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This article was written by the Nieman Storyboard. Personally, this is a news source that I have not heard of. After reading this article, it turned out to give out credible information about this theory that makes the reader believe this information is factual. This article was written in order to bring awareness to this Wayfair scandal. However, it does not talk about this being false. You can tell that the writer of this article leans more on the side of believing that this theory is true. This article also reflects information from the Washington Post article about the same theory. It brings up similar, if not, the same type of information as the Washington Post publishers did just in different words. You could say that this source is credible since they also bring up information that has been talked about in other trusted sources.

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These days, a conspiracy theory can burn through a population like a pathogen. And while these theories are built on top of untruths, the ripples they send out in the world can be very real.

Jessica Contrera of The Washington Post recently traced one such ripple: "QAnon con: How the viral Wayfair sex trafficking lie hurt real kids" published Dec. 16, 2021. It tarted with outlandish claims that Wayfair, an online home-goods and furniture company, was involved in human trafficking. As the claim multiplied and mutated, it swept up victims, including a teenager falsely tabbed as a victim, and sex-trafficking opponents who watched as attempts to help real victims were overtaken by hysteria over fake ones.

Contrera opens with the story of a teenager whose life was upended by false claims she was a victim of trafficking. From there, Contrera pulls in more and more people involved and affected. She describes a runaway train, giving readers a sobering sense of how fast and recklessly conspiracy theories can travel.

"If we had just told the story of a conspiracy theory's harm to (the teenager), it simply wouldn't be an accurate story," Contrera told me. "Because the repercussions were so, so much bigger and are still unfolding today."

To tell the story fully, Contrera needed many of the tools in her reporting-writing toolbox. From a previous story following the path of a single cheeseburger, she gleaned a structure that could let readers follow the conspiracy theory. Thanks to her previous work covering sex-trafficking, she was able to consider how to write about a sensitive issue without further harming those who had already been hurt.

She urges journalists to exercise patience, and consider a closer look at stories that may seem like they've already passed by.

"This reporting process was a reminder that just because a story has already been written about, or a lot of time has passed, it doesn't mean it's not worth doing," she said. "Some of the richest reporting can come after the public has stopped paying attention."

In an interview with Storyboard, Contrera explained how the Wayfair story came together. Her answers have been edited for clarity.

The bio at the end of the story says you write about people whose lives have been "transformed by major events and issues in the news." How did your role at the Washington Post develop that focus?
I've always been most moved by stories that explain the big controversies of our time by finding the people who are experiencing them firsthand and letting readers walk in their shoes. I feel incredibly lucky to work at a news organization that values those kinds of stories, and to have an editor, Lynda Robinson, who understands the time, resources and care it takes to do them. Our team, called the local enterprise team, also hops in whenever there are major events in D.C., so a significant part of the job is witnessing or writing those first-draft-of-history moments.

How did the story on the Wayfair sex-trafficking conspiracy claims came about.
I've been writing about the way that child sex trafficking cases are mishandled and misunderstood in our country. The idea of child sex trafficking most people have - kidnapping, border crossings, physical chains - is almost never in line with reality, which is vulnerable kids groomed by someone they come to trust. That misunderstanding has been seized upon by individuals who want to scare people, especially women, for political gain. Again and again, I heard from advocates and survivors about how sensationalized stories, whether well-meaning or hyped by QAnon, cause harm. I wanted to figure out how to show the consequences of that harm on real children and real victims of trafficking.

Tell us a bit about the reporting and writing, and the main challenges you facedDuring the early days of the pandemic, I did stories that tracked individual objects through supply chains. I am not cut out to be a business reporter, but by following one item, like a cheeseburger, you got to meet all the people on the journey and learn about the unequal ways COVID was upending their lives. So for this story, I hoped to use the same method: Follow one conspiracy theory from start to finish and see who it impacts along the way. The Wayfair conspiracy theory was the most obvious choice because it had gone so viral, so fast, had a lasting footprint online, and most of all, had recklessly damaged the reputations of real kids.

The hardest part of the reporting was going from the vague to the specific. Not just explaining that the trafficking hotline was overloaded, but finding a real advocate who couldn't get timely help for a real victim. Not just talking about kids being harmed, but taking you into the panic attacks of one specific girl. That said, how do we do this reporting without causing additional harm? That's the question I'm always asking myself. So we had to make tough decisions about what to include and what to leave out. We didn't want to further amplify misinformation. And we didn't want to draw attention to any kid who hadn't explicitly said it was OK to do so.

One fascinating aspect about this story is its wide net. It opens and closes with Samara Duplessis, a 13-year-old from the Detroit-area who ran away from home in a moment of teen angst, then had her life upended by a series of viral lies. You could have had a fascinating-enough story if you'd focused only on her. Instead the lens widens to find more and more people who've been dragged in. At what point did you decide to take such a sweeping view, and why is such a story more beneficial for readers?
If we had just told the story of conspiracy theory's harm to Samara, it simply wouldn't be an accurate story. Because the repercussions were so, so much bigger and are still unfolding today. I'd known since reporting at the Capitol on Jan.6 and seeing all the "Save the Children" signs, that we needed to write about the way that false narratives about sex-trafficking are on-ramps to far-right extremism. For Rosanne Boyland, and likely many others, the Wayfair conspiracy theory was the first step onto that ramp.

Though keeping the story's scope wide certainly made it more of a time investment for readers, my feeling was that if we were going to do a story about the harm caused, we needed to show as much of that harm as we could pin down.
I'm fond of a small touch in the lede, when you initially describe Samara as "the real Samara Duplessis." Here it is in two sentences that both summarize and foreshadow:

The real Samara Duplessis was sprawled across her comforter, her thumb on Instagram. Summer could drag on in the Detroit suburbs, and the summer of 2020 - her eighth-grade graduation reduced to Zoom, her whole world masked and anxious - was already the most boring of them all.

Do you remember how you landed on that description?
Thank you! I wanted to establish very quickly that this was going to be a story about what was real, and what wasn't. At that moment, there were two Samaras. The one the Internet was making up stories about, and the real one.

You profile Zari McFadden, whose tweet helped the conspiracy theory grow. How did you find out her role, and what was the process of approaching and interviewing her like?Zari's Wayfair tweet was among those that had the most traction, which I knew thanks to Marc-André Argentino, a researcher who had captured the Twitter ripple effect in real time. I found Zari's academic resume online and emailed her, explaining why I wanted to talk with her. I interviewed a lot of people who had shared the Wayfair conspiracy theory who never made it into the story. They had varying ranges of remorse and understanding, but so much of Zari's story was representative of the themes I kept hearing. She wanted to help. She thought it was a good thing to share just in case it was true. Once she realized she was wrong, she felt uncomfortable and uncertain of what to do next. Listening to her, I was reminded of all the times I've had the urge to post something without looking into it first. Her experience had served as a cautionary tale in her own life, and I thought it would do the same for readers.

