a family holiday in portugal has turned into a nightmare. a three—year—old girl, madeleine mccann, has disappeared from the apartment where she was sleeping. there are fears she's been abducted. the disappearance of madeleine mccann is one of the most widely reported missing persons cases of all time. what happened to the then three—year—old back in 2007 has gripped the world. every single person can identify with going abroad on a holiday and going abroad on a holiday with young children. and what is the worst possible thing that can happen? well, it's that. the other issue was, is that there was no obvious resolution as to what happened. and that is why that case, still to this day, resonates in the way that it does. earlier this year, my inbox was full of messages from people asking me whether a young woman in poland was really missing madeleine mccann. she'd gone viral online, and so i've tracked her down. and i want to ask her this question — why did she decide to post this on social media? online and media speculation has surrounded madeleine's case for the last 17 years, causing distress to those close to her. and julia's claims online seemed to be one of the most viral i'd seen. after creating her instagram account, which has since been removed, she began receiving hateful messages online. after careful consideration, she's decided to now speak out about her regrets and motives. she's aware that speaking out could trigger more abuse, but for her, it's important to tell her side of the story in her own words. it was hard to see all negative comments about myself. but i knew my goal, i knew my purpose, i knew why i was doing this. erm, because i wanted to know who i am. so, who isjulia wandelt? she lives in poland with her cat, monty. we are not disclosing her exact location. julia was open with her followers online. she told them she was sexually abused when she was younger and that she struggled with depression. she received some therapy, and during the course of that, she began to question why she couldn't remember large chunks of her childhood. first, i thought that maybe i'm adopted. i was giving many questions to my parents — for example, can you show me some pictures from childhood? can you show me your pregnancy photos? and later, will you do a dna test with me? because there are some things that i didn't understand and ijust gave many questions and no—one wanted to ask me... to answer me. frustrated by the response, julia became more convinced that there was some other reason for her not remembering her childhood, and so she turned to the internet for answers. i was looking at pages with missing children, and thenjune 2022, after a conversation with my dad and grandma... ..i wanted to check missing children, if maybe i'm similar to someone, and then ifound madeleine. julia says she had never heard of madeleine's case before, but there was something about the missing persons page that caught her attention — the sketches of potential suspects. when i saw drawings of suspects, erm... ok, you know, pencil drawings are very empty, but i know how my abuser looks like and i know this is very, very similar. that's why it was weird for me. and this was the reason i went to social media. and what were you saying exactly? were you saying, "i think i'm madeleine mccann"? no. i mean, from the beginning, it was, "i recognise the person from the madeleine mccann page." when i started to speak with more people, i think i can be this person, i can be this girl, but no—one treated me seriously. for me, police should catch people who are suspects. so when i say, even if they don't believe me, they should check it. but they didn't. and it was weird that they reacted like this, and it made me only more suspicious about them. julia says she didn't feel listened to by any of the authorities she contacted. she started posting on social media to see if people would listen there. i made a profile — iammadeleinemccann. i could make profile, "am i?" but i didn't have it on my mind then. ijust wanted to name profile in the way that could be easier for people to find it. then...it came viral. she's gained the entire internet's attention. so this would be absolutely. mind—blowing if this was her. one of the reasonsjulia thought she might be madeleine was related to her appearance, including the placement of her moles on her face, her dimples, and, more importantly, their rare eye abnormality. i do not believe this is madeleine mccann. she is not madeliene situation. tiktok users began wildly speculating aboutjulia's instagram account, which gathered more than 1 million followers. did you expect that kind of response? not completely. i mean, i knew that there will be people who will not believe me, who will hate me, but i didn't expect that i will get death threats, for example. i was trying to be strong, even when people said, "you should die, "you should be raped, you should be killed, "you should be murdered." they said many things. and one person created a post. she created... ..a bounty on my head. she said that she will give 30,000 euros for my head. even when you were receiving the online hate, the abuse, did you keep posting? yes. why? because i wanted to know the truth. so this is the only reason. you look a lot like her at those ages... after going viral, julia was invited to appear on the us chat show dr phil. it was around that time she took a dna test. she says neither her parents nor the mccanns agreed to provide dna samples for hers to be compared against. the test onjulia's own dna showed she was from poland with some lithuanian and romanian heritage, and therefore not madeleine mccann. julia's family responded, saying... from a psychological point of view, how does this kind of situation unfold ? why would someone behave in this way? she considered herself to be a missing person, so what you have there is a situation where somebody was actively looking and, lo and behold, stumbled across probably the most famous missing person case in the world and said, "that might be somebody who i might be." it's not difficult to see how these things can happen. we can block out tragic and painful memories to protect ourselves. and you often see incidents of