The police said on Wednesday that Roberta’s had been targeted for harassment twice in the past week since being linked to the hoax.

The bogus story originally focused on a Washington pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong, which has been subjected to a barrage of threats and unwanted attention since the conspiracy theory began to spread in the days before the election.

One person drawn by the hoax came at the restaurant to live-stream activity there. Others have stood outside holding signs. And this week, a 28-year-old man was arrested after he drove to Washington from North Carolina and fired an assault-style rifle inside the restaurant, the authorities said. The man, Edgar M. Welch, told the authorities he planned to help rescue children after reading the fake news story online.

In the case of Roberta’s, commenters on Voat and social media sites mined the restaurant’s social media accounts for images that some felt represented expressions of Satanism or the occult: a logo from its wine menu of a skeletal hand holding a wine glass under an upside-down cross, and a T-shirt in which some discerned a crescent moon and a star. One Voat commenter described seeing a “little kid with his hands tied together” embedded in the T-shirt logo.

“The more I dig those emails and new findings,” another Voat commenter wrote, “the clearer it gets, most of those so-called elites made a cult out of pizza. Disturbing indeed.”