I was agog at how thoroughly the Wayfair theory disrupted services for real sex-trafficking victims. There are several sources who address that, but the most vivid is Katie Howard, an advocate for victims. How did Katie get on your radar as a potential resource?
Thanks for asking about this. I spent time on Reddit forums for individuals whose family members had been radicalized by QAnon, reading in real time how the Wayfair conspiracy theory was taking hold. It included a copy of a Facebook post from an advocate venting about how the Human Trafficking Hotline had told her its slow response was due to the backup from the Wayfair lie. Even though Katie's post was no longer public, I could use the URL to figure out which profile it came from, and I messaged her directly. There were a lot of moments like that, just sending emails, texts, voicemails and snail mail - then hoping. I never heard back from at least half of them. But you go into a story like this expecting that. I was incredibly grateful Katie responded and shared all she did. It allowed me to focus on the harm to a real trafficking victim without having to name her or potentially put her in more danger.
I like the way you thread Samara and her family throughout, which helps anchor an otherwise wide-reaching story: QAnon and other conspiracy groups; the metastasizing power of disinformation campaigns; the consequences for victims who had been trafficked. This summary was about Amazing Polly, one of the people who fed the internet storm:

Her June Wayfair tweet planted a seed that was cultivated by other social media users. By mid-July, they had matched the cabinet and pillow names to real children, dreamed up bogus meanings for SKU numbers and invented rumors about Wayfair executives. On Instagram and TikTok, self-proclaimed influencers who regularly posted about beauty products or motherhood gained hundreds of likes, followers and subscribers by repeating the lies.

Was that always the structure you had in mind, or did it change during writing or editing?
One of the many wonderful things about my editor is that she thinks about structure from the very beginning, and those conversations inform the reporting itself. I knew that focusing on a real child as the through-line would be the most compelling way to tell the story. What I didn't know was whether the photographer, Sarah Voisin, and I would get that access. I started reaching out to families at the end of September. I didn't spend time with Samara until early November, because it took time for her parents to feel comfortable with the idea. Without their participation, and Samara's willingness to share what she'd been through, it would have been a much different story. I wasn't going to focus on a child unless I felt certain that both the parents and the felt ready to let the world inside what was one of the hardest moments of their lives.

You draw from an impressive range of resources, everything from a TikTok creator to a University of Maryland study. How did you go about finding them?
One benefit of this story is how much of it played out on searchable social media platforms. I was coming off a story about the jailing of child trafficking victims in Las Vegas, where the harm being done to kids is usually only witnessed by a tight-knit group of police officers, judges and advocates. So I found it to be an incredible relief that there was so much evidence of the consequences of the Wayfair lie and other QAnon nonsense online. The harder part was figuring out how to link it together and when to stop reporting; we could have kept digging for months. (For what it's worth to those looking for specific tools, I use Trello to organize everything I have and still need.) I'm also incredibly grateful to the survivors and advocates in the anti-trafficking community, who rightfully worry that bringing attention to the power of these conspiracy theories will only lead to more conspiracy theories. Without their trust and input, this story would have missed the point.
After a wider focus throughout the story, you return to Samara and close with the striking image of her looking in a mirror:

For the next few moments, at least, her image was hers to control.

How did you choose that as the story's ending?
I'm always looking for that moment that feels like it tells a reader that long after you close this tab, this person is still going to be in the thick of this, and here's what that future might look and feel like. With Samara, it felt like she was taking back some power. She'd been through hell, and she was aware that some consequences she'd never escape, but there she was, out in the world and trying new things. That felt like the most honest way to end: Don't come at her. She's not having it.

Is there anything you learned while doing this story that will help you while working on future stories, or may help other journalists?
I was reminded to be patient. When people have been through so much, and I reach out to them wanting to talk, it might take a few tries. They deserve the time to think about it, and to really understand what I'm asking of them.

This reporting process was also a good reminder that just because a story has already been written about, or a lot of time has passed, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Some of the richest reporting can come after the public has stopped paying attention.

The whole year of reporting on this dark subject was a never-ending lesson in how to keep laughing and keep leaning on my people. Just before this story published, I was fact-checking like crazy, not sleeping enough, and getting threatening emails from a QAnon propagandist. Every day that week, our Federal Reserve reporter, Rachel Siegel, sent me a voice memo filled with truly terrible jokes: "Why couldn't the man lift three tons of pasta?" "Because he wasn't stroganoff." Awful. And yet everything.

What are you currently reading for inspiration?
Amateur DIY blogs and roller skating TikTok, mostly. But I'm working my way through Bessel van derk Kolk's " The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma," and revisiting " Trauma Stewardship " from Laura van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk. So many of the people I write about have been through or are going through traumatic experiences. These books help me understand how that trauma impacts their actual brain chemistry and function, shaping so much about the way they see, show up in and react to the world.

They're also helping me understand my own brain. Reporters are so often witnesses to and repositories for other people's pain. I went into this career thinking that if I loved it enough, it wouldn't affect me or my mental health. I quickly learned that wasn't the case. I understand one option is to become numb to other's suffering. But for me, not soaking it up means I can't squeeze it out onto the page, or make a reader really know what it's like for someone else. I could also minimize and repress the way this work impacts me, because the effects that I feel are so much less than what the people in my stories are going through. But not facing my own sh*t head-on means not doing what I need to do in order to be present for the next person, the next story.

Rather than pretend I'm not sometimes emotionally wrecked by what I see and hear, or just grinding through until I quit and become a dog walker, I'm trying to figure out how we both let our work affect us and make it sustainable. I'm inspired by the people who have done that in other fields, and I hope we as journalists can figure it out, too.

***
Trevor Pyle was a newspaper reporter in the Pacific Northwest for several years, and now is a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.

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How a social media theory led to multiple victims. | Nieman Storyboard

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These days, a conspiracy theory can burn through a population like a pathogen. And while these theories are built on top of untruths, the ripples they send out in the world can be very real. Jessica Contrera of The Washington Post recently traced one such ripple: "QAnon con: How the viral Wayfair sex trafficking lie hurt real kids" published Dec.

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This article from USA Today summarizes how the Wayfair sex trafficking theory is a myth. The message in this article can be understood well. It mainly portrays how and why this theory is false. This article that USA Today wrote shows credible information since it reflects similar thoughts and ideas about why this theory is false to other trusted sources, like BBC or the Washington Post. This article shows many perspectives on how Wayfair responds to this claim and also reveals credible information to why this information was believed to be factual. This post was written in order to inform people about this misinformation being spread throughout social media.

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The claim: Expensive products on Wayfair are coded listings for missing children being sold in a human-trafficking scheme

The internet has been gripped with a conspiracy theory this month as thousands of viral posts allege that online furniture firm Wayfair is involved in a child sex-trafficking operation.

