Coachella, GRWM fakers, and Justin Bieber is chronically online

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0:34At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer. With a subscription to BBC.com and the BBC app, you get unlimited articles and videos, ad-free podcasts, the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7, plus hundreds of acclaimed documentaries. From less than a dollar a week for your first year, read, watch and listen to trusted, independent journalism and storytelling. It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com and the BBC app. Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited. Last week we interviewed the team behind the viral AI Lego propaganda videos. And since then, top comment has been flooded with pro-Iran people on social media.

1:21Hundreds of comments saying that the BBC is propaganda and that there's a conspiracy theory that we put the interview out to kind of get them banned from YouTube? Yeah, obviously that's not the case. But it's interesting because it actually touches on what we were discussing last week, which is the way that pro-Iranian accounts are particularly good at distorting or manipulating the social media conversation. I went and had a look at some of the accounts that had been resharing the article, the podcast episode, and loads of them have the kind of hallmarks of what we'd call bot accounts. They seem to only push out a particular message.

1:58They don't have any identifying details. Obviously, they could be part of something more coordinated. They could also just be a bunch of people running sets of accounts. It's quite hard now to say definitely a bot, but it gives the vibe of inauthentic activity. Iran is very successful at running bot campaigns. We know this because during the previous Internet Blackout in Iran, loads of pro-Scottish independence accounts disappeared, meaning that they were probably based in Iran. But as well as loads and loads of bots saying that the Iranian propaganda is true and that the BBC is lying, there's a bunch of kind of left wing people who understandably are frustrated with their government and Israel over the conduct of Israel's war in Gaza.

2:42And they believe the bots and they believe the Iranian propaganda and they don't believe that the protesters were killed by the Iranian government. These are people who they're unable to hold the nuance in their mind that both Israel could be bad and Iran could be bad. There's literally a department within the Iranian government whose job it is to convince gullible left wing people in the West that Iran's government is good and they are succeeding. Yeah. And so it's amazing to see Iran's strategy unfolding on Twitter and Instagram so successfully. OK, we're not chatting about Iran today. On the episode, we are going to be discussing an incident of rape that happened in the UK and what we're seeing in terms of the vacuum of information on social media, the blueprint for how people weaponize and use these kinds of incidents, even when we don't know what has actually happened.

3:34We'll also be talking about what everyone's seeing on their feed right now, which is stories about Coachella, why it's the Influence Olympics, why the real Coachella is arguably less important than the influencer version of Coachella. And we are going to talk about when influencers take it too far. That's after the streamer Johnny Somali was jailed in South Korea for kissing and twerking against a statue dedicated to the comfort women in South Korea who were essentially sex slaves.

4:11I've not been able to escape videos of influencers at Coachella being like, this is what I'm wearing. This is outfit day one. This is our vlog. This is what we're up to. A lot of them are, you know, people whose content I do see on TikTok, for example, fairly regularly. But I don't think I've ever experienced a festival through influencer content like this. And we often joke about which side of social media are you on? I believe you're on the Belieber side. What? No. What makes you think that? Your T-shirt that says, I love Joseph Beaver. No. Anyone looking at the YouTube will see that that's a lie.

4:44It's a bit like the US-Iran war. Yeah. It's like the meme, social media. That has never been said on any BBC. The social media version of Coachella, because it is experienced by more people, is more real than this Coachella itself, which is already a vastly commercial corporate enterprise that arguably destroyed music culture. And when it switched to two weekends a year to make more money, I think that was the final death of it. But it is also America's closest thing to Glastonbury. So there's an interesting discussion as to why Coachella is so fake and influencer-y, but Glastonbury isn't. Coachella's always been commercial, But I think what you're seeing now in social media is the apogee of that commercialism combined with social media.

