Name:
Directions:
4 sentences
of summary about the article(s). Include the most important points. Your
summary should show that you read carefully and have a good understanding of
the articles.
3 sentences
of your personal response/opinion. What do you think about these readings?
2 quotes that
stand out (quotes can be important sentences or phrases written by the author).
Include a couple sentences on the significance of each quoted sentence/phrase. Why
did you choose it/what does it mean for this article?
1 question or
connection—several sentences about something you still wonder or don't
understand about this article, OR about something in the text you can connect
to.
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10
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9-8
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7-6
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5
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4-1
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All items in the 4/3/2/1 are
thoroughly completed.
Answers are all in complete sentences.
Answers show complete understanding of
the 4/3/2/1.
Student went above and beyond what was
expected (analysis & thoroughness).
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One
part of the assignment may not be thorough enough.
Answers are mostly in complete sentences.
Answers show substantial understanding
of the question(s), but more analysis could lead to greater understanding.
Student met expectations of activity.
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More than half the assignment is
completed, but not analyzed thoroughly enough.
Answers show understanding of the
question(s), but they could use more detail, analysis, examples, and/or
connections.
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More than half the assignment is
incomplete.
Answers shows limited understanding of
the question(s), and needs a lot more detail and analysis.
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Assignment is either dreadfully
incomplete or needs significantly more detail and analysis.
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Name ________________________
Pizza Gate
4 Sentence Summary:
3 Sentences of Personal Opinion:
2 Quotes and Why They Stand Out:
1
Question or Connection:
Pizzagate, the fake news
conspiracy theory that led a gunman to DC’s Comet Ping Pong, explained
By
On Sunday, a man
walked into a pizzeria in Washington, DC, with an assault rifle and fired one
or more shots.
The scene,
thankfully, was not another example of a mass shooting — no one was injured or
killed. Instead, it was the result of a fake news story about Hillary Clinton’s
2016 presidential campaign that proliferated on social media in the weeks
before Election Day.
The totally false
conspiracy theory claims that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign manager,
John Podesta, ran a child sex ring at a pizzeria in DC, Comet Ping Pong. Over
the past few weeks, Donald Trump supporters and white supremacists on social
media have pushed the conspiracy theory — leading to headlines like “Pizzagate:
How 4Chan Uncovered the Sick World of Washington’s Occult Elite” on fake news
websites.
The Sunday shooting
was far from the beginning of threats that Comet Ping Pong has faced over the
past few weeks. Cecilia Kang reported at the New York Timesthat
the restaurant’s staff and its owner, James Alefantis, have faced a barrage of
abuse and death threats on social media as a result of the conspiracy theory.
Things have gotten so bad that the general manager’s wife asked him to quit.
Alefantis has worked to get the FBI and local police involved in an
investigation to stop the conspiracy theory’s spread, and requested that social
media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit take down messages and
pictures related to the false conspiracy theory.
But it has
persisted. Bryce Reh, Comet’s general manager, characterized trying to take
down the conspiracy theory online as “trying to shoot a swarm of bees with one
gun.” Yet as Pizzagate continues spreading online, it becomes more and more
clear just how big of a problem fake news now poses — and how difficult it may
be to address.
Pizzagate has been pushed by Trump supporters and white
supremacists
Like many ridiculous
things on the internet, Pizzagate appears to have begun on the troll haven and
message board 4chan. After Podesta’s emails were
hacked (likely by Russian agents) and WikiLeaks published them, 4chan users
in October found emails between Podesta and Alefantis about a
Clinton fundraiser that happened early in the campaign.
From there, people
began speculating without any evidence that the restaurant was part of a
broader child trafficking ring run by the Democratic Party — a popular but
entirely false conspiracy theory on the fringes of conservative media. And the
conspiracy theories jumped over to Reddit, where the popular Trump subreddit r/The_Donald championed it; Twitter, where
pro-Trump tweeters have continued to promote it; and Facebook, where fake news
outlets have written and shared articles about it.
