These are my own observations, so apologies in advance for being schizo. But bear with me. Remember QAnon and Pizzagate? It was CONFIRMED that Epstein had lunch with moot and then IN THE SAME MONTH /pol/ "coincidentally went up" yeah okay sure bud. Epstein mentioned his interest that 4chan could be a "weopon". What that means is that the Anonymous culture is the perfect breeding ground to spam conspiracies, and test them there before they go mainstream, and to basically "manufacture" memes;
(Two words: QAnon and Pizzagate)
4chan is a decaying bot pile and it makes me soooo angry how a site that was supposed to be for liberty turned into a garbage heap of bot activity. The captchas don't do anything, here is why:
>In some third-world dung heap someplace, there are people hired for 2 cents by bot-operators to solve captchas.
>4chan pass
Threads are manipulated, just go on /pol/ and see for yourself how stale it is. Remember the Sharty hack? And how everyone on /pol/ DIRECTLY AFTER acted like nothing happened? QAnon was fake, Pizzagate was bullshit, everything was manipulated by some Epstein think-tank. 8chan was a scam, it all was.
And Hiroyuki(the new owner) doesn't give a shit about the site at all, as long as he gets money, why would he care if some culture dies? Everyday we are witnessing the Dead Internet Theory in action, and there is nothing we can do.
I could be a bot, you could be a bot, is your mother a bot? Fuck this.
(And no, I will not mention that 38-minute headstart thread were Anon called Epstein's Death before it went public, my brain is so fried at this point that I don't even know where to clump that in here; and the fact that there were Fed eyes on 4chan at that time scares me as well)
It's the old lie; the internet was never free, and it's dead, it's gone.

My view is definitely that Pizzagate/QAnon was as you say manufactured. I mean seriously, the whole thing is literally misdirection of pre-emptive blame for all this awful shit by Epstein & co. framed as more phony Red vs. Blue american bullshit. What other conclusion is there, given all that has come out so far? I admit I'm feeling quite vindicated for never buying into it.