5:33So a lot of these influencers, they aren't actually at Coachella. They're pretending to be at Coachella. They're like in an Airbnb somewhere being like, get ready with me. Here's what I'm wearing at Coachella. And it's like, but you're not going. And that's worrying. Because I guess like influencers to some extent have become kind of synonymous with like being a bit fake, e.g. you're trying to push a particular product or push a particular point of view or whatever. and so we're all kind of used to that now but the idea that you would go all the way to a festival and then like not actually go but make it seem like you were going obviously it's worth saying a lot of influencers are going though it's worth yeah yeah of course lots of them are I've watched loads of them also remember like again because this is the closest thing America has to glass memory if you are a celebrity you have to go like why would you not go and there are amazing performances like and it is obviously fun I've actually been to Coachella I will send you the photos of me at Coachella they will shock you to your core But yes, some of these influencers, one of the things that's been happening is influencers have been saying, I was invited to Coachella and then my brand deal fell through.

6:33I've seen so many of these videos. And then people saying in the comments, like, I don't want to say what the brand is or like, I can't say until, or I can't say the name of the agency until more information is revealed, but I will. Nothing makes you feel like a big fat loser than being uninvited to the influencer Olympics that is Coachella. I'm supposed to be leaving for Coachella in literally two days. and I just got a text saying we're not going anywhere. It's cancelled. Hair's done, but we're not going Coachella. Do I laugh or do I cry? I need to do a story time. I thought it was an influencer myth, but turns out it's very real.

7:06In at least one case, it was real that an influencer got invited, then uninvited to Coachella. But a lot of them just appear to be pretending they were invited, then pretending they were uninvited. Which is, well, presumably because they want people to swoop in and give them a ticket. It's quite a clever tactic, really. It's worth saying that the content that comes from, say, a real influencer who says, I was invited on this trip and it got cancelled, looks the same as an influencer who's possibly saying, I was invited on this trip and it got cancelled, but they're doing it for different reasons.

7:33So one camp might be doing it because the trip did actually get cancelled. The second camp might be doing it because that means that they are then inserted into the Coachella conversation. They're getting engagement and views. They're engaging on the virality of the festival without being present in the reality of the festival. Exactly. And then also maybe they then do get offered the chance to go because they are so hard done by it. OK, do you want to see the picture of me at Coachella? Yeah, I would love to. OK, are you ready?

8:00Just kidding. Matt is showing an AI influencer at Coachella who is ripped. Although that does look like me, this is actually an AI influencer at Coachella. I've got this from a Daily Mail article called Co-A-I-Cella. Called Chamer. Co-A-I-Cella. They're really struggling with the pun there. And what is he pretending? So it's like an AI influencer. AI influencers are at Coachella, basically. But we've chatted about this on an episode before, the kind of rise of AI influencers. And when you've got such a curated event and the content is so kind of like perfect and pristine, I mean, you can totally see why people would consume loads of AI influencer content, because it's like, oh, great.

8:37Like it really sort of creates this version of Coachella that I kind of like and I'll enjoy this content. And obviously they can use it to promote stuff as well, which is how these influences kind of work and matt given that you're a believer i'm not okay so i like you sent me the justin bieber set i think you wanted me to talk about how it's kind of like lame that he was what he's done is he's gone on a laptop and he's basically youtube videos and it looks like you know he's being criticized because he got paid 10 million to do it he's just like in a hoodie sitting at have you not seen all the memes that are like when you work from home and it's like you're sitting at the laptop because he's sitting on the stage with the laptop and he's got YouTube open behind him.

9:20But it looks like he's just hunched over the laptop at one point and the memes are like when you work from home and you say nothing further to add to the meeting. But I think this is really actually clever. I like this because this is Justin Bieber displaying an awareness of himself as a phenomenon of the digital era. He's someone who became famous as a child star on YouTube. He's playing his own songs from a laptop taking requests from the audience of what to play on the laptop and then transitioning into him singing those songs to a concert level. But he's also playing random YouTube videos like Double Rainbow.

9:55He's playing videos including the viral video of him being kind of attacked by paparazzi where he says, I'm a real demon. It's not clocking for you. So it's basically influenced by social media. His set was sort of shaped by social media to some extent. He's meeting the audience on their level because that is how they will encounter his music. Someone playing it from a laptop at a house party, like while in between other videos. And he's like duetting his young self. I mean, all those clips have gone so viral, as you might imagine. Exactly. I actually think Justin Bieber here is achieving quite a high level of artistic merit.

