I have plenty of sauce to know your anecdote is true. For any anons that have followed Serpenza and China Now, what you are talking about is the same kind of Tofu Dreg in medicine, like the media, like the justice system.
Two fold,
In one hand the majority of Fake News was still mostly confined to a very limited number of Mainstream News outlets, "social media" was an infant at that time. Finding like-minded people to talk about the irregularities was more of the Analog method.
As the years ground on and technology took off, it was a speculation at that time that the perpetrators had a very narrow window to pull off a 9/11 of such scale with that information control they still enjoyed.