Conspiracy theories hook people with claims of violence against children—and that harms children
newsdepo.com
When social media started blaring stories that online retailer Wayfair was secretly selling abducted children in the summer of 2020, it mostly elicited eyerolls and sarcastic responses. But those claims also generated real and lasting harm. As the BBC rConspiracy theories hook people with claims of violence against children—and that harms children
When social media started blaring stories that online retailer Wayfair was secretly selling abducted children in the summer of 2020, it mostly elicited eyerolls and sarcastic responses. But those claims also generated real and lasting harm. As the BBC reported at the time, the posts started with a well-known QAnon conspiracy theorist singling out a group of cabinets with unusually high prices and claiming that they were «all listed with girls' names.» That tweet was then picked up by a conspiracy subgroup on Reddit, where the story was quickly amplified with claims that the names associated with the oddly overpriced items matched those of missing girls or women. For QAnon followers, this was a road well-traveled. After all, QAnon itself was nothing but an expansion of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy. That conspiracy started with claims by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his son that accused Democratic campaign manager John Podesta of cannibalism and engaging in Satanic rituals. It then pivoted to online supporters of Donald Trump claiming that orders for pizza—particularly by Podesta and Democratic staffers—were actually encoded messages describing trading children for sex in the basement of a pizza place called Comet Ping Pong. Except the pizza orders were just pizza orders. There were no captive children. And Comet Ping Pong didn’t even have a basement. None of which stopped a 28-year-old man from North Carolina from making the drive up to Washington, D.C., where he fired three shots from an AR-15 while “self investigating” the claims and seeking to “rescue the children.” That Wayfair might be selling girls under the guise of overpriced pillows and cabinets was an easy leap for people who already bought into the idea of a global conspiracy in which the Clintons, Obamas, Catholic leaders, Jewish bankers, and various celebrities were all engaged in a globe-spanning child abduction and trafficking operation. But as a new article from The Washington Post makes clear, it was the conspiracy claims that did real damage to real children. And that’s not even the worst of it. Read more