10:31I think he's occupying what David Bowie famously called the gray space in between the viewer and the artist or the listener and the artist. He's basically saying like, you know we're coming together to experience this music via a youtube playlist which is so different to like sabrina carpenter for example where the set was like barbie dream world kind of vibes right um that very curated you know blockbuster performance that feels like it's kind of like hyper reality vibes um which is interesting a lot of people have been calling it belieber no belieber bieber cellar bieber cellar bieber cellar oh yeah you wouldn't know because you're a believer um people have been calling it bieber cella and there's been so much about like the fomo thing which is because you're essentially experiencing kachala from your bedroom or sofa or wherever it is you have this really intense feeling of oh wow everyone's there everyone on my feed is there i'm not there which is such a effective way of getting people to keep coming back and consuming all of that content as well it's like really playing on the fear of missing out which we know is kind of integral to how the social media platforms work.

11:36And so you're just watching more and more of this stuff and you feel like you're not a part of it and you want to be a part of it. And that is a really powerful emotion in terms of getting loads of clicks and views and likes, which influencers know as well. Just like Justin Bieber is aware of the digital persona he as a pop star exists in, Coachella itself seems slightly aware of it as a kind of meta experience because they have billboards on the drive up to Coachella about Coachella. So the only people like seeing those are the people driving to Coachella who are already going. So it's just for them to take a picture and from their Instagram.

12:13So it's like, we're all experiencing this event through social media and we're all aware of that. And they're like a free advert for the festival. Like the billboard is not the advert. The influencer is the advert. And another really trippy thing, I think, is that Coachella happens now over two weekends so they can make more money, which to me feels strange. Like if you care about kind of festivals and festival culture, like it's in that experience. It's a point in time. Like it's like things happen there. It's like you get like a rerun of like, oh, next weekend. Yeah, you can't rerun. Like that just, it's so confusing to me.

12:44It'll be dystopian on my TikTok when you're like, oh, it's like a new batch of influencers who are going to this weekend. Yeah, exactly. It's really weird.

12:58Okay, Matt, there's something that pops up on my feed on X today. In fact, it's kind of taken over my ex feed and it's about a town in the UK. It's in Surrey. It's kind of just outside of London called Epsom. And a young woman, a woman in her 20s, according to the police, was raped by several people outside of a church on her way back from a night out. Very distressing. And understandably, it's provoked quite a lot of reaction. The issue is right now the police have said that they are not able to share any more information about the identity of the people involved in the attack for whatever reason.

13:35That has then triggered this whole frenzy on social media, which has only picked up steam, I'd say, in the last 24 hours, not least because people have actually gone and protested in Epsom. And Surrey police, who are the police there, have actually now come out and issued this disorder warning saying we will not tolerate, quote, disorder following that protest in Epsom. But there are people on social media suggesting that they know about the identity of the attackers or that they're not being told about the identity of the attackers because it's something to do with race or them being asylum seekers.

14:06With the caveat of we do not know right now because the police have not issued this information who actually is accused of carrying out this attack. We're recording this at lunchtime on a Thursday, so obviously that could change, but that is the current situation we're dealing with. Yeah, so there's already been a huge protest. The protest was spearheaded by one person who's an associate of Tommy Robinson, who live streamed the protest, made a call on social media for people to come down and was there with a megaphone. People were out there outside the police station last night demanding that the police release a description of the attackers, chanting, send them back.

14:42Look, if this was a protest or a press conference orchestrated by the parents of the victim and they said, you know, this investigation has been going on for too long. We still don't know who this person is. We're, you know, the community is worried about our daughters who are out there while there are attackers on the loose. That would make sense, right? But that's not what's happened. This is someone who has a history of stoking racial tension, bringing people from outside the community to come in and send them back before we know whether they have anywhere to be sent back to. because we don't know who they are.