"So wayfair has third party vendors that are HUMAN SEX TRAFFICKING on their website," various social media posts have alleged. "There are items like throw pillows, cabinets etc. priced at 10-20,000 dollars and named after missing girls. PLEASE BE CAREFUL!!"

Posts point to the high prices of items like pillows and dressers as evidence that the products are secretly fronts for child trafficking. Theorists further note the names of some of the dressers, which are allegedly the same children who have gone missing over the past few years.

Some users also allege similar activities occur on other e-commerce sites like Amazon, Etsy and Walmart. Others claim the scandal can only be tracked by using the Russian search engine Yandex.

Posts have tried to link the Clinton and Gates foundations, Ellen DeGeneres and George Soros, among others, to the alleged conspiracy. Posts have also attempted to link Wayfair to Ghislaine Maxwell, the ex-girlfriend of deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
More: Trump says of sex trafficking suspect Ghislaine Maxwell, 'I wish her well'
"You're worried I'm not wearing a mask I'm furious about the elite child trafficking pedophiles flaunting their crimes. - #WeAreNotTheSame #Wayfair #PedoGate," one viral graphic reads.

Wayfair has denied claims of its third-party vendors being connected to child sex-trafficking. The claims rely on anecdotal and contrived evidence. Many of the claims of missing children connected to the products have been debunked while other assertions are unfounded.

Online listings, algorithms and ridiculous pricing

The Wayfair conspiracy theory began when Reddit users began agitating about the high prices of certain furniture items on the site.
More: How an Arizona couple helped fuel a Wayfair sex trafficking conspiracy theory
While thousand-dollar price tags for pillows, dressers and other household items look exorbitant to most people, products with similar pricing have been listed on Wayfair for years.

In addition to expensive, high-end products being common on the site, Wayfair prices are largely determined by algorithms that adjust the price of a product in real-time. This practice, common among e-commerce giants, can lead to spikes in costs like the glitches seen on other online services like Amazon and Uber.

Claims that the listed products also have the names of missing children are also both cherry-picked and inaccurate. It is very common for retail stores from IKEA to Pottery Barn, Wayfair to Walmart and others to use names for products. The examples of products supposedly matching the names of missing children are a coincidence.

Wayfair denies the allegations

"There is, of course, no truth to these claims. The products in question are industrial grade cabinets that are accurately priced," Wayfair said in a statement to USA TODAY.

"Recognizing that the photos and descriptions provided by the supplier did not adequately explain the high price point, we temporarily removed the products from site to rename them and provide a more in-depth description and photos that accurately depict the product to clarify the price point," the company continued.

Many of the products in question have been removed, while the prices of others have fallen in the wake of the controversy.

Claims that Maxwell appears in a photo with Wayfair's "president of operations" are also untrue. The picture in question is a 2003 photo of Maxwell with George Bamford, the head of a luxury watch company, according to the Associated Press.

Wayfair also does not have a "president of operations" position in the company.

Ostensibly missing youth

MediaWise, a Poynter Institute fact-checking operation, found that of the six most widely circulated claims of allegedly missing children, only one - Yaritza Castro - is still missing.

Some of the children who were deemed missing responded to the claims in viral videos, exasperated that people were spreading misinformation about their abductions.

"Why am I mad? Because I'm not missing," Samiyah Mumin, one of the allegedly missing girls, said in a Facebook live video. The Ohio Attorney General's Office confirmed Mumin was found after being reported missing for a four-day period in May 2019 and has not been reported missing since, according to the Associated Press.

Other viral posts have claimed that the Russian search engine Yandex returns images of missing children if a user enters a product's number into the search. In fact, Newsweek found that almost any search on the site would result in photos of children, indicating an issue with the search engine's algorithm rather than an insightful tool for combating human trafficking.

Wayfair conspiracy theory masks a serious problem

"I think the real answer here is that people are unwilling to see trafficking as it actually happens yet are eagerly willing to make up stuff about it," Bridgette Carr, a professor of law at the University of Michigan and head of the Human Trafficking Clinic, told USA TODAY.
More: 13 sex trafficking statistics that explain the enormity of the global sex trade
"Can we see the effects of labor trafficking on Wayfair? Yes! Who is making the really cheap throw pillow or furniture that's arriving at your home in Amazon boxes? Those are the real questions that need to be asked not just about Wayfair but about our broad consumption of cheap goods and services," Carr said.

In 2017, about 152 million minors globally were engaged in some form of child labor, of which about 73 million were in hazardous labor, according to the Department of Labor. The department also maintains a list of goods produced with forced labor that includes furniture, clothing apparel and technological appliances.

"This is so convoluted," Sandy Skelaney, an anti-trafficking expert and adjunct lecturer Florida International University, told USA TODAY. "It's, unfortunately, so much easier to traffic somebody than to create an entire furniture catalog around it."
More: Who buys a trafficked child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men.
It is difficult to estimate how prevalent forced labor and child sex-trafficking is in the United States and around the world. However experts and advocates caution that public perception wildly differs from the reality of the issue.

"People who are vulnerable get trafficked, especially those with multiple vulnerabilities," Skelaney said.

"Oftentimes it's young women of color, poor women who are put in these situations. I've seen cases that most people would only see in a movie, but rarely, if ever, does it look like the movie 'Taken,'" she added.

Trafficking hotline overwhelmed

A 2018 report from the Polaris Project, a national organization that fights human trafficking, found that most of the victims it investigated were trafficked through an intimate partner or marriage propositions, familial ties, or job postings.

And the Wayfair conspiracy theory has now affected the group's work operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline, which is overwhelmed with calls about the false claims.

"While Polaris treats all calls to the Trafficking Hotline seriously, the extreme volume of these contacts has made it more difficult for the Trafficking Hotline to provide support and attention to others who are in need of help," the group said in a July 20 press release.

"We strongly encourage everyone to learn more about what human trafficking really looks like in most situations, and about how you can help fight trafficking in your own community," the statement continues.
Fact check: Hillary Clinton was not in court June 2 testifying about child sex trafficking
Experts note that real-life trafficking doesn't look much like many people might imagine.

"Despite the popular media narrative that human trafficking starts with people being snatched, that is not how any of the cases that we work on at the human trafficking clinic begin," Carr told USA TODAY.

"When I first started this work, no one was aware of human trafficking. Now, we've significantly raised the awareness, but there are all these hoaxes going around," Skelaney said.

Human trafficking claims are a popular trope in conspiracy theories. A high-profile example is the QAnon "PizzaGate" conspiracy theory which alleged that Hillary Clinton and other famous individuals were running a child sex trafficking operation in a D.C. pizza parlor.

TikTok of Samiayah, allegedly missing teenager, speaking out

Ben Collins on Twitter

Harvard Business School Case on Wayfair Algorithms, Building an e-Commerce Brand at Wayfair

Fortune Magazine, What causes crazy-high prices on Wayfair and Amazon?

