WASHINGTON — Days before the presidential election, James Alefantis, owner of a local pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong, noticed an unusual spike in the number of his Instagram followers.
Within
hours, menacing messages like “we’re on to you” began appearing in his
Instagram feed. In the ensuing days, hundreds of death threats — one
read “I will kill you personally” — started arriving via texts, Facebook and Twitter.
All of them alleged something that made Mr. Alefantis’s jaw drop: that
Comet Ping Pong was the home base of a child abuse ring led by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief, John D. Podesta.
When
Mr. Alefantis discovered that his employees were getting similar
abusive messages, he looked online to unravel the accusations. He found
dozens of made-up articles about Mrs. Clinton kidnapping, molesting and
trafficking children in the restaurant’s back rooms. The articles
appeared on Facebook and on websites such as The New Nationalist and The
Vigilant Citizen, with one headline blaring: “Pizzagate: How 4Chan
Uncovered the Sick World of Washington’s Occult Elite.”
None
of it was true. While Mr. Alefantis has some prominent Democratic
friends in Washington and was a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, he has never
met her, does not sell or abuse children, and is not being investigated
by law enforcement for any of these claims. He and his 40 employees had
unwittingly become real people caught in the middle of a storm of fake news.
