The first video was posted by an anonymous account with only a few hundred followers. Its title was just three words: "See for yourself."
The video was short. In it, someone in a white lab coat stood beside an operating table, administering electric shocks to a baby before drawing blood from its tiny body.
The forty-seven-second video was shared two thousand times in its first hour. Ten thousand in the second. Fifty thousand in the third. It spread like a virus, from Twitter to Facebook, from Facebook to every app whose name you had never even heard. People started adding commentary, dubbing it, enlarging the footage frame by frame, trying to identify the room, the emblem on that lab coat, and the models of the equipment.
Before long, the first "whistleblowers" appeared. A man claiming to be a former dark web data analyst livestreamed on YouTube, saying he had discovered these files years ago but had been afraid to release them because he feared being silenced. A hundred thousand people flooded his stream. He cried as he asked everyone to lend a hand. The donation link on his screen kept flashing.
Nobody checked whether he was telling the truth, because people needed the story he was telling.
Then other videos started going viral. The most popular showed a girl who looked seven or eight screaming in agony, with two masked men in the frame. The video was eleven minutes long, but most people who shared it admitted they had turned it off after the first two minutes. Every frame looked like a carefully composed photograph. The angle of the lighting, the oil painting in the background, the folds in the sheets-everything was so clear it made people want to vomit.
The comments were flooded with curses and incoherent rambling.
"We're