It may help if you look at the posts in the tag during the period of greatest hysteria. Here is a link showing how things looked the evening of the thirtieth.

Keep in mind that the ones who engaged in this in the most calculated fashion have already started deleting their posts to hide the evidence of their villainy, so things were actually more fucked up than they look. What's left are mostly just the ones who were genuinely hysterical, who haven't yet started hurrying to hide their gullibility.

(For the sake of the historical record, I saved a couple hundred pages of the tag as this was going on. In a while I'm going to re-visit the same time range and see how much has been hastily deleted.)