Washington Post, Uber glitch charges passengers 100 times the advertised price, resulting in crosstown fares in the thousands of dollars

Apartment Therapy, How Retailers Give Names to Furniture

MediaWise on Twitter

Associated Press, Baseless Wayfair child-trafficking theory spreads online

Department of Labor, Child Labor, Forced Labor & Human Trafficking

Polaris Project, 2018 Statistics from the National Human Trafficking Hotline

Polaris Project July 20 Press Release on Wayfair Conspiracy

USA TODAY, Man fires rifle in D.C. restaurant at center of fake-news conspiracy theories

Newsweek, Kids Shipped in Armoires? The Person Who Started the Wayfair Conspiracy Speaks

Associated Press, Photo does not show Ghislaine Maxwell with Wayfair's 'president of operations'

USA TODAY, Fact check: Hillary Clinton was not in court June 2 testifying about child sex trafficking

USA TODAY, Fact check: Ellen, Oprah, many others are not under house arrest for child sex trafficking

Arizona Republic, How an Arizona couple helped fuel a Wayfair sex trafficking conspiracy theory

Interview with Bridgette Carr, Head of the Human Trafficking Clinic

Interview with Sandy Skelaney, Anti-Trafficking Expert and Adjunct Lecturer at Florida International University

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here. Our fact check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.
"Where is the energy for the people who are actually being exploited in your community?" Carr asked.

"When we make human trafficking this super exotic thing that only takes place if you're kidnapped and sold for sex, we exclude all the ways that people like you and me are contributing to forced labor in this country and around the world," she emphasized.

Our ruling: False

There is no evidence to suggest that Wayfair is involved in child sex trafficking. The claims rely on circumstantial and debunked assertions. Experts and advocates engaged in anti-child sex trafficking work have cast doubt on the conspiracy theory, and multiple investigations have found key tenets of the claim to be untrue. We rate this claim FALSE because it is not supported by our research.

Our fact-check sources:

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Fact check: Home goods retailer Wayfair is not involved in child sex trafficking

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The internet has been gripped with a conspiracy theory this month as thousands of viral posts allege that online furniture firm Wayfair is involved in a child sex-trafficking operation. "So wayfair has third party vendors that are HUMAN SEX TRAFFICKING on their website," various social media posts have alleged.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2021/wayfair-qanon-sex-trafficking-conspiracy/

After reading many articles on this Wayfair theory, these two articles ended up being the most credible with the most information. They are both very similar, but have a different way of explaining everything. The article from the Washington Post starts off by explaining how a 13 year old girl, along with many others, disappeared mysteriously and then went viral after people started theorizing that an outrageously high priced pillow was posted to essentially cover up a sex trafficking operation. This article mainly talks about how this theory first arose from the girl going missing, while the other article from BBC talks about many reasons why this theory became believable. The BBC article also starts off by talking about an overpriced cabinet set at $10,000. There wasn’t only one thing set at a high price, but many items were then discovered with a similar high price. BBC talks about how people realized that the names of these cabinets or products were named after the same victims that went missing. But Wayfair denied this and said that this was a way to organize their products. Later on people began copying and pasting the serial numbers or SKU’s of the highly priced items into a major Russian search engine and getting many search results of pictures of younger women and girls. This claim ended up being false since it ended up being a glitch in their system. In the end, both of these articles find out that the Wayfair sex trafficking theories were false claims, but seemed very believable at first.

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According to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool, the term Wayfair has generated 4.4 million engagements on Instagram. It also spread rapidly on public groups and pages on Facebook, resulting in more than 12,000 posts and nearly a million direct engagements.

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Wayfair: The false conspiracy about a furniture firm and child trafficking

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It's gone global, and involves a US-based furniture company and unfounded allegations of human trafficking.

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The QAnon community began to claim that Wayfair is running a sex trafficking scandal. They believed that overpriced objects being put up for sale could be used as a disguise to cover up children being sold for sex work. This article written by BBC in July of 2020 claims that these assumptions were not real. But there was some good evidence to this theory that made it pretty believable. For example, a Wayfair user was scrolling and found a very overpriced cabinet that had a girl’s name in the name of the cabinet and description. This is what started this whole theory in the first place. These items were placed at an outrageous price then had the same name as missing girls from the U.S. But Wayfair responded to this topic after it went viral on many news sourced and the most on social media. Wayfair claimed that this they do not traffic kids and they use those kinds of names as an algorithm to organize products. And the overly priced cabinets were said to be large in size, hence the price being set that high.

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According to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool, the term Wayfair has generated 4.4 million engagements on Instagram. It also spread rapidly on public groups and pages on Facebook, resulting in more than 12,000 posts and nearly a million direct engagements.

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Wayfair: The false conspiracy about a furniture firm and child trafficking

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It's gone global, and involves a US-based furniture company and unfounded allegations of human trafficking.

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The mysterious theories of Wayfair trafficking kids began in the summer of 2020 when a girl disappeared and was nowhere to be found. She ended up running away from her own home making her parents really worried and terrified. Her disappearance ended up going viral, along with dozens of other kids her age disappearing randomly. There was an attached screenshot with articles of a Wayfair pillow being priced at $10,000. This led to people believing that Wayfair was up to some suspicious things. It ended up going viral on social media, including twitter with 1.2 million tweets about this topic. But after an investigation was done by human trafficking investigators at the Department of Homeland Security, these trafficking claims ended up being false. Shortly after a missing persons report was filed, the 13 year old girl named Samara Duplessis was found.

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Exclusive

An Internet mob wanted to rescue a 13-year-old girl. Instead, they terrified her, derailed real trafficking investigations and incited 'save the children' violence.

Samara Duplessis looks through a window on a November morning at her mother's apartment outside Detroit. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience.

The real Samara Duplessis was sprawled across her comforter, her thumb on Instagram. Summer could drag on in the Detroit suburbs, and the summer of 2020 - her eighth-grade graduation reduced to Zoom, her whole world masked and anxious - was already the most boring of them all.

But it felt even more bleak to 13-year-old Samara, whose parents had been a mess of worry ever since what happened in the spring.

In May, Samara had stuffed a box of Frosted Flakes into her sparkly backpack, slipped out the door and run away. She had just needed a break from it all, you know?

It was terrifying for her parents, Samara understood that now. The search parties, the police alerts, the missing posters.

They found her after two days, and ever since, everything in Samara's life was about "rebuilding trust" and "taking responsibility." All she wanted was for her parents to see that she was fine, and they didn't need to be so worried.

On this afternoon in July, she felt perfectly safe.

She scrolled to the next Instagram post, and the next, and the next, until her phone rang. Her dad's name was on the screen.

"Something's going on," Kevin Duplessis Jr. told his daughter.

Within the last 20 minutes, more than a dozen people had called him, frantic about whether Samara was okay. Apparently, thousands of people on the Internet were talking about the same thing.

Samara's name and face were going viral, along with the names and faces of half a dozen other children.

