Conspiracist propagators treat accuracy as irrelevant because crowdsourcing will reveal truth.

Evidence

Or consider Stefanie MacWilliams, one of the propagators of the Pizzagate story: “I really have no regrets and it’s honestly really grown our audience,” she said. MacWilliams is confident that the truth will win out—the beauty of the internet is that people can crowdsource the truth—so she admits that she does not try to be “100 per cent accurate.” Whether the Pizzagate conspiracy is true is an open question in her mind; the investigation by conspiracists is ongoing. “It’s like a real-life Kennedy assassination where all the stuff is at your fingertips, and it’s happening today,” she says. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 135

Categorization

• XREF: The audience-growth motive for spreading false narrative echoes the culture-industry insight that entertainment trumps accuracy; also parallels Islamophobia market incentives covered in other readings. — connects to: Disorienting targets, not explaining truth, is the conspiracists’ intended payoff — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 94; Conspiracist validation replaces evidence with communal repetition and affirmation. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 303; Crowdsourcing and leak tactics repeatedly misfired and produced false accusations — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 491

Broader Connections

• Disorienting targets, not explaining truth, is the conspiracists’ intended payoff #expands (0.80) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 94
• Crowdsourcing and leak tactics repeatedly misfired and produced false accusations #contradicts (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 491
• Conspiracist validation replaces evidence with communal repetition and affirmation. #complicates (0.75) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 303