15:13Yeah, and that's the issue with these kinds of frenzies online and then when they spill offline as well. We think of, for example, the attack that happened in Southport and three little girls who were killed at this Taylor Swift dance class, a really distressing attack, and there's just been an inquiry into it and everything else. There was loads of misinformation and speculation about the identity of the attacker, suggesting they were an asylum seeker, they'd arrived by boat, that they were Muslim. None of those things ended up being true, But because there was a kind of absence of information and people were trying to piece it together for themselves, they jumped to conclusions.

15:45Some people, not necessarily with bad intentions, but because they were panicking. Other people with bad intentions, seemingly, because they were looking to push certain ideological or political messages. Yeah. So now looking at what happened with Southport, a few things could happen with the case in Epsom. One, it could turn out that one or more of the attackers was an immigrant or a Muslim or an asylum seeker, in which case that will feed into the narrative that these groups are pushing, that it's immigrants who are causing crime and making women unsafe in this country. Two, it could turn out that they aren't immigrants at all.

16:20And then what happens? Do they just move on? If so, that proves that they aren't motivated by, you know, justice for rape victims, but rather only interested in the story insofar as it feeds into their narrative against immigration and against Islam. I guess you've got two different camps, haven't you, Matt? You've got the people who have got an ideological motive here, like they've got a political message or an idea that they want to get out there. This is a case that they feel could be relevant to that message. So they decide to go in and then you start seeing this stuff pop up on your feed.

16:51There are also people that just know that this kind of rage bait will get huge amounts of traction and engagement. They have a blue tick on Twitter, X, they can make some money out of it. It's how they work. I mean, in some ways, there are people who basically do both of those things and they feed into each other. But it's where we've reached this point now where we spoke about this when we were talking about what to do on the podcast. We spoke about this as an incident to keep an eye on because we knew that the vacuum of information would likely mean that this kind of thing would happen. And lo and behold, it did.

17:17It's like if we can predict it, why can't the social media companies? Yeah, yeah. I guess because it's an incident happening at a local level in one country and the platforms are huge. But ultimately, again, it's about the way that the systems actively allow this kind of content to be rewarded regardless of the truth. Yeah. And I'm concerned that this will lead to a discussion in which we blame the police and say withholding information from the public is causing harm. It's been a week. They're not withholding information. They do not have a suspect. They have enough evidence to release a description to the public.

17:52to. I mean, what are you asking for the police to, as soon as a rape happens, they have to release the race of the attacker and the age that they think it is immediately. I mean, that would lead to mob justice. That's ridiculous. Like justice takes time. And I think the internet and people on social media often do not realize that justice takes time and investigations take time and they take time for a very good reason because people are innocent until proven guilty. I think some of that is also in the age of social media people feeling like they have a right to information because information is so accessible in a way that didn't used to be the case that you would have to rely on the authorities or the police or whoever to update you on stuff we saw that with the nancy guthrie case um nancy guthrie is still missing and we did an episode where we were talking to some of the sleuths and that's not the only case in the us where people have tried to fill in the gaps about why someone's done it or why they got involved no i mean look at the charlie Kirk killing, you know, that was a case where before an investigation had even gotten to its nascent stage, the left were saying with complete assuredness that this was a groiper, someone who was a fan of Nick Fuentes, the far right nationalist, and that, you know, the evidence all pointed him being a groiper.

19:01The right were claiming him as like a trans activist before we knew any of this information. Pictures from his mum's Facebook were suddenly going viral with people jumping to conclusions about he must like or hate Charlie Kirk or Donald Trump because we've seen this or that. Exactly. Both sides are trying to claim him for the other side. And I just miss the days where something would happen and then you'd forget about it, go about your life for a few weeks, and then an expert would tell you what actually happened. I think that there's something slightly more concerning from a sort of existential point of view, not to go a bit deep, but there's just this constant tension that exists between the internet and society and you just worry at what point like society can't really coexist with the internet like all of the things that we kind of rely on like you could talk about it in terms of politics you could talk about it in terms of police and authorities you could even talk about it in terms of like schools and teachers and stuff like the way that we are our current form of society works does mean that like we have to find stuff out before we say it or like sometimes we We don't have the answers and we have to sit with uncertainty or sometimes stuff takes a bit of time and bureaucracy is slow and all of those things.