Twitter

all black lives matter

@zarimx

Y'all this Wayfair Human trafficking thing is crazy. Look at this, there are two pillows/shower curtains that are the exact same, but one is $100 and the other is $10K. The $10K one is named the same thing as a Black girl missing in Michigan...

July 10, 2020, 5:36 a.m.

Note: Now-deleted social media postings are pictured throughout this story. They have been recreated based on archived screenshots. Some include links to harmful misinformation; those links have been disabled.

One tweet circulating her picture showed a screenshot of an old local news article that said Samara Duplessis was missing. The article was never updated when Samara was found safe.

Beside it was a screenshot of a pillow for sale on Wayfair, the online furniture superstore. It was called the "Duplessis" pillow. Its price: $9,999.

The person behind the post was seemingly arguing that because the pillow was marked at a ridiculous price, and because its name matched the last name of a child who appeared to be missing, Wayfair was involved in something sinister.

There were thousands of tweets making similar accusations about cabinets Wayfair was selling. The claims were on Facebook, too. And onReddit, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Within 72 hours, the company was trending, with an estimated 1.2 million tweets about Wayfair and trafficking.

In the days to come, every aspect of these claims would be found to be false.

Human trafficking investigators at the Department of Homeland Security, who had to pause active investigations to sort out what was happening with Wayfair, would find no evidence to support any of the allegations. Wayfair's staff, bombarded with threats, would realize how the pricing anomalies were happening. Anti-trafficking organizations, inundated with callers, would beg the public to stop sharing bogus stories that made their work harder.

But with limited immediate intervention from social media companies, the Wayfair conspiracy theory would become one of the fastest-spreading disinformation campaigns on the Internet, ensnaring concerned mothers, TikToking teenagers, racial justice advocates and people all along the political spectrum.

They didn't realize they were amplifying a QAnon propaganda artist trying to convince the masses that President Donald Trump was saving the country from a ring of satanic pedophiles.

And they didn't know how dangerous child sex trafficking myths were about to become. That actual victims would be blocked from getting help. That women fearing traffickers would be driven to violence. And that the real children whose pictures were used in this ploy would have their lives upended.

One of those children was trying to make sense of what her dad was saying.

Kevin Duplessisand his ex-wife Tammy Samuels, Samara's mom, still hadn't recovered from their daughter running away two months earlier. Samara was the only child they had together, their little girl who belted out gospel music and argued like the lawyers she loved on "Law and Order."

Tammy Samuels, right, lectures her daughter Samara about not doing her online classes. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

She was beautiful in a way that drew comments at church, always about her stunning green eyes. And now people were saying Samara was some kind of target for sex trafficking? Or there was a price on her head? They didn't know what this was about, but they knew it wasn't good.

"Do not leave the house," Kevin instructed his daughter.

Samara lay back on her bed. Her parents were probably just overreacting, she thought. But a few minutes later, her phone rang again.

It was one of her closest friends, panicked about Wayfair.

"If you playing, tell me now," Samara told him.

He sent her screenshot after screenshot.

Samara didn't know anything about algorithms that caused pricing inconsistencies. She'd never heard of QAnon. She saw only her face. Her name. $9,999.

With every passing minute, her certainty about her safety was slipping away.

With every passing minute, more people were posting her picture.

Many of them wrote that they didn't know if what they were reading about Wayfair was true, but they figured that sharing it couldn't hurt.

Samara was about to find out just how much it would.

A conspiracy theory's creation

Zari McFadden, now 21, tweeted about the Wayfair conspiracy theory without knowing if it was true. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

In another bedroom 700 miles away, Zari McFadden reached for her phone and discovered it was hot. Which was weird. She had been sleeping in her parents' house, too, ever since her own graduation, from Spelman College, had been interrupted by the pandemic.

Bored back home in North Carolina, 20-year-old Zari had been doing a lot of doom-scrolling, including the night before, when she had been shocked by the tweets she was seeing about Wayfair.

Zari usually tweeted about activism and television shows to her few hundred followers. When she saw the picture of Samara Duplessis, she thought about how the stories of Black girls like her and Samara so often went ignored. Here, she thought, was a chance to do something about it.

"Y'all, this Wayfair Human trafficking thing is crazy," she'd typed.

Now she could see why her phone was hot. It was lighting upwith every new notification, and by morning, there were nearly 10,000 retweets. Soon there would be more than 64,000.

Twitter

Amazing Polly is FREE and will act like it

@99freemind

My spidey senses are tingling.
What's with these "storage cabinets?"
Extremely high prices, all listed with girls' names & identical units selling for different amounts.

June 14, 2020, 9:11 p.m.
A researcher analyzing the false claims about Wayfair would pinpoint Zari's tweet as one of the most powerful spreaders of the misinformation.

But she was far from the one to start it. By the time Zari read about the Wayfair frenzy, it had been simmering on the Internet for nearly a month.

It began, QAnon researchers say, with a tweet from a woman who calls herself Amazing Polly.

@BocaPolice
Rumor has it Oprah Winfrey's property is being searched and she's been arrested. Has she been arrested or brought in for questioning or can you deny all this?
#OprahWinfrey
March 17, 2020, 12:09 a.m.

The social media stories trending about @oprah being arrested by @bocapolice is absolutely false.
March 18, 2020, 8:22 a.m.

Polly, a middle-aged White woman in Canada, had spent years making YouTube videos with titles like "How to fight Islamic prayer in school" and "Diversity is a con job." She professed her allegiance to QAnon in 2018, after watching a viral video warning that everyone from former president Barack Obama to the Queen of England and the Popewere "deep state criminals" destabilizing the world for their own gain.

QAnon had grown out of another conspiracy theory - Pizzagate - that commandeered the issue of child sex traffickingto spread pro-Trump propaganda. Pizzagate was so effective in convincing one man that pedophile Democrats were abusing children in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant that in 2016, he showed up with an AR-15 to "rescue" the nonexistent children.

He was sentenced to four years in prison for the three shots he fired into the restaurant.

Pizzagate was a cautionary tale, showing how online conspiracy theories about sex-trafficked children could lead to real-life violence. But that did nothing to stop more made-up stories from spreading.

Instead, QAnon followers, with the assistance of YouTubers like Amazing Polly, usedsex trafficking as a tool to gain traction, especially with women. By the time pandemic lockdowns drove people to spend endless hours on their screens, false claims about Tom Hanks, Chrissy Teigen, Ellen DeGeneres and other celebrities trafficking children were regularly appearing on mainstream social media platforms. So many people believed Oprah was about to be arrested for trafficking in March 2020 that the Boca Raton Police Department in Florida had to tweet that the rumor was not true.

This time, Polly's target was a high-profile corporation. In an email to The Washington Post, Polly, who declined to reveal her real name, said she was shopping for storage cabinets when she noticed multiple low-quality photos of the same cabinet at a variety of high prices.

