It started In March 2016, when the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, was hacked in a spear-phishing attack.
WikiLeaks that obtained a copy of the email in November that year, quickly gathered proponents that claimed the emails contained coded messages that connected several Democratic Party officials and U.S.-based restaurants with an alleged human trafficking and child sex ring.
Then on October 2016, a Twitter users posted white supremacist material and claimed that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had discovered a pedophilia ring linked to members of the Democratic Party while searching through Anthony Weiner's emails.
One of the establishments allegedly involved was the Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C..
The pizzeria was said to be the meeting place for Satanic ritual abuse, and a place for harboring child sex slaves.
Members of the alt-right, conservative journalists, Donald Trump supporters and others who were against Clinton, started spreading the conspiracy theory on social media networks like on 4chan, 8chan, and Twitter.
In response, Edgar Maddison Welch, a man from Salisbury, North Carolina, visited at Comet Ping Pong to "self-investigate" the conspiracy and fired three shots from an AR-15-style assault rifle inside the restaurant. He was arrested without incident, and no one was injured.
This started the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
The allegations started to spread to "the mainstream internet" several days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, after a user on Reddit posted a Pizzagate "evidence" document.
The theories were then picked up by fake news websites like InfoWars, Planet Free Will, and The Vigilant Citizen.
If those weren't enough, the conspiracy was also promoted by alt-right activists, like Mike Cernovich, Brittany Pettibone, and Jack Posobiec. They were joined by other promoters that included writer David Seaman, anchor Ben Swann, basketball player Andrew Bogut, Minecraft creator Markus Persson, and more.
Some of Pizzagate's proponents have even evolved the conspiracy into a broader government conspiracy called "Pedogate", which describes a theory of a "satanic cabal of elites" of the New World Order that operates international child sex trafficking rings.
The conspiracy was again echoed on a Reddit community to further strengthen it.
As a result of this conspiracy theory, Comet Ping Pong was threatened by hundreds of people who believed that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory was true.
Several other restaurants that had links to the pizzeria or performers who had performed at the pizzeria were also facing harassment.
The conspiracy theory was then debunked, as it came with no evidence.
After detailed investigations were made by fact-checkers and journalists from numerous news organizations, the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia said that the case was "fictitious".
It was found that proponents of the conspiracy took sources from social media networks. From the photos of the children, to the staff of the pizzeria, we all taken from websites like Instagram, and were then claimed to be the photos of victims.
Proponents also went to Alefantis' Instagram account and pointed that some of the photos he posted there were evidence of the conspiracy. Images were also said to have been taken from Facebook users who had Liked or commented Comet Ping Pong's Business Page.
Other theories were also debunked.
Like for example, the ones that said the pizzeria has an underground facility, which proven to be false as it doesn't even have a basement.
What's more, no alleged victims have come forward and no physical evidence has ever been found.
Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis referred to the conspiracy theory as "an insanely complicated, made-up, fictional lie-based story" and a "coordinated political attack".
Despite the conspiracy theory being debunked, it continued to spread on social media using the hashtag #Pizzagate.
The conspiracy was so misleading that Hillary Clinton responded about the dangers of fake news websites.
"The epidemic of malicious fake news and fake propaganda that flooded social media over the past year, it's now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences," she said.