… a certain color palette, kind of font, and design...

Today this visual style sells us meal kits and underwear and monthly toothbrush subscriptions

— and just about everything else. But it's also showing up here: in seemingly

harmless, trendy Instagram posts about child trafficking.

On Instagram, there are over 800,000 posts like this — from social media influencers

and regular users — with the hashtag #savethechildren. We've seen things like this before: slideshows

about social justice and current events dominated Instagram this summer.

But something else is happening here. On Facebook, membership in pages and groups

branded as anti-child trafficking grew 3,000 percent between July and the end of September.

By the end of August, in-person rallies started taking place in cities across the world.

Ending child trafficking is hardly controversial. But behind that surge in growth is the baseless

conspiracy theory known as QAnon. Now, an ideology once confined to the more

obscure parts of the internet is finding its way mainstream — one Instagram post at a time.

On October 28, 2017, the first of a series of posts from an anonymous user appeared on

the 4chan message board /pol/. The user was nicknamed Q — after Q-level

security clearance — the Energy Department equivalent of “Top Secret.”

The community that followed and believed those anonymous postings became known as QAnon — and

they developed an elaborate conspiracy theory lore that President Trump is fighting a global

child trafficking network led by Satanic cannibalistic left-wing pedophile elites.

Their theories have been proven false time and again, but that didn't stop the community

from spreading from 4chan to another messaging board 8chan, and to places like Twitter, YouTube,

and Facebook. And as it did, the posts, videos, and memes

explaining its ideology became more accessible and digestible.

Now, QAnon is a giant entanglement of conspiracy theories — with dozens of offshoots —

that invites all different kinds of conspiratorial thinking into its fold.

QAnon has always been a “big tent” conspiracy theory that invites

people of different beliefs. And the thing is that because the QAnon narrative is so

broad and sprawling, people can kind of enter it and pick out the things that they like the best.

That paired with the Facebook algorithm, which recommends, like other groups

that someone might be interested in, that turns into a very dangerous combination.

"A QAnon follower blocked the Hoover Dam with an armored vehicle..."

"... a far-right conspiracy theorist was planning a kidnapping in Douglas County..."

"... a 24-year-old man was charged in the shooting death of a reputed mob boss.

His attorneys argued he was motivated by QAnon."

In 2019, the FBI labeled QAnon as a potential domestic terror threat after some QAnon followers started committing

serious crimes in the real world.

On Facebook, QAnon-related activity grew steadily for years without consequences.

But then something changed.

There is a lot of evidence that suggests that the pandemic had a big effect

on the growth of QAnon: the impact of people spending a lot more time indoors, and being

online a lot more, combined with the stress of the pandemic and the uncertainty of the

future. That was a toxic combination that pushed people into QAnon.

In March, three leading QAnon Facebook groups saw their membership rise from under 50,000

to over 300,000. By August, an internal investigation at Facebook

reviewed by NBC found that a number of QAnon groups and pages had more than 3 million followers.

On August 19, Facebook announced that it would be banning hundreds of QAnon pages and groups

And after that, traffic for QAnon phrases

and hashtags fell. But membership in groups posing as anti-child

trafficking groups exploded. And in those groups, users were still largely

spreading QAnon content. QAnon followers had simply pivoted to a new

hashtag to improve their image. One that was already being used for a fundraising campaign

by a U.K.-based charity: Save the Children.

I suppose for someone like me — who's been covering QAnon for the past number of

years — the past six months have been like watching a tsunami in slow motion.

Save the Children is a simple rebrand of QAnon, a very simple and effective message to bring the QAnon movement to a wider

audience — who doesn't want to save children?

It's hard to accurately trace how the #savethechildren

hashtag jumped from these QAnon Facebook groups to mainstream accounts on Instagram.

But by July, high profile accounts like model Helen Owen and the real Housewives of Orange

County's Kelly Dodd boosted the hashtag with inaccurate or misleading statistics.

This coincided with the United Nations' Human Trafficking Awareness Day.

Other accounts put together slideshow-style infographics like these.

And these are all packaged up in very pretty posts that are very easily

digestible, especially to people that are not familiar with Qanon.

The colors are a lot softer, there's a lot of pastels, and it's very

pretty and nice. And if you look at it without reading the words, you would think it would

be just like just any other kind of yoga-inspired Instagram post.

And so the move to Instagram kind of brought QAnon to this lifestyle

influencer circle. And many of these influencers already have very high followings, and they

already have a dedicated audience that will very much listen to what they have to say.

Accounts that might otherwise be getting just a few hundred likes on posts found themselves

getting tens of thousands of likes as soon as they start posting about #savethechildren.

A lot of people who get into QAnon, especially if they're struggling

influencers, they notice that these QAnon themes, they're like an Internet cheat code.

Because they attract people who are very, very engaged. They spend a lot of time online.

And if you start promoting QAnon themes, you start noticing that you're getting a lot

more likes and shares. That could be a big incentive to keep doing it.

Perhaps the most damaging part of the Save the Children movement is how inaccurate information

is making it harder to fight actual trafficking. One of these most often-cited statistics is

that 800,000 children go missing every year in the US.

That number comes from a 2002 survey that

asked parents if they had reported their children as runaways sometime in the previous year

— 797,500 said that they had, though 2019 FBI data puts that number closer to 421,000.

Roughly half of those reports are related to custody disputes, and the rest mostly relate

to runaways But even then, that number refers to children

who are reported missing by their parents — the vast majority of whom (over 99 percent)

return home within hours or days.

In that 2002 study, only 115 were considered “stereotypical” kidnappings.

There's no reliable data on how many people are trafficked in the US each year.

But stereotypical kidnappings aren't what trafficking usually looks like.

Instead it often takes the form of forced labor or wage theft — most commonly in agriculture,

then domestic work, or sex work. And the people most at risk are those already

vulnerable: youth experiencing homelessness in foster care, or unstable housing, LGBTQ+

youth who have been kicked out of their homes, or migrant young people.

Most people kind of have this idea in their head that it's, you know,

children being lifted off the streets and being shipped overseas, and although that

does happen, it doesn't happen at all to the extent the QAnon followers believe that it does.

But the hysteria caused by distorted numbers

has led to a deluge of calls and outreach from concerned QAnon followers — and it's

overwhelming the organizations fighting actual child trafficking.

And that's very damaging because it made it harder for people with

real information about possible human trafficking victims to get through.

And so we've seen this actually repeatedly, the ways in which the misinformation that this kind of "Save

the Children-style" of QAnon is promoting damages real efforts to actually help children.

You won't find any searchable hashtags with typical QAnon language on Instagram anymore.

But because #savethechildren isn't an inherently harmful tagline moderating it has proven particularly

difficult. And tackling misinformation on Instagram can

be harder than on Facebook, since it's harder to train an algorithm to recognize misleading

text in slideshow images than it is to recognize text in Facebook posts or comments.

The belief in QAnon definitely falls along a spectrum. I don't think you

can say that everyone that was out to Save the Children rally believes that Hillary Clinton

eats children. It's the hysteria that grows and grows and grows as

you're going down that rabbit hole, that could more than likely eventually lead to you thinking

that Hillary Clinton eats children.

QAnon has really struck

on something clever, in that people get confused in their own way, and they fall down their

own individual rabbit holes that radicalize them according to their own personality type.

There are now more than 20 candidates for congress who have expressed support for QAnon.

The real danger is that people don't need to believe

— or even be aware of — the entirety of a conspiracy theory for it

to start influencing their decisions.