Do reddit, também:
The big problem here is that the whole "investigation" is built on inductive reasoning and circumstantial evidence, substantiated with confirmation bias and clustering illusion. The arguments themselves are filled with more fallacies than can be listed here. There's also a huge bandwagon effect and an availability cascade with the common uses of the words "bizarre" and "creepy."
This whole process largely started with an email to return a handkerchief. Some people saw this and considered it
bizarre to return a handkerchief. Well, it seems that it had a map on it to a pizza place, as if someone wrote it on the handkerchief and it seemed important. In this case there is a reasonable explanation but some people started searching for other references to pizza and someone deduced that
cheese pizza is a code word for child porn, as it is in 4chan.
From there, they built a list of other code words and symbols and started making connections all over the place, using the cognitive bias of a code word list or symbol to reinforce the connections. In that context, they discounted any exculpatory explanation and latched on to any vague connection as reinforcement of the conclusion. This built upon itself to the point where there are now underground tunnels, cannibalistic parties, and an international human trafficking ring.
Let me give one example: If you look at this
picture with no context, you see a logo of two ping pong paddles arranged in a manner that is
quite common in a logo. In fact it is so common it is almost a cliche. But if you look at that logo with the expectation of finding a child porn connection, you see a vague resemblance to a known symbol and therefore you have established evidence in your mind. When everyone agrees on this and calls it
creepy as fuck your belief is confirmed and strengthened. Therefore, anything connected to Comet Ping Pong must be child pornography.
Then, you take a photo like
this one and are completely disgusted because of the context you have already established. However, a non-biased person would look at that and think it is a parent playing around with some masking tape. They taped the girl down and joked about the new seating arrangement. Parents play with their kids like that all the time: rolling them up in a blanket, tickle tortures, etc. My kids used to love it when I laid on top of them where they couldn't move and I pretended to be asleep. It is completely absurd to think that an actual child trafficker taped up one of their kids with malicious intent and posted it to their Instagram where the world could see it. It's such an obvious joke but if you are already convinced of the conclusion then this is now evidence to support it.
Another example is
this one. It is a restaurant so a walk-in cooler would be expected. Some distasteful comments joke about it being a kill room, which to some people confirms that they are also involved with murder. But if you look, there is also a comment about werewolves, but everyone dismisses that as a joke. Why would murder be serious but werewolves be dismissed as a joke? Because murder confirms the conclusion of an underground conspiracy but werewolves do not fit any narrative. A more reasonable explanation would be that all the comments are in fact jokes because they are all absurd. No one involved with murder and killing is going to use the hashtag #killroom on a picture.
And so this process continues taking things out of context and making weak connections until you end up with something like
this, which is surprisingly similar to the
crazy wall trope you see in movies. To the people in
/r/pizzagate this is all evidence of an ever-growing conspiracy but a more reasonable explanation is that this has become a self-propagating cluster of cognitive errors and logical fallacies.
Most of the evidence has a completely reasonable explanation if looked at isolated and objectively. Without a cognitive bias many of the connections look extremely weak. Yes there is some distasteful art, inappropriate comments, poor attempts at humor, and (weak) evidence of unethical relationships and connections, but none of that is proof of
the largest international underground cannibal child trafficking satan worshipping pedophilia ring ever uncovered.
And like most conspiracy theories, this is all strengthened by the fact that there is also a conspiracy to shut people up and hide this whole thing. That is why the FBI is in on it, people are mysteriously killed, 4chan has been compromised, threads are getting deleted or downvoted (so make backups), and the shills and CTR are out in force to stop it. Reading through the pizzagate threads is extremely frustrating, seeing the amount of hysteria, escalation, and paranoia under the guise of an
investigation. It is tempting to jump in and bring in some sanity but that just further reinforces it all.
The issue with pizzagate is that they've come to a conclusion first and then twisted every piece of "evidence" to fit that conclusion and made out that any reference to pizza/pasta/literally any other food type is evidence of something suspicious. People were even trying to convince themselves that the phrase "getting pizza for an hour" was unusual.
