For a brief moment back in 2016, the internet’s obsession was the physical and mental well-­being of an En­glish ­YouTuber named Marina Joyce. Joyce was girlish and princesslike, with long blond ringlets and huge blue eyes, who uploaded innocent videos where she tried on pastel-­colored clothes, opened gifts sent to her by different brands, or ate sweets she thought were exotic because they came from Asia. And because the internet’s blurring of boundaries often means you can’t discern whether you are viewing erotic content or family content (or, perhaps, both at the same time), a widely disparate community followed her—­from little girls who wanted to wear the same pink dresses to bald men in their fifties who probably masturbated to videos of her eating ice cream.

But after a while, her followers began detecting subtle changes in her behavior. In one of her videos, Marina Joyce was at a party, smiling at the camera and showing off her outfit, but something in the way she walked around (languid and listless) or the way she responded to questions (taking about three seconds too long to grasp them) set off all the alarms. This gave rise to a conspiracy theory, according to which Joyce had been kidnapped by her boyfriend or by a cult (it was unclear which) and was being abused and forced to upload videos against her will.