It all mushroomed in the last (I can't remember exactly, it's all a blur) maybe 1 week before the election.
The reddit/The_Donald site has over 250,000 members, and for whatever reason, call themselves "centipedes": and their investigative web-skills 'weaponized autism"... :-)
I remember exactly when I started learning about it: the Thursday before the election.
I remember because that’s when I became so nauseous I couldn’t eat for days.
It hit FR the next day.
To the credit of FReepers, it was shocking and most who commented had no idea what the symbols meant and many simply couldn’t believe anything so horrible.