PleadingtheYiff | 13 points | Nov 22 2016 20:22:50

Recently this post was made to the sub and I noticed it generated a fair amount of critical feedback:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pizzagate/comments/5eb0p8/critical_analysis_of_pizzagate_from_an_outsider/

I personally have been noticing a number of users who seem to either be nuts or shills raising topics that seem to do nothing but discredit our work. Perhaps others can mention topics they similarly feel have been derailing our work and making us look bad. I think it's important that we all talk about this since we are getting increasing media attention here and we need to present ourselves professionally. Here's stuff I've been seeing:

1) Holocaust deniers, proponents of unsubstantiated/out there theories that are in the vein of "this is all a Masonic/Jewish/Illuminati conspiracy" etc. This bothers me because even though our investigation has touched on topics like spirit cooking occultism we had solid evidence to cite in reference to the topic (the Wikileaks emails in the spirit cooking case). I didn't start researching this to just rehash a bunch of nutty conspiracy stuff on the internet and I know most of you didn't either.

2) Users making threads about "spooky websites" they found in random corners of the internet that they want people to "hack" because there's supposedly treasure troves of information to be uncovered. There have been a number of these attempts and none of them have borne any fruit. In one case we had an innocent company responsible for one of the websites reach out to us because users were causing them server problems. These attempts seem to be nothing but disinformation and a distraction. There may come a time where we want to investigate certain websites but at this stage we are trying to do "big picture" work and I'd like to see more focus on investigating public groups and individuals so that we can find potential links and connections.

3) Attempting to link other possibly related conspiracies to pizzagate without providing proper sourcing. I've seen certain topics like MKULTRA or alleged CIA/US intelligence involvement in drug trafficking raised in connection to pizzagate for example. While these may be relevant or informative to what we are looking at, most users tie them in without proper sourcing or explanations beyond rambling about how this is all part of a massive shadow government conspiracy or something along those lines. While this is fine on 4chan and 8chan, this sub fills the additional role of being a public outreach forum. Not properly sourcing claims which may or may not be true causes people to discount what you are saying and hurts our efforts in general. Linking to conspiracy websites serves to provide an interesting read and not much more than that. We need to keep it minimally academic here.

I of course realize that occasionally people might want to make posts postulating and theorizing to get feedback and brainstorm. But the number of outside eyes on this sub is growing daily and we need to have a solid approach to this investigation while we are still a small community. As someone who has brought some pretty out there topics to the table in this investigation I understand what people are saying about pizzagate being by nature conspiratorial but I do my best to thoroughly source my claims and I think that's something we should all aspire to.

What are your thoughts on quality control? Would you like to see more stringent moderating? Perhaps a requirement for all new submissions to be pre approved so we can ensure we don't get anything too out there posted that might discredit us?

Or does the potential for censorship bother you? Would you be more comfortable if we combined a more intense content approval process with clearer rules on how to properly source and cite what you've been researching? Are there any other topics users feel are distracting/discrediting us that they'd like to see less of?

I welcome any feedback you all have. I want to us to be professional and focused in this investigation.

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