It was lighting up with every new notification, and by morning, there were nearly 10,000 retweets. “Y’all, this Wayfair Human trafficking thing is crazy,” she’d typed. Here, she thought, was a chance to do something about it. 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. Zari usually tweeted about activism and television shows to her few hundred followers. She had been sleeping in her parents’ house, too, ever since her own graduation, from Spelman College, had been interrupted by the pandemic.īored 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. In another bedroom 700 miles away, Zari McFadden reached for her phone and discovered it was hot. Zari McFadden, now 21, tweeted about the Wayfair conspiracy theory without knowing if it was true. 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.” Kevin Duplessis and his ex-wife Tammy Samuels, Samara’s mom, still hadn’t recovered from their daughter running away two months earlier. One of those children was trying to make sense of what her dad was saying. And that the real children whose pictures were used in this ploy would have their lives upended. That women fearing traffickers would be driven to violence. That actual victims would be blocked from getting help. 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.Īnd they didn’t know how dangerous child sex trafficking myths were about to become. Anti-trafficking organizations, inundated with callers, would beg the public to stop sharing bogus stories that made their work harder.īut 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. Wayfair’s staff, bombarded with threats, would realize how the pricing anomalies were happening. 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. In the days to come, every aspect of these claims would be found to be false. Within 72 hours, the company was trending, with an estimated 1.2 million tweets about Wayfair and trafficking. And on Reddit, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. There were thousands of tweets making similar accusations about cabinets Wayfair was selling. 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. Some include links to harmful misinformation those links have been disabled. They have been recreated based on archived screenshots. Note: Now-deleted social media postings are pictured throughout this story.
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