20:11And then you've got social media, which is like whooshing in all sorts of other directions. If you were in charge of any police force anywhere in the world, to be honest, you, I imagine, would constantly be grappling with this issue, particularly when it comes to a case that's emotive and worrying and gets a load of people talking. At the heart of this is a young woman who is a victim of gang rape. You know, she's not speaking to the press. She's not at the protests. Her parents aren't at the protests. This is kind of outrage, supposedly on her behalf, by a group of people, at least some of whom have come to her community to express outrage about a topic that may have nothing to do with her.

20:47And that's what's so disturbing often about these kinds of incidents is the people who've experienced the crimes at their heart, which is the reason for the outrage and shock and upset, are often forgotten in this wider conversation where it becomes so much more about the identity of the attackers or what this is symbolic of, rather than actually about justice for the victim.

21:12so johnny somali a youtuber was jailed in south korea he filmed himself kissing and twerking against a statue dedicated to korean uh comfort women who were forced into sexual slavery he didn't know he says you know the significance of the statue but understandably south koreans were furious this reminds me a bit of logan paul yeah japanese suicide forest he kind of filmed a dead body and was was cancelled god you used to be cancelled for the i know for well not a small thing but for things that are so small compared to what you have to get cancelled for today yeah and it feels like influencers have really evolved in that if you post something and there's outrage i mean to be honest you kind of benefit from that outrage and usually you're able to kind kind of like seize upon it and keep posting through it.

22:01The only issue is when you actually face real world repercussions, like you are sent to prison or you are charged with something criminally or you come to harm in some way. And actually, we've seen that kind of happening with Clavicula as well, haven't we, who we spoke about on our very first episode, this kind of taking it too far or the conversation around him going too far because he's been in hospital, hasn't he? Yeah, well, he overdosed live on stream. Which is so sad. Yeah, I mean, the guy was in all of his streams, almost all of his streams, doing drugs constantly. And this just gets into the dark kind of wild west of Kik.

22:38You know, he's streaming on a platform. Which is this like streaming platform, isn't it? Yeah, it's a competitor to Twitch, which is the main streaming platform. But it's sort of the wild west. Things that have happened on Kik. A person died live on stream on Kik. A woman was filmed having sex without knowing that she's being live streamed. People have been attacked. People stream Snipe, right? If you're live streaming your life 24-7, other people like the trolls that troll us on the internet, like find them in real life and mess with them, attack them physically, make fun of them, etc. I mean, imagine what would happen if people knew where you were at all times.

23:08You would be dead. You would be dead. The people who give you death threats and abuse you on the internet would be following you around. Yeah, exactly. So like Sneeko just got punched this week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like live on stream. This is what Clavicular said about him overdosing live on stream. The worst part of tonight was my face descending from the life support mask. Like he is worried about the looks maxing. He's now said he's not going to do it anymore because he says he needed the drugs. He's retired from kickstreaming. Now, a lot of the extreme examples that we've mentioned are on kick.

23:46I just want people to remember, we spoke about this during the Clavicular episode. Not enough people are talking about this. Kick is a streaming website owned by a gambling company. A lot of these streamers, whether it's Clavicular or whoever, are gambling on the gambling company in their streams. And even though there's usually only a small audience watching these streams, 10, 20 ,000 people, for the most popular streamers, all the people are talking about Sneeko, Clavicular, there's only 10 ,000 to 20 ,000 people usually at a time watching these streams. The way most people encounter these streams is through clips.

24:17And there's a whole clip economy of people who are financially incentivized by kick, by the streamers themselves, to cut and reshare clips of these streamers. So there's this entire economy that financially incentivizes people to do the craziest shit possible. Whether that leads to ODing on a stream, abusing someone on a stream, that is the business model.