Some Assembly Required: #Wayfairgate on Reddit and Twitter

• In Event: Cross-Platform Approaches to Online Harms

Abstract

On June 14th, 2020 a Twitter user named @99freemind (or Amazing Polly) tweeted a picture of grossly overpriced office furniture sold by Wayfair under female names, noting “My spidey senses are tingling” (Contrera, 2021). While this tweet did not gain much traction, a few weeks later, on July 9th, a Redditor named u/PrincessPeach1987 uploaded a similar image to the r/Conspiracy subreddit, which, to date, has received over 2700 comments and 6000 upvotes. The post ignited a discussion on whether the home-goods and furniture company Wayfair was secretly involved in human trafficking, which spread back to Twitter and other platforms (Spring, 2020).
The #Wayfairgate conspiracy theory exhibits several unique features. First, its exact onset could be identified. Second, the theory’s spread did not stay limited to one platform but spread to become a multi-platform phenomenon. It thus serves as a unique opportunity for the multi-platform study of misinformation and conspiracy theories dissemination. Using unsupervised machine learning and time series analyses of data captured daily, we explore the complex relationship between Twitter and Reddit, and the unique role each played in disseminating and elaborating on the conspiracy theory over the timespan of two weeks.
Notably, #Wayfairgate was rooted in old conspiracy theories relating to child exploitation. Weeks before the tensed 2016 American elections between Clinton and Trump, a conspiracy theory purported that a cabal of liberals and global elites were running a Satanic pedophilia ring from the basement of a Washington D.C. pizzeria. #Pizzagate, itself a reincarnation of centuries old accusations against Jews (Blood libel), women (the Salem Witch hunt) and educators (the 1990s Satanic Panic), would soon evolve into the mega-conspiracy theory known as QAnon. QAnon started in 2017 from cryptic messages claiming to consist of top-secret governmental information about an upcoming “Storm” in which top liberals in government, entertainment, and finance would be executed or arrested. Q soon grew into a much larger phenomena thanks to a group of dedicated believers and promoters, mostly online but also in the top echelons of the Republican party (Rothschild, 2021).
Conspiracy theories claim with no evidence that “a number of actors join together in secret agreement, in order to achieve a hidden goal which is perceived to be unlawful or malevolent” (Prooijen, 2018, p. 5). Conspiracism enjoyed an increased popularity in recent years, moving from the dark corners of the Internet (Ophir et al., 2022; Walter et al., 2022) to mainstream political discourse (Papakyriakopoulos et al., 2020). As mentioned earlier, #Wayfairgate was created not by Q but by some of its ordinary believers. The company quickly denied all allegations about its website serving as a front for child-trafficking, as did the National Human Trafficking Hotline (Argentino, 2023; Hupp Williamson et al., 2023).
As we (the authors) were following the developments of Q in real time, we were able to collect data for #Wayfairgate on short notice, before social media companies moderated some of the more toxic posts. In combination with a parallel dataset scraped at the same time from Reddit, we use this specific branch of the Q universe as an opportunity to understand how conspiracy theories evolve in multi-platform digital environments, a topic that received some scientific attention from scholars (e.g., the study of Russian trolls and bots across platforms in Lukito, 2020), but remains largely understudied, often limited to identifying links shared across platforms (Ginossar et al., 2022). Our study instead examines the full texts as originally posted by social media users, allowing us to see nuanced trends and association in linguistic uses. Using Twitter (n = 1,239,362) and Reddit (n = 70,877) posts and comments, containing relevant keywords, we asked:
RQ1: What were the commonalities and differences in terms of volume and themes between Twitter and Reddit?
RQ2: Did the two platforms influence each other's discourse (volume and theme)?
Methodology:
We examined the volume and thematic content of discourse on both platforms using the Analysis of Topic Model Network approach (Walter & Ophir, 2019). ANTMN combines topic modeling, network analysis, and the identification of themes using community detection. We examined differences in thematic prevalence between Reddit and Twitter and used Vector Autoregressive Models to capture the dynamic interdependencies between volume and themes on each platform over time and Granger causality to estimate the strength and direction of the relationship (Lokmanoglu et al., 2023; Lukito, 2020; Stock & Watson, 2016).
Our paper expands on the case study, theories regarding the dissemination of conspiracy theories online (and the lack of multi-platform research), and the methodology for the study and elaborates on these results, augmenting them with qualitative research.

Authors

• Ayse D Lokmanoglu, Boston University

• Dror Walter, Georgia State University

• Yotam Ophir, University at Buffalo

• Eduard Fabregat