throwaway91774's comments

I'd say it's fitting, not ironic. Conspiracies do exist, and implicit conspiracy-like behaviour does emerge where minds converge too.

I saw a lot of crap appear organically, but my guess is that by volume most is exagerated, clickbait, racebaitting stuff done as a dayjob, with wildly varying levels of sincerity. The few talented peddlers that create organic looking content make a huge difference, and some almost believe their own bullshit.

For reference: IMO, Alex Jones knew from day one that pizzagate was just bullshit made up on the internet, and kept distance accordingly. But there was so much intersection with his audience that he treaded carefully and did an obscure video on the side where he said he was just playing it cool to avoid persecution. Of course, if anything real came out of that, he would have claimed he was in on it from the start.

I watched pizzagate grow from day 0, AMA.

I spent an inordinate amount of time on /pol/ around the 2016 election and when Wikileaks made the emails available I was among those hitting the random button to see what we could find. The authors of the paper did a great job in understanding a key feature; (vacuous) conspiraciy theories involve a lot of jumping to conclusions, and are all over the place (multi-domain). At the time there was so much momentum to find dirt on Hillary, that every silly comment seen through chan culture lenses became a zero-point energy engine, and suddenly we were swimming in mspaint.exe infographics pulled out of thin air.

I was never a believer though, but I did enjoy the shitstorm, and human trafficking is a real thing. I was disappointed that people was so fed up with the matter that Epstein's suicide was not a bigger deal with the general public.