"At the time I was doing a lot of research into human trafficking so my twitter post about the cabinets was kind of a 'raised eyebrow' type thing," she said.

Her June Wayfair tweet planted a seed that was cultivated by other social media users. By mid-July, they had matched the cabinet and pillow names to real children, dreamed up bogus meanings for SKU numbers and invented rumors about Wayfair executives. On Instagram and TikTok, self-proclaimed influencers who regularly posted about beauty products or motherhoodgained hundreds of likes, followers and subscribersby repeating the lies.

Zari is now a PhD student at North Carolina State University, where she is studying algorithmic bias. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Every share was a potential for more people to "look into" the allegations - and with a few more clicks, find their way to other QAnon content. In her next YouTube video, Amazing Polly encouraged them to do just that.

"The people who are now just waking up because of Wayfairgate, I hope you'll go down these other rabbit holes, too," she said.

In North Carolina, Zari wasn't going down the rabbit hole. She'd been excited at first about all the traction her tweets about Samara and the pillow were getting. She had even bragged to her mom about it.

But Zari, who was starting graduate school in the fall, was planning to pursue a PhD in algorithmic bias, researching the ways technology could be helpful or harmful. As she read the replies to her tweets, she saw how many people were telling her the Wayfair claims were being debunked. They informed her that journalists had found old Facebook posts from Samara's parents saying she had returned home safely.

"I sort of felt uncomfortable about it," Zari said. She came to a realization: "I don't know that this is true, really."

She deleted the tweet specifically about Samara, telling her followers she wasn't missing after all. Eventually, Zari would delete all eight of her tweets about Wayfair.

But she knew enough about the Internet to know that to the 64,000 people who shared what she shared, and to all the people who followed them, there was no taking it back.

A family's fear

Samara passes time on her phone while waiting to get her nails done. Ever since her picture was spread across the Internet, she gets nervous about being around new people. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Samara did not leave her dad's house. Sometimes, she did not leave her bed. But even lying there, she was afraid to fall asleep. She stayed on the phone with a friend all night, not wanting to be alone.

They suspect that Wayfair selling kids... 1 of them listed mentioned Samara
July 10, 2020, 1:41 p.m.

A direct message sent to Samara's mother on Facebook.

"I started getting real bad anxiety. I started pacing around real heavy," she recalled. "When I get in my head, like real, real deep in my head, I start hyperventilating."

The hives came next.

Hey sis. Hope all is well. Ran across this and not sure if you knew about it. When I saw your daughters pic I wanted to make sure you knew about it
July 10, 2020, 10:18 p.m.

Wild Child Trafficking Conspiracy: People Are Finding Expensive Storage Units All Labeled With Missing Girls Names.. Being Sold On WayFair! [Images]

worldstarhiphop.com

Direct messages sent to Samara's mother on Facebook.

"My body is just doing whatever it can just to get me to calm down," she said.

Samara had talked about Wayfair with her dad a few times, and he still didn't seem to know what to do about her picture being all over the Internet. So how could she be sure she wasn't going to be snatched one day? She didn't tell anyone about the hives, though.

She didn't want her parents to know how freaked out she was.

All the while, Samara's mother, Tammy, kept returning to her Facebook inbox. It was full of alarming messages from strangers and distant friends.

Tammy worked as a counselor who helped kids in the juvenile court system. But at home, she was struggling to get through to her own teenager. The night Samara snuck out two months before, they'd been fighting because Tammy had taken Samara's phone.

The 48 hours Samara was gone were the worst of Tammy's life. There were so many false tips that sent them running around Detroit and frustrated conversations with police officers she worried weren't taking her seriously. And then, when Samara was found safe, Tammy learned that she'd been temporarily taken in by total strangers who had offered her a place to stay. They kicked Samara out once her face was on the news, but they didn't call the police or her parents.

So even as Tammy read the articles saying the Wayfair thing was a lie, she couldn't shake the feeling that somehow, there was a bounty on her daughter's head.

"Can my child go outside?" Tammy asked herself. "Can she go to the grocery store without people lurking? We don't know."

Samara's parents never realized that nearly all the other "missing" kids who were named in the viral posts about Wayfair weren't actually missing.

One girl from Texas had run away for a few days in 2017,but like 92 percent of all children reported missing, she was recovered.Now 19, she posted a TikTok to show everyone she was just fine. Her mother, Katrina Waggoner Phillips, was not. The moment she saw her daughter's missing poster being shared again as a supposed Wayfair sex trafficking victim, it felt like a mostly healed wound had been ripped open.

"I just started shaking all over," Phillips recalled. "Everything was bringing back the memories of when that poster was made, when she had run away."

Cameron Dziedzic, a 16-year-old boy from Maryland, tried to ignore how many people were sharing a picture from when he had gone to stay with friends for a few weeks without telling his family. He'd since been placed into foster care and was working toward joining the military.

Cameron Dziedzic, now 18, is pictured in Silver Spring, Md. He tried to ignore all the people who spread his picture online and wrongly claimed he was being trafficked. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

But one day at Walmart, an employee recognized him as the boy next to pictures of the $9,999 "Dziedzic" pillow.

"Chill out," Cameron told the woman. "Everything is good."

She called the police anyway.

Even when one 18-year-old girl went on Facebook Live to demand people stop saying she was being sold in a cabinet, commenters refused to listen. They said she was probably being forced to make the video. Or that she should be "grateful" people were trying to help her.

"You're mad because I'm telling you that I'm not missing?" she asked the 530,000 viewers of her live stream.

A woman watching didn't like her tone. "Put her ass back in the cabinet," she commented.

Hundreds of thousands of people wanted to help these children when they believed they were victims of sex trafficking. When it turned out that they were victims of a viral hoax, the kids and their families were left to face the wreckage alone.

Samara's mom tried calling the Michigan attorney general. Someone there, she remembered, told her to call the FBI. Tammy did, but said she never heard anything back.

After that, she decided it would be better not to talk about any of this with Samara.

She didn't want her daughter to know how freaked out she was.

A real victim's fate

Katie Howard, a former professional advocate, called the National Human Trafficking Hotline to get services for a real victim of trafficking in a Florida emergency room. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Nearly two months after Wayfair was trending on Twitter, a real victim of sex trafficking was sitting in a hospital emergency room in the Florida Panhandle.

A nurse giving her a sexual assault examination had recognized the warning signs. She called a local advocate, who would come to learn that this woman in her 30s had been coerced by two men to sell herself out of a hotel. In exchange, she got a place to stay.

The advocate, Katie Howard, knew this was what mostsex trafficking looked like in America. Not kidnapping. Not stranger danger. Not Wayfair cabinets or pillows. Just a person being manipulated by someone exploitingtheir vulnerability.

Howard knew, too, what she needed to do: call the National Human Trafficking Hotline, which provides resourcesto people being coerced into commercial sex or any kind of forced labor.

