Last Week's Scroll: Conspiracies and Scams
Kate Truthers return, the YouTuber bank fails, and the war on links
I’ve been traveling and attending conferences last week and also this week (check out NLAS!), so the weekend edition is arriving a couple days late. But it’s here! I’m still alive! Enjoy all the best, worst, and most interesting things happening on the social web last week.
The Return of Kate Conspiracies
A few months back we reported on the state of the British royal family - specifically, the state of Kate Middleton and why she had gone missing from public view for so long. To recap:
Kate’s last public appearance had been on Christmas Day 2023, after which she had a ‘planned surgery’ that was pretty obviously unplanned.
Nobody saw her for the better part of three months, during which time speculation started to run wild.
The palace decided the best response to all of this was to release an obviously photoshopped picture of her, which caused speculation to shift from ‘Haha This Is Funny’ to ‘Wait Is She Actually Dead’.
After this PR fiasco led to a tidal wave of internet conspiracies, Kate finally released a video revealing she had cancer and that was the reason she’d disappeared from public view.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does social media. In the absence of information, conspiracies will flourish. But I expected most of the conspiracies to die down with the formal announcement of her diagnosis. Turns out that definitely did not happen.
Kate’s continued complete absence from public life, combined with rumors that she may never return to royal duties, have seen a resurgence of conspiracy theories around her situation. Some people speculate that she’s already dead. Some think her cancer announcement video was AI-generated.1 Some people think the whole cancer thing is fake, and a smokescreen for an upcoming divorce from Prince William. Some people think she’s incredibly sick and the Royals are doing some sort of weird ‘soft launch’ of her death. Twitter and Reddit are the main outlets, with /r/KateMiddletonMissing as a main hub.
There are a couple of lessons I take away from this. First, once an online conspiracy movement has started it’s very hard to stop it. You can’t unburn a candle, you can’t put the cat back in the bag, choose your favorite metaphor but they all apply here. Second, Reddit continues to be a fertile breeding ground for this kind of low-grade conspiracism and anti-fandom activity. Third, the palace continues to royally2 screw this up. It’s bizarre how the most sympathetic story imaginable - Conventionally Attractive Young Mother Gets Cancer - has turned into such a fiasco. They still don’t seem to understand that the absence of official news/photos creates the necessary conditions for conspiracies to thrive. I understand that a woman going through cancer treatment probably isn’t real jazzed to take pictures or do public appearances. But here’s the thing:
A: The King has cancer and is doing exactly that, and therefore doesn’t have these insane conspiracies.
B: That’s the bargain you make as a member of the royal family.
You can’t be photographed in public every single week for decades on end, suddenly go half a year without a public appearance, and expect people to react normally. Just one small appearance or new photo per month would stop so much of this, but the palace continues to fail PR 101.
YouTuber Bank Goes Bust
Coffeezilla, everyone’s favorite scam documentarian on YouTube, released a video last week on Yotta Savings. Yotta was a bank that was frequently promoted by big YouTube accounts, with a gimmick of ‘we pay you to save money’ via no-lose lottery tickets that you get for your level of savings.
Except, as Coffeezilla notes, Yotta wasn’t actually a bank. They were an app that simply transacted with a bank, an intermediary ‘fintech’ company that sat between customers and the actual FDIC insured bank that really held the money. And thanks to a complicated series of failures,3 now a bunch of customers can’t get their money out.4 Some have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars locked up in Yotta’s ecosystem.
The story is interesting on its own. But beyond Yotta’s particular shenanigans I’m interested in the idea of what creators owe their viewers when it comes to brand deals. Brand deals are a massive part of what allows online content creators to exist,5 but does a creator take on responsibility if one of their readers or viewers has a negative outcome with a brand they recommended? Plenty of Yotta customers are now saying they feel scammed, misled or lied to not just by Yotta, but by the influencers and content creators who recommended Yotta to them over and over.