that in sort of horrific child physical and sexual abuse, where the coping mechanisms at play are a disassociation from the memories that exist. so, memory loss for trauma is something that is possible, absolutely. do you think that the social media sites have responsibility for how this unfolded? i don't think that they should protect me, because i'm just a person on social media like everyone, but i think that social media shouldn't allow people to share hate. why do you think the abuse is so extreme? anything that comes up that challenges a long held belief like that is a challenge about everything that you know about the world. so how do you respond to that? with anger, with aggression. what are the tools at your disposal on your computer? it's words. what words can you use? the worst kind ? # why can't you live your # your daydream ? some online followers supported julia, sending her encouraging messages, teddy bears and other gifts. were they like fans? yeah. like friends. 0rfans? i've never... i've never thought that people who support me or people who follow me are fans. i always thought that they are just people who support me or people who are friends. i saw that you apologised to the mccanns. you said you were sorry for that. why did you do that? i did it because many people, so many people said that, "you hurt mccanns, you hurt mccanns," so i wanted to write, "i never meant to hurt anyone, "including mccanns." when this was happening, how much did you think about how they would be feeling? because they are a mum and dad who...? their little girl, they've not seen her. i thought that they will reach me out, to be honest. anything madeleine's parents say is likely to trigger more hate and headlines. and there's an active police investigation into madeleine's disappearance. those i've been in touch with who know the mccanns and who have also been affected by some ofjulia's content say they are willing to accept julia's apology and forgive her for the situation that unfolded online. according to the find madeleine campaign, kate and gerry mccann do not use social media, which somewhat shields them from the trolling. i got in touch with x, instagram and tiktok and none of them responded with a comment about the case. all of the social media sites say publicly that they have policies in place to protect users from hate and disinformation. one thing that struck me after meeting julia is how she didn't feel listened to, and so she turned to social media as the only place she felt she could be heard. 0nly, it really backfired. now, she recognises the harm that it caused notjust to her but to everyone who knew madeleine mccann — her parents, herfriends, others affected by this. and while she thinks it was valid to ask the questions that she did, she sees how social media was just the wrong way of going about it. if you were going to do this again, what would you do differently? i would change a little bit. in what way? i would never go to social media. it can destroy. hello! hello. coming up, a survivor of a mass shooting in the united states becomes convinced by conspiracy theories about the tragedy. you needed a crutch and this was my crutch. find the answer and then you can move on. now, he wants to meet the person behind the account that pushed him down the rabbit hole. las vegas, just after 10pm on sunday, i october 2017. rapid gunfire gunfire rings out. country singerjason aldean rushes off the stage. gunfire and screams more than 20,000 people enjoying the music quickly realise they're under attack. there was like four random shots that came out, which i had mistaken for fireworks. i have never been in a situation with gunfire and we just sort of ran. stuart mccormick was at the country music festival with his wife when a shooter, holed up in a hotel room overlooking the event, started firing indiscriminately at the people below. it was a case ofjust trying to run back to a safe place, which... you didn't really know where that was. thankfully, we never were in the bits where we seen people getting harmed, but we got away early enough. tragically, a lot of other people didn't. 60 people died and over 400 were wounded. police radio: breach, breach, breach. - we have one suspect down. the gunman, stephen paddock, was found dead an hour later with a self—inflicted gunshot wound. he'd committed the deadliest mass shooting by a single person in us history. there was a lot of anger, a lot of grief. although you didn't know anybody who passed away personally, you think to yourself, "did i rub shoulders with somebody who's not going home?" my and my wife's hardest part was that was our honeymoon, so. . .always attributed to being married would be, "this happened two days later." in the months and years that followed the shooting, stuart turned to social media to try to make sense of what had happened to him. but it had unexpected consequences. six years after the shooting, stuart reached out to me. he told me how, afterwards, he'd experienced abuse on social media. and notjust that, but he'd actually fallen down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories about the shooting. i've spoken to lots of people who've survived attacks and tragedies and who've experienced the worst kinds of online abuse, but i've never heard from someone who's genuinely believed conspiracy theories about the attack that they survived. he lives with his family in picturesque county down, about an hour's drive from belfast. after returning home from las vegas, stuart was struggling to cope with what he witnessed. he started posting more on social media in favour of greater gun control in the united states. some people would have had a debate with you and said, "look, you can't remove guns now. it's too late. "we've just got to accept what we have," which is a weak excuse. and others, i mean, i think i said before, but others had said, like, "if you come back here, we'll happily finish the job." what was it like getting those kinds of messages? awful. you just wanted to kind of shake them and be like, "that's an awful thing to say." for stuart, what started as an emotional online campaign soon descended into an obsession as he sought answers. he came across more