Meme Culture Reflection
For my group's Meme Culture assignment, we researched the role meme culture played in propagating the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. In October 2016, WikiLeaks released emails from the Clinton campaign, including emails from her campaign manager, John Podesta, in which he was discussing dinner plans. Right-wing readers of these emails theorized that the phrase "cheese pizza" was code for "child pornography," and the conspiracy theory spiraled from there. Websites with large conservative followings, including Alex Jones's Info Wars, ran stories that Hilary Clinton and the Democratic Party were running a child sex trafficking ring from Comet Ping Pong, a pizza shop in DC. This was ultimately debunked in December 2016, when Edgar Welch went to Comet Ping Pong armed with an assault rifle to self-investigate the conspiracy. He shot around (nobody was injured), found nothing, and was consequently arrested.
When my group was researching the memes relating to Pizzagate, practically all the ones we found were right-slanted, and did not condemn the conspiracy. Instead, they joked about how the conspiracy might be true, and how suspicious it was that theorizing was being shut down by social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit (see examples below). Throughout our research, we were shocked to see the role memes played in propagating such a ridiculous and obviously untrue conspiracy. Memes are not the most valid and reliable sources of news, but they help bring news headlines to our attention, and influence our opinions of what is being reported. Pizzagate memes and right-wing websites mediated the truth about what was happening in Comet Ping Pong, so a large number of conservatives believed that the Democrats were actually running a child sex trafficking ring there.
