Four years ago today, Pizzagate was born when Wikileaks dropped John Podesta& #39;s hacked emails.

Users on 4chan and Reddit said if you replaced the words "pizza" with "little girl" in his emails, suddenly they were eating children.

A year and three weeks later, QAnon was born.

In the last four years, an infrastructure for an alternate reality was built on social networks to frame one political party as Satanic child eaters.

It went unchecked by social networks and winked at by politicians who it didn& #39;t yet harm.

Millions joined those communities.

This is important to note: The reason 4chan users were so ready to accept "pizza" meant "little girls" in creating Pizzagate?

In 4chan speak, "cheese pizza" was a backronym for "CP," or child porn, which saturated the site for years. https://twitter.com/bleeding_palm/status/1313884658896121860">https://twitter.com/bleeding_...

Shortly after Edgar Welch shot up Comet Pizza, looking for Hillary& #39;s stolen children, social networks banned Pizzagate.

Ten months later, QAnon was born on 4chan.

Same idea: Democrats are eating kids.

But this time, there was a savior, Donald Trump, and a puzzle you can solve.

Regular people don& #39;t use 4chan, especially not older ones. Moderators knew that.

So they hatched a plan: Deliberately evangelize Q on a 24/7 YouTube channel, on Facebook, on a Reddit.

Make it a game or a puzzle, like the Da Vinci code—something to solve. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-theorists-took-q-sparked-qanon-n900531">https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech...

Millions of people believe there& #39;s a Democratic cabal of baby eaters, and Donald Trump is fighting a secret war to stop them.

It& #39;s because, four years ago this month, somebody on 4chan searched emails hacked by Russian intelligence, and replaced "pizza" with "little girl."