Here is one example
of a fake news outlet promoting the conspiracy theories behind Pizzagate,
keeping in mind that the story is entirely false and the FBI has not confirmed
anything about Pizzagate or related conspiracy theories because they’re all
wrong:
Your News Wire
Craig Silverman at
BuzzFeed has an exhaustive report on how these ridiculous conspiracy
theories got so big.
They appeared to
really take off after a white supremacist Twitter account (which uses an avatar
of a Jewish lawyer in New York) propped them up. The tweet pointed to a Facebook
post that claimed a likely nonexistent “NYPD source” confirmed that police had
found evidence on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s devices that the Clinton
campaign ran an international child enslavement ring. Again, there’s absolutely
no evidence for any of this — but the tweet, which is still up, quickly got
thousands of retweets and favorites.
With that, fake news
outlets like Your News Wire pushed the story more broadly just days before
Election Day. One of the stories even claimed, “IT’S OVER: NYPD Just Raided
Hillary’s Property! What They Found Will RUIN HER LIFE.” New York police
officers did not raid Clinton’s property, but the story quickly got more than
100,000 engagements — shares, reactions, and comments — on Facebook, and it was
quickly plagiarized by multiple fake news outlets to get hundreds of thousands
more engagements on social media.
The nonsense just
kept building and building, with fake news outlets running more and more false
details about this false conspiracy theory — typically alleging that police,
particularly the NYPD and FBI, had uncovered even more evidence of this
international child abuse ring, even though no such thing had happened.
As all of this
spread, pro-Trump supporters went back to the Podesta emails published by
WikiLeaks to find more “clues” for Pizzagate and other conspiracy theories.
Without any evidence or cause, they quickly began to interpret basic food items
as code words for this supposed sex ring. Through this new ridiculous
“discovery,” Trump supporters on social media linked even more emails to
Pizzagate, which grew from a conspiracy theory about a DC pizzeria to one about
a fictitious international child sex ring.
But communications
between the Clinton campaign and Comet Ping Pong’s Alefantis were the original
source of the Pizzagate speculation. And the allegations were further emboldened
by the pizzeria’s ties to the Clinton campaign, including Alefantis’s former
relationship with David Brock, who founded the liberal media watchdog group
Media Matters and publicly supported Clinton.
So the DC pizzeria
bore the brunt of the damage that came from these widespread conspiracy
theories. The restaurant and its staff got hundreds of death threats on their
phones and social media — including one that read, “I will kill you
personally.” People also began showing up at Comet Ping Pong to investigate
Pizzagate. Then, on Sunday, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old from North
Carolina, armed himself with an assault rifle and fired at least one shot in
the restaurant while investigating the conspiracy theory.
After the latest
scare, Alefantis asked people
on Sunday to stop spreading all this nonsense about his pizzeria: “I really
hope that all of these people fanning the flames of this conspiracy would take
a moment to contemplate what has gone on here today and maybe to stop.”
But ultimately, this
is about much more than one pizzeria and conspiracy theory.
Fake news has become a big problem on social media
While Pizzagate has
quickly become the most high-profile example of fake news going seriously
wrong, it is part of a much broader problem with fake news that has quickly
become widely recognized in the aftermath of the 2016 election.
Here’s one example
of just how widespread fake news is: Over at BuzzFeed, Craig Silverman pit
Facebook engagement for the top 20 fake news stories — like “Pope Francis
shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president” (he did not) and “FBI agent suspected in
Hillary email leaks found dead in apartment in murder-suicide” (this did not happen) — against the top
20 legitimate news stories, from outlets like the New York Times and Huffington
Post. In the last three months of the election, the fake news stories got more
Facebook engagements than the legitimate news outlets.
So why did these
outlets suddenly pop up and push fake news in time for the election? Some of it
is political: Some people are willing to do anything they can, including lie,
to make sure their candidate wins.
But there’s also a
financial interest in fake news. A BuzzFeed investigation found that many of the big fake news
stories originated from a tiny Macedonian town known as Veles. There, young
Macedonians have embraced “a digital gold rush” by setting up fake news sites
and using Facebook as a platform to push their false stories, reaping the
advertising dollars that come with the clicks and sharing.
Silverman and
Lawrence Alexander wrote for BuzzFeed, “Several teens and young men who run
these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate
traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best
way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false
content that caters to Trump supporters.”
