Carol wasn’t a real person. She was the creation of Facebook employees testing how the site’s algorithm would nudge a woman fitting Carol’s profile—a conservative southern mother—toward conspiracy theories and disinformation. By populating the Carol account with “likes” for only mainstream conservative figures, they were able to see how the site’s algorithms encouraged users to check out QAnon and other conspiracy and fringe theories even when they had shown no interest in them in the first place.
