evidence: Anxiety about the nation’s children, which is at a steady simmer in the best of times, boiled over in the summer of 2020, when the digital soldiers of QAnon occupied the otherwise innocuous hashtag #SaveTheChildren. Around the same time, major social-media platforms had started blocking overt QAnon accounts and hashtags. From their new beachhead, the digital soldiers were able to disseminate a cascade of false information about child trafficking on Instagram and Facebook: Children were being trafficked on the hospital ship USNS Comfort, then docked in New York City, and through tunnels underneath Central Park. [...] Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts "PEDOPHILES CAN BE ANYONE," Laura Pamatian, at the time a Palm Beach–based volunteer team leader for Operation Underground Railroad, wrote on Facebook in June. "They look just like you and me. They work with us … they sit next to us at our favorite restaurant … they are shopping with us at the grocery store." To raise awareness, and funds, for Operation Underground Railroad, Pamatian helped organize a statewide motorcycling event. "It’s about saving children who are being raped and abused by pedophiles 10, 20, 30 times a day!" she wrote. "And I don’t say that to sensationalize the topic, I say it because it’s TRUE and it’s happening and NO ONE is talking about it!" Her volunteer chapter claimed that "upwards of 300,000" children are victims of sex trafficking in the United States every year.