content that questioned the official narrative. his fixation began with one particular account. its username was weg 0ag. he would spend hours each night looking at the information it was publishing about the las vegas shooting. hello! hello. oh, wow, you actually brought the bag. yeah. amazing. when we meet stuart, he brings along a bag full of documents he has printed from weg's account. and why did you print it all off? it was just the fear that it would be taken down before i could, in my head, read it all. but i haven't really read much of it. and what i did was take weg's lead in pointing out parts, and then i would work my way through and sort of note maybe bits... oh, yeah. what did you note? i'm thinking back to it, butjust, just important pages that would have been referenced there. as well as facts about the case, weg's account also discussed a number of false conspiracy theories surrounding the shootings — one suggesting that a saudi prince had been the real target and the victims were collateral damage, another that a hotel worker who tried to stop the shooter was really a government plant of some kind and a third saying that a helicopterflying over the hotel that night had been firing the bullets. during the times when you weren't mentally well with all this, i believed when i was talking on social media that i was being tracked by america, and if i went back there... these were the theories in your head. if i went back to america, somebody may detain you. it'd be like, "you're getting too close to the secret here." not that i was in the conspiracy game, but you were pulling at threads and you worried about these things. so you became sort of reclusive with your information. you keep it all to yourself. you needed a crutch and this was my crutch. find the answer, and then you can move on. stuart had asked me whether i could find out who weg was. its username seemed to be a pseudonym. i sent messages to all of the accounts, but those went unanswered, so then i started contacting anyone i could find who weg had interacted with online. eventually, i got a reply with an email address for weg. i sent a message to that address and, just before i gave up altogether, i received a response. his real name wasjoel and he lives in phoenix, arizona, and now stuart wants to meet him. joel wants to know how his content affected others and agrees to fly thousands of miles to northern ireland. so this is. ..stuart. this is... hi, stuart. you know me as weg, i guess. my real name isjoel. come on in. nice to meet you. take a seat. 0h. howdy! tell us about weg. where does that name come from? i made it up and it doesn't come from anywhere, is the short answer. yeah, ijust needed something to register new internet accounts that weren't associated with my true identity, and it was easy to type. i would never have been able to guess that i would eventually start being called that in real life by people. that was... yeah, at that time when i created it, i had no idea that would be happening. get down! why did you choose that event? why was it the 1st of october and the mass shooting? mass shootings have always been an interest of mine injust looking into because i want to understand them — why they happen, what's the cause, what's the motive? and whenever a shooting had happened prior to october 1st, i would look into it. when the vegas shooting happened, i felt that there was a huge gap between what was being reported by the mainstream media and what was being reported byjust like people on youtube that...seemed to have access to a lot more resources than the news channels did. joel's fascination with the tragedy led him to uproot his life and move to las vegas. he ended up staying for 18 months. it was very clear to me that it was what i was supposed to be doing with my life at that time. so, yeah. so i picked up my life and my dog and i moved to las vegas and lived in an apartment three miles from where the shooting took place. went to the las vegas police headquarters every week to get the, you know, the evidence drops. there's like wall street journal, cnn, las vegas review—journal, and then there's just me. hello, everyone. ijust wanted to leave you a quick note here and show you how you can get all of the evidence. they seem to want press credentials, so i'lljust make up a company and i'll just print out a press card and hopefully... like, i'll show you, actually, one of the show—and—tell things. you had a press card? yeah. i had two of these printed out and i would... i had a lanyard. but isn't there also — and this is the flip side of it — there's a risk to that, too, which is, you know, people who haven't had that experience of investigating stories like that, who risk putting things out that then subsequently aren't true and then cause harm. how do you mitigate that? i don't think that there should be a way to stop citizen journalists from showing up at press conferences and evidence drops. regardless of their intents, i think it encourages pressure on the powers that be to just disseminate the information. joel's account shared hours of police bodycam footage... no, you've got to be quiet because he can shoot through these walls. ..and questioned why the las vegas police force wasn't releasing certain evidence. did you feel that the conspiracy theorists and the weg account could have been giving the wrong impression of the police at that time by driving it just by information? yeah. was there a lot of misplaced anger? i think that most of the people that i knew and worked with were not angry at the police. in fact, you know, when the evidence came out, it demonstrated how great... there were heroes that day — a lot, a lot of heroes. in the las vegas police report on the shooting, i feel like now you're really... in a brilliant way, you're very reflective about your content, about what you shared. how much did you think about how conspiracy theories could be harmful to people? there are real—world dangers to conspiracy theorising, if you want to call it that, because i felt like, "0k, well, i am emotionally stable "and healthy and i'm still like thinking there might be "something going on here." if somebody was not in that situation, they're