But when she called, she was placed on hold. It was late, so she filed a written assistance request for this victim instead.

That request landed in an inbox still full of people who wanted Wayfair to be investigated and Samara and the other kids in their social media feeds to be rescued.

See full document

"All contact with the Trafficking Hotline is confidential. What we can say is that none of the reports we have received involving Wayfair contained any information beyond what has been widely shared online. Nor have any of these reports been made by someone who has a specific connection to any alleged missing children."
Polaris

The highly trained advocates at Polaris, the nonprofit that operates the hotline on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services, had been repeating the same response for weeks: "We've actually already heard about this. We understand that law enforcement has already determined that this information is unfounded."

Even before Pizzagate, they were accustomed to hearing the sensational myths people believed about trafficking, from zip ties on cars to secret messages in the snow. For years, they had been explaining to the public that most victims of sex trafficking are exploited by someone they already know. The charming guy from Instagram, whose threats don't start until the 10th date. The generous landlord who offers a different way to pay the rent. The heroin-addicted parents who, just this once, let someone pay to touch their teenager.

Now legions of callers were parroting QAnon propaganda, most without even knowing it.

"The majority of people who were swept up in this misinformation really believed that this was a human trafficking ring, and that no one cared," said hotline director Megan Cutter, who had to call in extra staff for weeks.

Both Polaris and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children passed on everything they were hearing about the Wayfair claims to local police and federal agencies.

Ongoing investigations across the country were put on hold while a viral lie took precedence.

At Homeland Security, that impacted all 30 field offices, said Ramon Padilla, acting division chief for the Center for Countering Human Trafficking.

Twitter

Save The Children US

@SavetheChildren

We have been protecting children around the world for over 100 years.

While many people may choose to use our organization's name as a hashtag to make their point on different issues, we are not affiliated or associated with any of these campaigns.

savethechildren.org

Save the Children Statement on use of its Name in Unaffiliated Campaigns

Aug. 9, 2020 2:30 p.m.
"That time could be spent trying to identify victims, and doing the stuff that investigators need to do in order to get a prosecution, and ensure that these traffickers go to jail," Padilla said.

Polaris's insistence that the Wayfair story was false did little to stop its spread. Neither did a statement from Wayfair, which issued a short paragraph saying there was no truth to the claims and theexpensive cabinets in question were industrial grade and accurately priced.

The company hired armed security at several fulfillment centers after an onslaught of threats from people who claimed they were bringing their guns to "free" the kids.Some pointed to Wayfair's lack of explanation about the pricing of the other products, like the Duplessis pillow, as proof that they were hiding something.

Cameron Dziedzic holds his phone with the Wayfair site open. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Jane Carpenter, the company's global head of communications, could have provided a detailed accounting of what went wrong. Manufacturers uploading their own products to Wayfair's platform don't always fill out every needed piece of information.

The company had long ago created a workaround where the product would default to a high price, like $9,999, until the true price was determined. With millions of items for sale on the site, there were occasionally duplicate products and mismatched prices.

But Carpenter, working from home while figuring out how to navigate her first QAnon crisis, decided Wayfair would stay quiet.

"Our goal was really to try to minimize adding anything else to the story, and try to do whatever we could to not add fuel to the fire" she said.

Online, QAnon devotees were already doing that for her. After Facebook started placing warning labels on Wayfair-related content andTwitter started banning those promoting it, QAnon followers went even further in co-opting the anti-sex trafficking cause. They started using the name of an international humanitarian organization, Save the Children, as their hashtag. The hashtag became a rallying cry, fit for pastel-colored Instagram posts and homemade posters waved at the roughly 200 "save the children" events that took place in late summer 2020, from Spokane, Wash., to Sarasota, Fla.

The signs were also popular at rallies for Trump, who, when asked about QAnon at a town hall before the election, said, "I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard."

All the while, the calls, texts and online reports to the trafficking hotline kept coming, burying requests like the one from the advocate in Florida.

The woman at the hospital was afraid of being arrested, and she didn't want to talk to the police.

"You are not going to get in trouble for this," Howard, the advocate, had assured her. She just wanted to find this trafficking victim a safe place to stay.

Howard called the hotline two more times that weekend.

By the time Polaris's advocates connected her withan organization that had a room to spare, the woman who needed her help had fled.

Howard, who had given her a businesscard, hoped she'd get in touch. But the only call she received was from another hotline advocate, wanting to follow up on the written request that was now two weeks old.

The advocate apologized for the delay, explaining how backed up they were with callers demanding that they "save the children." She was ready to provide support however she could with this case.

Howard explained to the hotline worker that it was too late. She never heard from the woman who asked for her help again.

A true believer's death

Rosanne Boyland, left, with her sister Blaire, who tried to convince Rosanne that the Wayfair conspiracy theory wasn't true. (Courtesy of the Boyland family)

While Samara was trying to stop thinking about child traffickers, a woman in Georgia couldn't think about anything else.

Rosanne Boyland had been up all night, watching YouTube and sending links about Wayfair to her family. At 34, Rosanne didn't have kids of her own, and because of cervical cancer, she likely never would. But she had nieces to think about, the 4- and 5-year-old girls who loved to paint her fingernails, cover her driveway in sidewalk chalk and call her "RoRo."

Rosanne texted her sisters Blaire and Lonna about Wayfair again.

"It was not like 'oh this is so crazy.' She was really upset,"Blaire remembered. "She wanted to look more into it to try and help put an end to it."

Blaire knew her sister, like so many people, was having a tough time during the pandemic. Rosanne couldn't attend the in-person Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that had helped keep her away from opioids the last few years. Now, it seemed like she was replacing her old addiction with a new one.

Rosanne Boyland, who lived in Kennesaw, Ga., worried that children were in danger and wanted to do something to help. (Courtesy of the Boyland family)

Although YouTube had begun removing false information about Wayfair and QAnon that July, Rosanne's family said she was still finding video after video about the furniture site and Jeffrey Epstein, the Clintons and cabals, Pizzagate and pedophiles.

"In a couple-week period, she was fully into QAnon and the celebrities eating children for their adrenochrome. It happened really quick," Blaire said.

By fall, Rosanne, who'd never voted or shown interest in politics,was touting Trump's brilliance. By the holidays, she was talking about the election being stolen. She was certain that on Jan. 6, Trump was going to announce the arrest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his master plan to save the children.

The Boyland family, who had been Googling for "how to get someone free from a cult,"couldn't convince her not to go to Washington.

Rosanne told Blaire, "If I'm wrong, you guys can do whatever you want to me. I just have this deep down feeling that I'm right. I want it to be proven that I'm right."

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They never got to have that discussion.

As a mob stormed the Capitol, Rosanne was in their midst. As they battled the line of police trying to protect the polished brass doors, Rosanne was lying on the terrace, unconscious. She would become one of four rioters to die that day.

