【Obsession Archives】

Before he went to a historic black church and Obsession Archivesallegedly killed nine people in Charleston, South Carolina, Dylann Roof took to the internet. He uploaded a racist diatribe, a sort of origin story in which he explained how he came to be convinced that black people and white people were enemies.

This was in June 2015. According to his manifesto, Roof wasn't led down a dark path of bigotry because of fake news shared on Facebook or misleading tweets from Donald Trump. It was a Google search, prompted by the killing of Trayvon Marton, for "black on white crime" that started it all.

SEE ALSO: A pizza shop patron is fighting back against the #Pizzagate trolls

Roof singled out information that he found via the Council of Conservative Citizens, a well-known white supremacist group known for disseminating a variety of misleading "statistics" about black-on-white crime. The material, Roof claimed, truly opened his eyes.

"I have never been the same since that day," Roof wrote in the manifesto. It was the beginning of a downward spiral that ended with the unthinkable.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

A year and a half later, Edgar Maddison Welch walked into a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., armed with an assault rifle. He was in search of the truth about a government-backed child slavery ring, a conspiracy theory known online as Pizzagate. What could have been another mass shooting thankfully ended after the man fired a handful of rounds and eventually surrendered to police. In an interview with the New York Times, Welch admitted, "The intel on [Pizzagate] wasn’t 100 percent." The report noted he believed there were children in danger who he wanted to rescue.

The entire ordeal served as a stern warning about the dangers of online misinformation—a current hot button issue in the wake of the presidential election—but ultimately no one died, so perhaps it's easy to brush aside. Fake news is dangerous, but it isn't deadly.

Except it is, because "fake news" is simply another form of online misinformation, which is exactly what inspired Dylann Roof. And they have plenty in common.

When Roof showed up at the church that night, the term "fake news" was still more than a year away. The election-fueled, Facebook-incubated cottage industry of Macedonian teenagers and nihilist opportunists ready to cater to the paranoid masses had yet to emerge. But the audience was already there in small far-right collectives that focused on minority groups such as blacks, Jews and Muslims, or powerful and shadowy groups like FEMA, the Illuminati and alien lizard people.

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But these movements, however bizarre and niche they might have seemed at the time of Roof's killing spree, would soon get a serious boost. Five months after Roof killed nine people, Trump would tweet out an image pulled from the kind of racist propaganda that inspired Roof. The image below contains inaccurate statistics that originated from what appeared to be an account belonging to a Neo-Nazi.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The fringe wasn't so fringe after all. Hate speech became a massive problem on Reddit. Conspiracy sites gained audience and influence. A fake story about an imminent government military takeover became widespread enough that Texas Governor Greg Abbott told the national guard to keep an eye out for this supposedly forthcoming coup.

Now, once-obscure websites like Gateway Pundit and Infowarsthat have trafficked in these kinds of race-baiting stats are at the center of the debate around misinformation and propaganda—as well as serving as popular media outlets for the president-elect. Unsurprisingly, they're among the many outlets pushing Pizzagate narratives.

This is peak "fake news": A mix of conspiracy theories, propaganda, and misinformation duping the public, proliferated via social sharing, and armed with a headline so extreme as to defy hyperbole, if not at least hyper-optimized to go viral among a likeminded social graph.

Some of it can be easily dismissed. It's awful, but still, relatively harmless when compared against the violent work of scary ideologues. "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump" certainly isn't a good thing to have out in the world, but at least it's not trying to instigate a race war.

Even Pizzagate is hard to take seriously, given its overall ridiculousness. That's a luxury only afforded by the fact that the man who showed up to investigate didn't end up shooting anyone.

Roof's victims weren't as fortunate. By his own account, Roof spent more than three years—from the time of Trayvon Martin's death to the murders—having his worldview shaped by this stripe of news. Edgar Welch, the man who charged into the D.C. pizza parlor, told the Timeshe only "recently" had internet installed. It allowed him to look into Pizzagate, which he only previously heard about through word of mouth.

This propaganda network was once relegated to a dark corner of the internet that attracted the likes of Dylann Roof. The fear now is that this network has manifested into part of a broader media world consumed by a large swath of Americans unaware of its origins (or its intentions). A BuzzFeedsurvey found that 75 percent of adults were fooled by fake news headlines. Welch heard about it from another person, and clearly had little problem finding it online.

The Pizzagate fiasco seems to bear that out. Again, this was the notion that Hillary Clinton was involved with a child sex ring, operating out of the basement of a popular pizza restaurant, in the nation's capital. Just a few years ago, this would barely have been good enough for the murkiest corners of the internet. At the end of 2016, it picks up enough traction to yield a substantial number of people believing it. It doesn't seem hard to imagine one of them trying to do something about it, especially now, after one of them just did.

Trump's embrace of this network—and the network's full embrace of him, and anything that might smear his adversaries—provides something of a Trump News Network that is already primed to rally behind certain policies such as a Muslim registry list. At that point, there won't be much needed to push followers over the edge. And it isn't terribly hard to get Isalamaphobes to go to mosques with guns. The FBI has already said attacks against American Muslims rose in 2015. The mainstream media has been littered with reports of attacks and threats directed at Muslims after the election.

So what kind of conspiracy theory could spur people with guns to act on some propaganda? Here's one: President Barack Obama is hiding 22 secret ISIS compounds within the U.S. We can only hope the wrong person doesn't read it as the right news.

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