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Why Do People Believe Conspiracy Theories?
On December 4, 2016, a 28-year old man from North Carolina entered Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington, D.C. with a loaded AR-15 rifle. He pointed the gun at an employee demanding to know how to get to the basement. The restaurant did not have a basement. The man searched for a secret passage. When he didn’t find it, he fired several shots into the wall. Customers and workers fled in terror. No one was injured and the man was arrested and charged with assault.
The man told police he’d gone to the restaurant to investigate reports of a pedophile sex ring linked to Hillary Clinton that was coordinated out of the pizzeria. The so-called Pizzagate story first appeared in a Facebook post ten days before the 2016 election. The story spread to Twitter, was promulgated by bots and was picked up by right wing platforms like Breitbart and InfoWars.
A few days after the pizzeria incident, Michael Flynn, Jr., son of President Trump’s former National Security Advisor, tweeted support for the Pizzagate rumors. His father, General Michael Flynn, tweeted a link to a story connecting Clinton’s staff to a child sex ring. Pizzagate was debunked and discredited by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, LA Times, Snopes and Fox News. This didn’t stop people from believing the story. In a 2016 poll conducted by The Economist, 46% of Trump supporters said they…