It’s a tricky subject. Influencers should obviously do some due diligence to make sure they’re not being paid to promote outright scams. But what happens if a company that seems reasonable later turns out to be abusing their workers, or ends up being a scam? It’s not entirely clear that the YouTubers who endorsed Yotta could have known they’d turn out terribly. What about services like VPNs that have some legitimate uses, but also advertise themselves for uses that are false/misleading? Is it different if you’re advertising your own brand like MrBeast’s Feastables or Beast Burgers - do you need assume a higher level of care? These are questions we still haven’t worked out the answers to. Right now we’re stuck in an ecosystem where some creators are incredibly conscientious about only doing brand partnerships with the most respectable brands, while others shill any scam or shitty mobile game that will pay.
The War on Links
Every week, I include a links section near the end of the Weekly Scroll post. That’s because I think linking to other people’s work is one of the best things you can do on the internet. It helps you, the reader, discover new cool stuff. It helps those writers and content creators get more traffic and recognition. And it helps me fill out the post with content. Win, win, win. To me, this is the best part of the internet - organically discovering new stuff that rocks via links on a trusted site.
That’s why I’m so discouraged about the direction the internet seems to be going in. Links are becoming an endangered species in many ways. Google’s search results now prioritize ‘search generative experience’ and AI-driven results rather than just show you some links. Many social sites like Instagram make it nearly impossible to link offsite, while other Meta properties like Threads and Facebook openly deboost external news and links. Twitter is a black box of pain under Elon Musk, and users have reported that links seem to be punished by Twitter’s algorithms now.
Side note - I’ve had off-the-record conversations with some folks at Twitter who deny this is happening. But I’ve also seen how poorly tweets with links seem to perform these days - they sure seem to be deboosted to me? This chart doesn’t lie:
Social platforms these days are desperate to achieve platform lock-in, with users who never want or need to leave their app. Keep those users to yourself! Never let them wander away when they could keep scrolling! There’s a sense in which this is individually rational for each site, but when each site does it you end up with a series of walled gardens that aren’t as good as an actually-connected internet would be. And it’s particularly hard on independent sites like this one - I need search engines and social media sites to get new subscribers, but it’s increasingly hard for external links to reach users on those sites.
This is part of why advertising as a business model is simply broken on the internet for anyone who isn’t Meta or Google - those giants aren’t sharing the traffic any longer. It’s why this blog is supported by paying subscribers rather than ads - the referral volume that sites like Facebook used to pump to independent sites is probably never coming back. You can still survive if you have enough loyal fans and enough gravity to keep them, but it’s a tough market.
Overall, this just sucks. The internet is at its best when you can organically skip from blog to blog, new thing to new thing, discovering stuff organically and democratically. It almost feels like the promise of the internet is fading as more and more stuff sits behind platform walls. I hope more people notice and make the conscious choice to keep linking stuff, because otherwise we’ll be missing something vital that makes the internet what it is.
Links
Remote Amazonian tribes were connected to the internet for the first time via Elon Musk’s Starlink. Within months, some of the men were addicted to porn. Beyond that flippant observation, it’s fascinating to see internet newbies grapple with the obvious harms and benefits all at once.
An excellent article on a Chinese dissident using social media to defy the CCP and report on protests, lockdowns, and China’s censorious regime. The CCP, not content to be a horrifying totalitarian nightmare state at home, has stepped up their efforts to go after dissidents living overseas as well.
Meta is trying to revive their relationship with Gen Z, using exactly the playbook described in Who Wins the Next Era of the Internet? Remember the mantra - it’s always on Infinite Scroll first.
Jenny Nicholson’s ultra-viral video about Star Wars Land made it to the pages of the NYTimes, with a good discussion of modern fandom included.
Gen Z loves Nirvana shirts, even though they can’t name a Nirvana song. Interesting discussion of how the accusations of being a ‘poser’ no longer sting - people play with identities all the time now.
YouTuber arrested for shooting fireworks at a Lamborghini from a helicopter.
Posts
There is absolutely no evidence for this that I can find.
heh
Which are partially, but not entirely, Yotta’s fault
There’s also the issue that Yotta has transformed from an anti-gambling company (regular gambling is a scam, put your money with us for a no-lose form of lottery that gamifies responsible behavior) into a company that now just outright shills for gambling with blackjack and roulette available in the app. But while that seems bad, the ‘your money is inaccessible’ part is what’s truly awful.
Hit me up, large corporations! Or small ones!
NEIN KLAUS
Speaking of links, any chance you could note when links are pay walled and when the are not?