TALKING TO THE BOYS IN THE BUBBLE::

According to a sample of tweets with Pizzagate or related hashtags provided by Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics at Indiana University, Pizzagate was shared roughly 1.4 million times by more than a quarter of a million accounts in its first five weeks of life - from @DavidGoldbergNY's tweet to the day Welch showed up at Comet Ping Pong. The vast majority of tweeters in our sample, just 10 percent of all possible hits, posted about the story only a few times. But more than 3,000 accounts in our set tweeted about Pizzagate five times or more. Among these were dozens of users who tweet so frequently - up to 900 times a day - that experts believe they were likely highly automated. Even more striking: 22 percent of the tweets in our sample were later deleted by the user. This could be a sign, Woolley says, of "someone sweeping away everything so that we can't follow the trail."

Next, we decided to cross-reference the most frequent Pizzagate tweeters with a list of 139 handles associated with Trump campaign staffers, advisers and surrogates. We also ran our entire sample against the list of accounts linked to Russia's Internet Research Agency. We found that at least 14 Russia-linked accounts had tweeted about Pizzagate, including @Pamela_Moore13, whose avatar is, aptly, an anonymous figure wrapped in an American flag; that account has been retweeted by such prominent Trump supporters as Donald Trump Jr., Ann Coulter and Roger Stone, the political operative who recommended Paul Manafort as Trump's campaign manager. (Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted Manafort for money laundering as part of his investigation into possible collusion with Russian efforts to influence the presidential race.) "Well! Well! Well!" "Pamela Moore" tweeted on November 19th, 2016, above the fake news headline "FBI: Rumors About Clinton Pedophile Ring Are True."

The campaign's engagement went far deeper. We found at least 66 Trump campaign figures who followed one or more of the most prolific Pizzagate tweeters. Michael Caputo, a Trump adviser who tweeted frequently about Clinton's e-mails, followed 146 of these accounts; Corey Stewart, Trump's campaign chair in Virginia, who lost a tight primary race for governor in June, followed 115; Paula White-Cain, Trump's spiritual adviser, followed 71; Pastor Darrell Scott, a prominent member of Trump's National Diversity Coalition, followed 33. Flynn's son, Michael Flynn Jr., who followed 58 of these accounts, famously took the bait and was ousted from the Trump transition team in early December after tweeting, "Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story."

Many of the Pizzagate tweeters had the characteristics of political bots - Twitter handles made up of random or semi-random letters and numbers and twin passions for conservative politics and pets (puppies and kitties win audience, Watts says). Others were all too human. Crystal Kemp, a 50-year-old grandmother who lives in Confluence, Pennsylvania, tweeted about the story more than 4,000 times in five weeks. I reached out to her via Facebook to ask why. "Didn't want Hillary to win at any cost," Kemp tells me, "but liked Trump from day one. I don't really know that much about the Pizzagate thing. Everything I tweeted or retweeted was stuff that I found through my own research or from another follower."

Kemp tweeted links to articles from well-known right-wing sites like Fox News and Breitbart. But she also shared stories from obscure outlets like ConservativeDailyPost.com, which appears to be among the fake-news sites that operated from Macedonia during the election. Buzzfeed had found that teenagers in the deindustrialized town of Veles published pro-Trump stories because they were profitable as click-bait. When I traveled to Macedonia last summer, Borce Pejcev, a computer programmer who has set up dozens of fake-news sites - for around 100 euros each - said it wasn't quite that simple. Macedonians don't invent fake news stories, he told me. "No one here knows anything about American politics. They copy and paste from American sites, maybe try to come up with more dramatic headline." Fox News, TruePundit.com, DailyCaller.com, InfoWars and Breitbart, he said, were among the Macedonians' most common source material ("Breit-bart was best"). Macedonians would've happily copied anti-Trump fake news too, he said. "Unfortunately, there weren't any good U.S. pro-Clinton fake-news sites to copy and paste."

That was exactly how the right-wing-media ecosystem worked during the 2016 campaign, explains Yochai Benkler, who directs the Berkman-Klein Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard. After the election, he and his colleagues mapped about 2 million campaign-news stories. He found that far-right-media outlets were organized extremely tightly around Breitbart and, to a lesser degree, FoxNews.com. "The right paid attention to right-wing sites, and the more right-wing they were, the more attention they got," Benkler says. More extreme sites would distort and exaggerate the claims, but they would use a "relatively- credible source" such as Breitbart as a validator. "Because they were repeated not only on the very far-fringe sites but also by sites that are at the center of this cluster, the right-wing disinformation circulated and amplified very quickly." 

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