Last year, as thousands of women shared their stories of sexual assault and harassment with the hashtag #MeToo, Amanda, a 30-year-old from Oregon, was looking for a supportive place to share her own experiences. Soon enough she was invited by a friend to join a Facebook group for survivors of sexual assault that had thousands of members.

The group was easy to find: As recently as this month, the page associated with it ranked higher in some search results than the #MeToo page verified by Facebook. The group, which also had “me too” in the name, looked legitimate to Amanda. Best of all, it was “closed,” meaning that while the group showed up in search results, new members needed an admin’s approval to join and only members could see what was posted in it.

“People shared the most intimate moments of trauma with these people,” says Amanda. (WIRED is declining to include her last name to protect her privacy.)

Then suddenly earlier this month, Amanda noticed the group’s name and photo had been changed. The same day President Trump had mocked the #MeToo movement at a rally in Montana, trolls began descending on her community. The group was now advertised as a place for sharing erotica and an account Amanda didn’t recognize had become the administrator. They began adding new members; many of these profiles, when later examined by WIRED appeared to be fake.

WIRED spoke to five women who were in the group, including Amanda, some of whom provided screenshots to support their accounts. They described harassment by many of those new profiles, who threatened in some cases to contact their abusers or to call child protective services regarding their children. One troll commented that they had collected all of the women’s posts about abuse in a file, implying they could still be released even if they were deleted from Facebook. The social network subsequently suspended many of the accounts after being contacted by WIRED.

It’s not clear whether the #MeToo group was taken over through some sort of hack, or if it was purposely set up to lure women in with the goal of eventually harassing those who may have joined. After women began reporting their group to Facebook, it was deleted, leaving the original members to piece together what might have happened.

“That was the worst part. Some people had posted that the group was their safe place to talk, then bam, it’s gone,” says Amanda.

"We want people to feel safe to engage and connect with their community. For that reason, we consider authenticity to be the cornerstone of our community and do not tolerate harassment on Facebook. In line with these policies, we disabled this group, the Page, and the identified profiles for violating our Community Standards,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

'That was the worst part. Some people had posted that the group was their safe place to talk, then bam, it’s gone.'

There’s no doubt that Facebook groups represent important communities for millions of people. They played an instrumental role in organizing the West Virginia teacher strike earlier this year and in the 2017 Women’s March. But groups have also been used as tools for manipulation, scams, and harassment.

Whitney Phillips, the author of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Internet Culture, says Facebook groups and pages have long been a place for trolling and harassment. She cites incidents that go as far back as 2010, when trolls hijacked memorial pages set up for loved ones that had recently passed away.

“Overnight the admin would flip it so that it said whoever the person was, they deserved [to die]. That was an established strategy back then,” says Phillips. Since then, malicious actors have continued to set up Facebook pages and groups to exploit tragedies and news events, like mass shootings. “This is a failure of Facebook really taking their own product to its logical extension. Facebook doesn’t seem to understand that their tools are the bread and butter of manipulators.”