“ SHAME ON YOU EBAY, FOR ALLOWING THIS.”Īt first glance, the rumors surrounding the eBay chicken nugget listing bear a striking resemblance to the Wayfair furniture conspiracy theory, which also took root on TikTok last summer (albeit at a much larger scale). Looks like child trafficking to me,” one poster on eBay wrote. “Why are people selling ‘Chicken Nuggets’ for THOUSANDS of Dollars.

More troublingly, since the chicken nugget TikTok was posted, the claim that a viral chicken nugget somehow serves as a front for sex trafficking has made the rounds on other platforms, particularly on YouTube, where it’s been posted on a number of far-right conspiracy-flavored “ news” channels. “There are more slaves today than in any time in history,” she confidently claims. Though that clip was taken down from TikTok, there is another on her page making similar claims about other eBay postings, such as a $20,000 potato chip shaped like a pizza slice and a Cheeto shaped like a urinating dog that is selling for $18,000 on the website. “When people become aware of child sex trafficking, it is no longer hidden in plain sight,” she declares at the end of the video. Especially from with #traffickingsurviorĪnother TikTok creator known for spreading far-right conspiracy theories, with an even larger 25,000 follower count, posted another video promoting the theory.

“I would suggest to people, don’t believe everything you hear. One eBay poster selling an Among Us chicken nugget (the current top bid is $1,000), tells Rolling Stone he has received a few messages regarding the sex trafficking claim, including someone who informed them they would be contacting eBay “with their suspicions and concerns.” ” Such an interesting hoax for sure,” tells Rolling Stone. Many of the eBay listings of the chicken nuggets were also removed, including the one in the original TikTok. ( TikTok did remove the video after Rolling Stone reached out, saying it violated their community guidelines.) Dean says she and a few other TikTokers reported the video for spreading misinformation, to no avail, saying such videos rarely get removed by the platform if they surpass a certain view count threshold: “i f a video passes 10,000 likes, I’ll try to get it taken down but I’ve given up hope,” she says. The chicken nugget trafficking video was later duetted by sex trafficking hoax debunker Jessica Dean, aka bloodbathbey0nd, which racked up more than 169,000 views and 26,800 likes. Inside the 24/7 Influencer Competition for a Major Record Deal Woman Killed, TikTok Star Wounded in Shooting During Screening of 'The Forever Purge' “Literally, a ‘rare’ ‘nugget,’ $14,000? This is fishy.” “This needs to go viral and something needs to happen here, because something is a little bit off,” she concludes. “I think there’s a little bit of human trafficking going on here,” the poster says before showing screengrabs of listings for various chicken nuggets. Last month, she posted a video accusing various eBay sellers peddling the BTS chicken nuggets of nefarious intent. One person who clearly did not see that story, however, was a TikToker known for posting QAnon and QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories. One item in particular, a chicken nugget shaped like a “crewmate” from the multiplayer online game Among Us, was auctioned off on eBay for nearly $100,000, a story that was quickly aggregated by multiple news sources, largely by citing it as an example of the absurdity of the meme economy. The meal almost immediately sold out, and enterprising individuals on social media decided to take advantage of the group’s enormous popularity by selling certain items from the meal online. Last May, the K-pop superstar group BTS entered into a partnership with McDonald’s to release a limited-edition promo meal that consisted of a medium Coke, medium fries, sweet chili and cajun dipping sauces, and a 10-piece order of chicken McNuggets.

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