For Ceally Smith, it felt like she was suffocating. The 33-year-old holistic health entrepreneur would spend hours consumed with conspiracy theories—about sex trafficking, children secretly being sold on a furniture website, the multimillionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. There was always another video to watch, another media lie to investigate, another stranger to enlighten. Things that once fulfilled her—exercise, her meal-prep business—no longer seemed to matter. Instead, she dug deeper and deeper into the horrors the internet presented her every day, feeling obligated, as a sexual abuse survivor, to “be the adult I needed as a child,” she says.

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