The claim
In the spring of 2018 a claim began circulating on Facebook, on 4chan's politics board and on Gab that a video existed showing Hillary Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin assaulting a girl. Its proponents gave it a name — Frazzledrip — and said it had been recovered from a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, Abedin's husband at the time, and was changing hands on the dark web.
This is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly. Most entries in this archive concern a documented event around which competing explanations formed. Here the event is the claim, and the documented history belongs almost entirely to its distribution — which happens to have been recorded in more detail than most, because a newspaper measured it and a congressman then read the measurements aloud to the chief executive of Google.
April 2018
The earliest datable artifacts are from the middle of April 2018.
On 15 April, YourNewsWire published a story under the headline "Horrific Hillary Clinton Snuff Film Circulating On Dark Web." YourNewsWire was a Los Angeles clickbait operation with a long record of fabricated stories; it would later rebrand as NewsPunch, a change that had the side effect of evading filters keyed to the old name. A similar version appeared the following day on a site called thepedogate.com. A screenshot said to be a frame from the video was being passed around a Facebook group devoted to QAnon material.
Checks followed within days. Lead Stories traced the screenshot on 16 April: the source image was at least eight years old and came from promotional material for Hush Supper Club, a Washington restaurant. The woman in it was the restaurant's proprietor.
FactCheck.org's Angelo Fichera published on 23 April. By then the YouTube videos repeating the story had accumulated more than half a million views between them — one of them nearly 190,000 on its own. Fichera noted what none of them contained: "None of these videos contains images of the alleged sex crime — just descriptions based on unnamed sources." He also asked the New York Police Department about it. Its Office of the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information replied that the department was not investigating such a video.
The laptop
The claim attached itself to a real object, which is part of why it travelled.
Anthony Weiner's laptop was seized in September 2016 during a federal investigation into his communications with a minor, an investigation that ended with his imprisonment the following year. Clinton and Abedin emails found on the machine caused the FBI to reopen and then re-close its examination of Clinton's private email server in the last eleven days of the 2016 campaign — a sequence documented at length in the Justice Department Inspector General's June 2018 report on the bureau's conduct before that election. That report runs to several hundred pages on who held the laptop, what was searched for, and why the search took as long as it did. The subject throughout is email.
So the laptop existed, was in federal custody, was examined, and generated a real controversy. None of that is in dispute, and none of it touches the claim, which concerns material no account of the device has ever described.
Eight months on YouTube
On 10 December 2018 the Washington Post published a review by Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin of conspiracy material still circulating on YouTube two years after a man fired a rifle inside a Washington pizzeria looking for the children of the Pizzagate story. Frazzledrip was its central example, and its findings are the most concrete record of how the claim moved.
Some of the original April clips had come down. Dozens of videos repeating or discussing the claim were still up, and had been watched millions of times over the intervening eight months. One, still online, had 77,000 views. Another had reached 177,000 before its removal. YouTube's search box surfaced them for queries as ordinary as "HRC video" or "Frazzle."
The recommendation figures came from Guillaume Chaslot, a former Google engineer who had worked on YouTube's recommendation algorithm and afterwards founded the watchdog group AlgoTransparency. By his logging, a single video with the words "Lost Hillary snuff tape" in its title had been recommended to users at least 283,000 times. Others carrying the term in their titles were being offered the same way.
The Post put sixteen videos to YouTube. The company said one of them violated its policies, and removed that one after the inquiry. On the rest its statement read: "YouTube is a platform for free speech where anyone can choose to post videos, subject to our Community Guidelines, which we enforce rigorously." On Chaslot's data it said that "No part of the recommendation system that Chaslot worked on during his time at Google is in use in the YouTube recommendations system today."
Other researchers quoted in the same piece measured the surrounding traffic. The Network Contagion Research Institute found users of Gab and 4chan's politics board discussing the claim through April and linking to videos on it dozens of times. Clemson University researchers found it considerably more popular on Twitter, generating thousands of comments a day at its peak.
11 December 2018
The day after that article ran, Sundar Pichai appeared before the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing titled "Transparency & Accountability: Examining Google and its Data Collection, Use, and Filtering Practices." It had been convened to deal with privacy and with claims of political bias.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland used his time differently. "Do you know what Frazzledrip is?" he asked, and read from the previous day's reporting. His framing was the recommendation engine rather than the uploads — what it meant for a platform to be routing this material to people who had not gone looking for it, and what that had already cost: "when your communications vehicle is being used to promote propaganda that leads to violent events, like the guy showing up within the Pizzagate conspiracy case."
Then the question he wanted answered. "Is your basic position that this is something you want to try to do something about, but there's just an avalanche of such material, and there's nothing really to be done, so it should just be buyer beware when you go on YouTube?"
Pichai's reply: "This is an area we acknowledge there's more work to be done. We have to look at it on a video-by-video basis, and we have clearly stated policies, so we'd have to look at whether a specific video violates those policies."
That exchange is the reason the claim is remembered at all outside the forums that produced it, and the mismatch inside it is the substance. A video-by-video standard was offered in answer to a question about a system that recommends in aggregate.
The record
Set out as a list, the record is short.
No video has been produced, by anyone, in the years the claim has been in circulation. The screenshot offered as a frame from it was a restaurant's publicity photograph. The only police agency to answer a direct question about it said it was not investigating one. The laptop the claim is built on is documented in federal terms, and that documentation concerns email.
Against that, the distribution is recorded in detail: a measured 283,000 recommendations for one video, millions of views across dozens, a search box completing an innocuous query into it, thousands of comments a day at the peak, and one of the largest companies in the world answering for it in a committee room.