When Fake News Leads to Real Dangers

Imagine that you have owned a family-friendly pizza restaurant for about a decade in an upscale northwest Washington, D.C., neighborhood. Suddenly, without warning, you're getting slimed by sickos on the Internet with death threats and obscenities.

What would you do?

There's wasn't much James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong, could do when threatening messages began to appear on his Instagram feed in late October and grew into hundreds through texts, Facebook, Twitter and telephone calls.

The furor was based on a lie, a breathtakingly false allegation of a child sex abuse ring supposedly led by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief, John Podesta.

There was, you may recall, a presidential election coming up.

Conspiracy theories have percolated constantly against the Clintons, among other famous and powerful people. The longer they're around, the more bizarre the narratives have become, particularly in the Internet's busy hives of fake news.

But this particular yarn took on a new seriousness Sunday. Edgar M. Welch, 28, a father of two from Salisbury, N.C., and fired up by Internet rumor mills, brought his AR-15 rifle and a handgun to Comet Ping Pong on a busy afternoon, according to the criminal complaint against him. He wanted to "self-investigate" the charges, police said, and presumably help rescue children Rambo-style.

He surrendered peacefully after finding no evidence that "children were being harbored in the restaurant," said law enforcement authorities, who have denounced the so-called #Pizzagate as a "fictitious online conspiracy theory."

Of course, as you may recall from such other viral myths as the "birther" theory of which President-elect Donald Trump was so reluctant to let go until recently, conspiracy fanatics are not about to let inconvenient facts get in the way of a juicy fable.

As one who makes a living out of checking things out, I am sobered by the degree to which people really love fake news.

A recent BuzzFeed News report, for example, found that during the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election stories --reported in hoax sites or hyper-partisan blogs -- generated more engagements (8.7 million shares, reactions, comments, etc.) on Facebook than the 20 best-performing election stories from legitimate media outlets (7.3 million).

We should not be surprised. Entertainment typically sells better than news. News people are limited to reporting reality. Fake news can be as unfair, unbalanced and hyper-sensational as its creators please in pursuit of an audience that would be mightily disappointed by anything less.

Unfortunately, we appear to entering an era with the rise of president-elect Trump that blurs the lines between the real and the crazy as never before.

You can see that in the widely reported use by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's chosen national security adviser, and his son, Michael G. Flynn, of social media to spread fake #Pizzagate news stories and other allegations of serious crimes, backed by no evidence.

And one of the leading purveyors of the Pizzagate sludge is Alex Jones of the conspiracy-focused website Infowars, who is in a mutual-admiration bromance with Trump. Trump has praised the "amazing" reputation of Jones, and Jones said Trump called to thank him after Trump's election victory.

Also, in characteristic style, Jones and others are trying to dismiss the charged gunman Welch as a "false flag" decoy by the alleged Pizzagate conspiracy to fuel new calls for censorship of independent websites.

In other words, those who disagree with the conspiracy theory must be part of the conspiracy, either as co-conspirators or stooges.

Which, again, sounds a lot like Trump and other birthers. Now Trump has shed that theory just in time to head for the White House -- and take the new paranoia mainstream.

Meanwhile, as the threats and other vile harassment of Comet Ping Pong and its neighbors continues, several nearby merchants thanked their customers for sticking by them -- and questioned why the FBI and social network officials can't do more to hunt down their harassers.

That's a good question. The First Amendment protects free speech in general, but not necessarily when it is obscene or threatening. It's OK to burn a flag, the Supreme Court has said, but not always to burn a cross. One is a political expression, the other is a well-known form of intimidation.

In the Internet age, we're just beginning to debate the difference as we try to distinguish the fake from the real.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)