Louis Tomlinson used to be the least-famous member of One Direction.

Since the band’s inception in 2011, Zayn Malik was the beautiful one, with the best voice; Niall Horan was the funny one with the charming accent and the bottle-blonde hair; Liam Payne was “Daddy Direction,” a rule-follower and endearing killjoy who was handsome like a firefighter; and Harry Styles, was, of course, a juggernaut. Whenever anyone asked me who “the fifth one” was,“ I described Louis as the oldest, the most elvish-looking, and the one constantly experimenting with different widths of horizontal stripes.

All that changed last summer when a frisky Michael Strahan prompted Tomlinson to announce on national television that he was going to become a father. The mother of the impending infant was Briana Jungwirth, a Los Angeles-based stylist that Tomlinson had never been publicly tied to romantically. The reveal was its own internet fiasco — is there anything less sexy than a boy band with a dad in it? — and the information was pretty inescapable for anyone with Wi-Fi and named Kaitlyn.

WHERE DOES A FAKE BABY RUMOR EVEN START?

Under the surface, where conspiracy theories usually bubble, a conspiracy was sure as shit bubbling. Somehow, thousands of people on Tumblr convinced themselves and each other that the baby was not real. Then they set about proving it.

In aggregating the biggest "evidence” that Louis Tomlinson’s baby isn’t real into a truly thrilling blog post, Buzzfeed’s Ellie Woodward did the difficult work of dragging a corner of the sub-mainstream internet into the light. Otherwise, evidence of “babygate,” as it’s called, isn’t aggregated anywhere that you’re going to get to through a Google Search —€” it exists on hundreds of Tumblr accounts that endlessly feed and steal from each other to create a daunting web of fledgling conspiracy theorists.

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