bust the evil organisation.
As it turned out, there were no imprisoned children in the basement. In fact, Welch didn’t even find any basement. It took quite a while before he realised that he had been cheated by wild theories and fake news, but he was confused and dejected when the police arrived. Fortunately, he surrendered without a fight. Welch was eventually charged in court and sentenced to 4 years in prison. Things could have turned out much worse. Social media was flooded with #pizzagate. Many folks couldn’t believe that an average Joe like Welch, with normal IQ and of perfectly sound mind could believe in something so bizarre and do something so insane. They believed it was an aberration, an event that happens once in a million years. But they could be wrong. That’s because while Welch realised that he had been fooled, there were many like him who believed that he had merely failed to locate that secret basement. This conspiracy theory is still very much alive today!
Late in 2016 during the U.S. presidential election, hacked emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman were released by WikiLeaks. The “evidence” that triggered the conspiracy theorists was the heart-shaped logo of the restaurant and the owner was raising funds for Hillary Clinton. The Clinton-haters believed that the heart was a secret code for child predators. This wild accusation quickly went viral on social media, led by various influencers. One of them was Jack Posobiec, an intelligence officer in the US Navy Reserve. His superiors removed him from his duties as intelligence officer and everything he posted on Twitter thenceforth became all the more “credible”. Even though videos shot inside the restaurant showed no evidence of what he insinuated, his posts earned him many fans and followers.
The fire was further fanned by the troll factories operated by St Petersburg. Russian agents spawned a tsunami of #pizzagate posts. Opportunists in the trump camp capitalised on it. Was it enough to have tilted the election results in Trump’s favour? Maybe not, but the most worrying thing is that there might be more folks like Edgar Welch out there. We have not seen the last of #pizzagate. Social media is a fertile breeding ground for similar conspiracy theories. Welch may not have hurt anyone, but we won’t know if the next “hero” will.
Let’s not forget where the largest audience is. A study of 330 million Weibo users shows that only 3000 accounts have more than 100,000 followers. Conversations that go viral originate from less than 300 accounts. These “super spreaders” practically control the narrative for hundreds of millions of people and it doesn’t even have to be true. In their positions of power, they can be engaged to harness the power of 无中生有.