A $100,000 Chicken McNugget Triggered a Child-Sex-Trafficking Conspiracy Theory

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The idea that a chicken nugget eBay listing would serve as a front for child trafficking was clearly ridiculous on its face. Yet many of the commenters appeared to believe it held credence. “A lot of people seem to believe that the concern is valid. They seem to believe because the pricing is so high that, it must be a child that being bought, despite the evidence that there have been cases of people buying odd looking food for insane prices,” says writer and activist Maya Morena, who also posted a tweet about the video (indeed, as recently as last week, a 13-year-old girl received $15,000 in reward money from Doritos after posting a TikTok about finding a rare “puffy” Dorito in her bag.)

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As Rolling Stone previously reported, part of the reason why such outlandish sex trafficking hoaxes tend to take root on TikTok is because the format of the platform allows attention-grabbing yet inaccurate content to circulate at an astoundingly rapid rate. “Panicky videos are very engaging,” disinformation researcher Abbie Richards previously told Rolling Stone. “If you are just watching someone say, ‘Oh my God, this happened to me,’ that’ll go viral. Scary content goes quite viral.” TikTok’s For You page also delivers content that is algorithmically engineered to meet the user’s interests, providing little opportunity for content debunking such viral misinformation to surface.

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