depressed or anxious or they have mental problems and they come across this, that... it could cause... it could cause the wrong kind of actions to be taken. so, yeah, it was always in the back of my mind that that was a possibility. it was the vessel for me to search for the answer, do you know what i mean? as i say, i would wait and see any comment that would come up. i'd have the notifications on twitter to see your information coming through. i would be at the page instantly. i mean, in my social life, i would stop what i'm doing, or in my real life, would stop what i'm doing to keep up with what was going on, you know, with the rabbit hole i was falling down in. thankfully, counselling and stuff pulled me back out of that. but at that time, this, as i say, was a crutch that i used, do you know what i mean, this information coming out, to try and make peace with what was... this, to me, could have led to me finding out what was wrong overall, so it was very important. it's normal for us to question and to try to fill in gaps with story. i think that's... you can't be human without that. so i think the fact that people come up with conspiracy theories is... i think it's a normal part. it's not something that's going to go away. i think what can go away is with, one, with how those people know to approach... the theories that they have in meaningful and in ways that push the conversation forward, and then, two, having authorities and powers that be being willing to look at how what they're doing is not discouraging that, but encouraging that. like, "how to be an ethical conspiracy theorist". yes! these two men became consumed by a horrific shooting that they couldn't make sense of. that led to both indulging in conspiracy theories they now broadly accept aren't true. what have you taken from this, stuart? the one thing i wanted, i said yesterday, was that i wanted it to be a decent person who was running this experience because i got a good bit out of the experience. and the worst thing for me would have been somebody who didn't sort of share the same journey as myself or was after something that... we didn't. i think we're very alike in why we searched this up. it just helps to closing that chapter off that it was done by a decent guy. a lot of people would look at this on paper and think that we should probably hate each other. the fact that we don't, i think it gives me a lot of hope. hello there. we had fewer showers around on saturday and with clearer skies and light winds, it is turning pretty chilly out there. but we've got some more rain to come, i think, on sunday. it's going to come from this area of low pressure. now, that's going to tend to slide across towards france and that's where we'll get any mild air heading. we're still going to be in the chillier conditions and we've got a more widespread slight frost by early morning. again, the lowest temperatures, like the previous night, are going to be in north east scotland — minus five or minus six. and mist and fog patches, too, which will be a little slow to clear in the morning. but we'll see rain developing across south west england and south wales during sunday morning, and that rain develops more widely across the southeast of england during the afternoon. away from here, though, we are going to find the odd shower cropping up but many places will be dry with some sunshine after the early mist and fog and again, temperatures around eight or nine degrees. it's getting windy with that rain in the south and more rain is not good news at all — 15—25 centimetres quite widely could lead to some further flooding. and the rain should clear away from south wales and south west england on sunday night but continue in the southeast, where it's going to be very windy — strong to gale force winds here. a few showers will get blown in further north from off the north sea but with more of a stronger northeasterly wind for england and wales, it won't be as cold. frosts early monday in scotland where we've got the clearer skies. a few showers in scotland and northern ireland shouldn't last too long. the rain slowly creeps away from the far southeast of england and then, with that northeasterly wind, there'll be some sunny spells for england and wales and maybe the odd shower around as well. quite windy, actually, towards the southeast, particularly in the morning — strong to gale force winds here. the winds ease a bit in the afternoon and again, we'll see typical temperatures on monday around nine celsius. so, as one area of low pressure brings some rain in the south of england then moves away, we'll see this brief ridge of high pressure overnight into tuesday morning, so turning chilly in the south ahead of a weather front that will bring some rain down from the northwest this time. so, we'll see some rain on tuesday across scotland and northern ireland, followed by sunshine and showers. that rain heading into england and wales. east anglia and the southeast still look like being fine and dry here but turning more cloudy. the rain will tend to peter out as it runs southwards. and, for many parts of the country, wednesday will be a dry day with some sunshine for a while. live from washington, this is bbc news. donald trump is the projected winner of south carolina's primary, all but cementing his lead for the republican presidential nomination. his rival nikki haley vows to stay in the race, despite a fourth loss, this time in her home state. alexei navalny�*s body is finally returned to his mother more than a week after the russian opposition leader died under unexplained circumstances in an arctic penal colony. and the us and uk strike 18 locations in yemen: the fourth wave of coalition strikes on houthi targets. hello, i'm carl nasman. donald trump is the projected winner of south carolina's republican primary, easily defeating his only remaining rival for the republican presidential nomination, nikki haley. here's how the count is looking at this hour with just over 83% of votes counted. trump has 60% of the vote with haley trailing at 39%. but despite that projected loss home state, the former south carolina governor has vowed to fight on,

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