As a mob stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6, Rosanne was lying unconscious to the left of this entrance. She cannot be seen beneath the crowd attacking a line of police officers. (Lev Radin/Sipa USA)

An autopsy found she'd overdosed on amphetamines. Her family still questions that conclusion, saying the only amphetamine in her body was the Adderall she'd been prescribed.

Police attempting to reach Rosanne that day were attacked with fists and flagpoles, according to prosecutors pursuing cases against some of the rioters. Video footage shows one man reaching over her body to bash a helmetless officer with a baton.

To her gleeful attackers on the Internet, Rosanne was a meme in the making, a woman with a "Don't Tread on Me" flag, trampled by her own co-conspirators.

To Blaire, Rosanne was still the person who went with her to see Green Day for her first concert, who took the pictures at family parties, who had truly believed she was doing her part to fight something evil.

To those studying QAnon, Rosanne's story was further proof that conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking were serving as on-ramps to far-right radicalization and disturbing acts of violence.

Outside of the insurrection, there have been at least nine QAnon-inspired crimes in 2020 and 2021 committed by people who believed they were in the midst of saving the children, according to data from a University of Maryland analysis.

A woman driving drunk in Texas repeatedly rammed her car into another vehicle. Cecilia Fulbright, who has not yet entered a plea in the case, told police the driver she struck "was a pedophile and had kidnapped a girl for human trafficking."

In New Hampshire, a woman who had been talking about QAnon and sex trafficking barricaded herself and her own two children in an upstairs bedroom. Then, police say, Elizabeth Corliss lit the room on fire. She pleaded not guilty to arson and other charges. But court records show that when the family was rescued, her 9-year-old daughter told an EMT, "When the bad guys broke in, my mom set the fire to protect us."

And in California, a mother struggling with depression began to tell family members that she alone was responsible for the coronavirus, and that her husband was involved in a sex trafficking ring. One evening in April when her kids - ages 3, 2 and 6 months - were in the bathtub, she drowned them all.

"I killed my children," Liliana Carrillo told KGET in a television interview from jail. "I hate myself for it, but like I said, I wasn't about to hand them off to be continuously tortured and abused."

"I promised," she said, "to protect them from everything that would come their way."

As these women await trials, their families are questioning what they consumed on social media - and how it twisted their minds so quickly.

A September 2020 rally in Hollywood was one of dozens of events that took place across the country that year that amplified false narratives about human trafficking.

A recent document leak from a Facebook whistleblower showed that before the company cracked down on misinformation, its own algorithms promoted QAnon content and encouraged users to join QAnon groups.

Today, Facebook says it removes all pages, groups and Instagram accounts connected to QAnon. It sends people searching for "save the children" directly to information about the nonprofit of the same name. YouTube and Twitter said they have ousted thousands of users spreading extremist content. Amazing Polly has been banned from YouTube and had her most influential Twitter account shut down. She and other QAnon influencers remain on fringe platforms, but most have far fewer viewers.

And yet, the Wayfair conspiracy theory has continued to find new audiences. It has thrived most in an unexpected place: TikTok, where young content creators have racked up millions of views repeating the trope that unusually high-priced items are related to trafficking. Along with Wayfair, they've gone after Walmart, Amazon and Etsy. EBay was accused of being involved in trafficking when someone listed a McDonald's chicken nugget for $100,000.

"This needs to go viral and something needs to happen here," the video creator said.

Eventually, the chicken nugget video was banned. TikTok says its moderators proactively identify and remove false content that causes harm, along with blocking hashtags such as #pizzagate.

But before the video disappeared, the nugget theory had spread to Facebook.

A trafficking survivor who goes by the name Jessica Dean on her TikTok account @bloodbathandbeyond, said there is so much misinformation about sex trafficking on TikTok, she spends her nights and weekends making videos to counteract it. No, she tells her 352,000 followers, Walmart is not selling kids via $5,000 shoe listings. The spam texts you're getting from bots are not traffickers hunting you down. Empty baby car seats on the street are not traps to lure women into trafficking.

Some creators making these TikToks seem genuinely concerned, Dean said. Others seem to be pandering for likes and followers. The impact is the same.

"It's very easy to scare women in under 60 seconds," Dean said.

Rosanne's sisters believe she was scared, too. As the anniversary of her death approaches, Lonna and Blaire still wonder if Rosanne would have given up on QAnon once the predictions about Trump didn't come true.

They have yet to go through her room, or all her journals, where they know they are likely to discover more evidence of just how radicalized she had become.

But they did notice one sticky note Rosanne wrote not long before going to Washington. It wasn't about "saving the children." It was just about one child.

Rosanne had recorded the date her niece lost her first tooth. What mattered most to her family now was that she couldn't mark the second.

A teen's reemergence

Samara sits in her father's car on a recent afternoon in Michigan. Her family is still recovering from the experience of being caught up in a QAnon conspiracy theory. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Samara sat in the back seat of her mom's minivan, watching Detroit pass in a blur. She was on her way to meet new people, something that still made her uneasy a year and a half after thousands of strangers shared her pictures online.

"It never truly leaves your spirit," Samara said. "Just to know that somebody had the capability to take me from my family. It becomes a lifestyle, making sure I'm always cautious of who is around me."

Her dad still had securitycameras outside his door. Her mom still didn't want her to go to in-person school, so Samara was takingall of her sophomore-year classes online. She didn't go to homecoming.

But earlier this year, Samara convinced her parents to let her try modeling. They took her to classes at a Black-owned modeling school, where she learned to walk a runway, hold her posture and build her confidence.

On this November afternoon, she was headed to practice for a fashion show, where at 15, she would be the youngest model on the stage.

Samara sits on her bed in her room at the apartment of her dad. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Samara got out of the van, and her mother followed. Tammy made sure a coach she trusted was inside.

"Mommy needs to see," she said.

In her chunky-heeled boots, Samara took her place in line. She smiled at the other models. She hoped they wouldn't Google her.

Samara imagined that one day, her search results would show her accomplishments in the Air Force, or that she was putting a law degree to good use, making all kinds of people feel like they had someone by their side. For now, they still showed screenshots of a pillow and stories about sex trafficking she still didn'tfully understand.

But she couldn't be thinking about that. She needed to be ready for her turn. She heard "Five, six, seven, eight," and on cue, Samara stepped out.

She started walking toward the full-length mirror at the end of the runway.

Her chin was up. Her shoulders were back. Her face was composed.

Here, she wasn't missing. Or hyperventilating. She wasn't a trafficking victim. Or a conspiracy theorist's pawn.

She looked at her reflection in the mirror. For the next few moments, at least, her image was hers to control.

Samara practices her runway walk with her coach. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A QAnon con: How the viral Wayfair sex trafficking lie hurt real kids

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An Internet mob wanted to rescue a 13-year-old girl. Instead, they terrified her, derailed real trafficking investigations and incited 'save the children' violence.