There’s a reason
these websites have a partisan, pro-Trump bent: At least in the 2016 election
cycle, fake news took off much more with conservatives than with liberals.
Laura Sydell reported at NPR the experience of one fake news
purveyor, 40-year-old Jestin Coler in California:
During the run-up to
the presidential election, fake news really took off. "It was just anybody
with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of
rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about
to get served," Coler says. "It caused an explosion in the number of
sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded
during the Trump election."
Coler says his
writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take
the bait.
Why is this the
case? Coler suggested that it has to do with Trump and conservative media
outlets discrediting mainstream news, pushing conservatives to look for other
outlets for their information: “This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin's
famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the
rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it
as. This isn't something that started with Trump. This is something that's been
in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting
mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his
supporters.”
That doesn’t mean
that all fake news is geared for conservatives.
Jeremy Stahl at Slate pointed out that some liberals have seized on a
few false stories, including those that hyped up Bernie Sanders’s chances in the
Democratic primary and blamed his loss on widespread voter suppression. But
it does seem like the biggest fake news hits of the 2016 election were by and
large geared for Trump supporters, with headlines like “IT’S OVER: Hillary’s
ISIS Email Just Leaked & It's Worse Than Anyone Could Have Imagined” and
“Just Read the Law: Hillary Is Disqualified From Holding Any Federal Office” dominating the most shared fake news stories of the last three
months of the election.
Wherever it lands on
the political spectrum, all of this fake news has created a big problem: Many
people are now getting completely false information from fake news outlets that
pose as legitimate, making it hard for readers to know if the information is
legitimate.
So the rapid spread
of fake news has led people to demand that social media platforms, particularly
Facebook, and Google do something to halt the spread of fake news.
Google and Facebook have promised some action to counter
fake news
Google responded in
November, announcing that it was cutting off fake news
sites from its huge advertising network. Facebook followed suit by vowing to
block fake news outlets within its own ad network.
Still, Facebook has
at times been resistant to do much more — like making sure that fake news
doesn’t pop up in someone’s Facebook feed in the first place. Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg, for example, suggested that fake news wasn’t much of an issue to
begin with, writing in a Facebook post (without evidence for his numbers)
that “more than 99% of what people see [on Facebook] is authentic. Only a very
small amount is fake news and hoaxes.”
But Facebook now
seems to be acknowledging that it needs to do something.
“For so long, we had
resisted having standards about whether something’s newsworthy because we did
not consider ourselves a service that was predominantly for the distribution of
news. And that was wrong,” Facebook executive Elliot Schrage said at
a panel in Massachusetts last week. “We have a responsibility here. I think we
recognize that. This has been a learning for us.”
“WE HAVE A
RESPONSIBILITY HERE. I THINK WE RECOGNIZE THAT. THIS HAS BEEN A LEARNING FOR
US.”
The bad news:
Facebook doesn’t seem to have an idea about what it will do yet. The big
problem seems to be that the social media platform just doesn’t want to get
into heavily policing people’s own posts and feeds, especially in a way that
could come off as partisan or as censorship.
But Facebook is also
now the main way many Americans and people around the world share and read the news. That has led
to a democratization of media, which means that new legitimate news sites like
Vox can build a big audience and even compete with established outlets like the
New York Times, but also that a fake news site can as well.
As Tim Lee explained for Vox, “Stories
like this thrive on Facebook because Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes
‘engagement’ — and a reliable way to get readers to engage is by making up
outrageous nonsense about politicians they don’t like.”
So the platform
needs to take some more responsibility for what it’s doing.
Ultimately, Facebook
seems to be coming around to some sort of system that would nudge users to act
differently without actively blacklisting or favoring certain sites. “We’re in
the business of giving users the power to share. Part of that is helping them
share thoughtfully and responsibly, and consume thoughtfully and responsibly,”
Schrage said, offering few details for how exactly this would work.
Whatever Facebook
and others do, some of it will come too late. Not only did fake news appear to
convince a gunman to fire off bullets at a DC pizzeria, but the rise of fake
news prior to Election Day suggests it may have helped Trump get elected.
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