Secret message board drives 'pizzagate'-style harassment campaign of small businesses

The theorists are inspired in part by a far-right news website that has been used by prominent Republicans for fundraising efforts.

by Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins / Aug.27.2018 / 12:54 PM ET

In January, Andrew Richmond, a co-founder of a Toronto-based chain of ice cream shops called Sweet Jesus, started receiving strange online comments and phone calls.

Conspiracy theorists littered the Instagram and Facebook accounts of Sweet Jesus with accusations and menacing comments, pointing to the chain’s name, brand iconography and advertising featuring children. They posted the shop’s advertisements to their own social media accounts and tagged them #PedoGate. Others took their campaign offline, calling the company’s shops and threatening employees.

The harassment comes from a group of fervent online conspiracists who have been targeting private businesses and individuals with harassment campaigns and accusations of being involved with child-sex trafficking rings.

Sparked by a video posted on a popular YouTube conspiracy channel, the group, whose members are also largely followers of the Qanon conspiracy theory, has flooded Voodoo’s Instagram and Facebook posts and left Yelp reviews accusing the owners of child sex trafficking. Last week, the chain’s original Portland outpost received more calls from conspiracy theorists than customers ordering doughnuts, Monaghan said.

Republican connections

The baseless allegations are being lobbed daily by self-described “patriot researchers." Their harassment of Voodoo Doughnut and Sweet Jesus are just part of a larger war — waged on Twitter and in private groups on Facebook and Discord, a gaming-focused online chat program — against the politicians, celebrities and businesses they claim are part of a global conspiracy to harm children.

Their paranoia is partly fueled by Big League Politics, which has published articles that glorify the anonymous peddlers of the Qanon conspiracy theory and promote unfounded allegations that the Democratic National Committee had ordered and covered up the 2016 murder of staffer Seth Rich.