In early October 2016, Wikileaks posted a dump of 20,000 hacked emails from the Gmail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. Users on an internet message board called 8chan/pol/—short for “politically incorrect”—imme-diately began combing through the emails looking for damaging material about Hillary Clinton. Using social media, they spread allegations that George Soros was funding liberal protesters to disrupt Trump rallies, that a vast ring of pedophiles was operating out of a Chevy Chase, Maryland pizza parlor, and that Clinton had a secret desire to assassinate Julian Assange. Despite the spurious, even fantasti-cal nature of such allegations, they spread through social media to far-right blogs and eventually to the mainstream media. As one 8chan poster wrote: “The media isn’t doing their job. With thousands of emails released, the only things they’ve reported on even marginally has been what WE’VE dug up. They literally can’t be bothered to do any digging at all.”