QAnon may have catalyzed the spread of the Wayfair speculations, but the story had independent sources of energy. It was passed along by mom influencers who might otherwise post about manicures or nutritional supplements; it was shared among circles of women marketing essential oils or specialty shampoos, and on Instagram, where friends happily reposted one another’s well-designed Stories or infographics. Many of these women, when I spoke with them, emphatically denied supporting QAnon or even having a good understanding of what it was.

Jaesie Hansen, the Etsy seller, traced her interest in the child-sex-trafficking cause to the Wayfair theory, which she had come across mostly because she’d been stuck at home during the pandemic and was spending more of her day on social media. “I have no idea if that was true,” she said. “But I do know that that went viral, and that was when I started to look into it a lot more … If I hadn’t dove deeper into the whole Wayfair scandal last year, I probably wouldn’t have understood how big of a problem [child sex trafficking] actually is.” While Hansen acknowledges that the coronavirus is a serious issue, child sex trafficking around the world seems at least equally serious to her, and she doesn’t feel that it’s receiving adequate attention from the media. “I want to hear as much about that as I do about people dying of COVID,” she said.

Yet the panic and the pandemic are inextricably intertwined. Rumors of child sex trafficking shot across the internet during the months when pandemic shutdown measures were first implemented, a time when parents and children alike found themselves with more opportunities for idle digital browsing and emotion-led sharing. Referring to the dangers of kids being out of school and chattering online all day, Operation Underground Railroad’s founder and president, Tim Ballard, has regularly described this period as a “pedophile’s dream,” and claimed that predators were thinking of it as “harvest time.” The threat of trafficking became a pet cause for anti-vaccine groups that recruit by exploiting every kind of parental concern. (As a Florida state senator noted in August 2020, some in the anti-mask movement falsely claim that “wearing a mask increases the risk of kidnapping and child sex trafficking.”)