What happens when an industry built on love is actually built on silence? In the age of social media, adoption has become content. Adoptive families build brands around newly placed children. Agencies curate their public image while suppressing the voices of birth mothers who tell a different story. Algorithms amplify the rescue narrative and bury the accounts of adoptees who dare to complicate it. And somewhere underneath all of it — underneath the courthouse photographs and the viral homecoming videos and the tearful testimonials — are the people who never consented to any of it. Consumed: How the Social Media Age Is Exploiting Adoptees, Silencing Birth Families, and Selling the Myth of Happy Adoption is a reckoning with what adoption has become in the digital era. Drawing on peer-reviewed research, investigative reporting, legal scholarship, and her own lived experience as an adoptee who fought a coordinated system to parent her own child, MFT intern and advocate Brielle Wilson documents the machinery behind the myth — and names it clearly for the first time. From the historical roots of the adoption industry to the algorithms that funnel vulnerable pregnant women toward agencies, from the legal silencing of birth mothers to the coordinated online attacks on adoptees who speak honestly about their experiences, Consumed follows the full arc of how adoption gets sold, who profits, and who pays the price. This is not an argument against adoption. It is an argument for the people at its center — the adoptees, the birth families, the children who had no vote in any of this — and a demand that their stories be treated as their own. For readers of: The Child Catchers by Kathryn Joyce · Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson · All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung