Weekly Scroll: Mormon Madness
MomTok drama, Trolling Threads, and some unexpected Chop Suey
Welcome to the Weekly Scroll, your guide to the week in social media.
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
Here’s something I didn’t expect to happen this week: I ended up completely engrossed by a reality show about Mormon MomTok.
As a straight white man who typically watches football and plays video games, I am very much not the target audience for this show. But the new Hulu show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives has been a surprise hit, and I can’t stop thinking about the influencers at the center of all of it.
You can read recaps here or here if you’d like, but here are the basics. The show follows several of the stars of ‘MomTok’, which is a collection of Mormon TikTok stars who are mostly young white Mormon wives and moms from Utah doing dances and other inoffensive mom content. These women seemed to have a pretty good thing going! So it was shocking when two years ago one of the leaders, Taylor Frankie Paul, went on TikTok Live to declare that they’d all been partying and ‘soft swinging’ with each others’ husbands.
In the wake of that scandal, Taylor’s marriage blew up but her social media star kept rising. The whole incident went viral enough that Hulu decided to launch a reality show about these perfect seeming but very messy influencers. The show has gained a ton of popularity since its debut two weeks ago because of that messiness. There are religious conflicts, unplanned pregnancies, a swinging scandal, a cheating husband, and domestic violence charges, and that’s all in the first episode.
Other than the absurd amount of drama, why is the show so fascinating? I have a number of theories:
There’s an increasingly low bar between social media and traditional media. You see this in both directions. Big movie stars and celebrities are increasingly doing their press tours via YouTube shows like Hot Ones and highly online podcasts, and social media stars like MrBeast or the members of MomTok are increasingly getting deals for shows on major streaming services. This blurring between different forms of media is happening more and more often, and I think it helps shows like this go viral. These women already had a built-in audience in the millions before the show debuted. It helps the show get kickstarted, it means all the characters have interesting back stories, and it means that even after you’ve watched the final episode the show never really ends. You can jump straight on social media to keep up with the latest drama.
Of course, there still has to be good content. I’m not a veteran of Real Housewives style shows, so this is speculative, but Mormon Wives seems to have an absurd amount of dramatic nonsense happening compared to a typical show of this nature. It’s absolutely bonkers how much stuff happens - the first episode alone has as many dramatic happenings as a whole season of a typical reality show.
Related - I also think there’s an element of reality to this that seems more authentic here. Kayfabe is a term in professional wrestling that also applies to reality tv. Kayfabe is basically the unspoken agreement between pro wrestlers, fans, and media to not acknowledge that the whole thing is scripted and fake. Saying it out loud ruins the fun, even though we all know it. Most reality TV works on similar kayfabe principles - it’s mostly staged and artificial but we collectively agree to just not dwell on it. Maybe I’m a sucker, but the drama from Mormon Wives in a lot of places seems too real and too messy to be staged. Watching this show is like being ringside at a pro wrestling bout that seems to have devolved into an actual fight. You’re wondering in the back of your head - holy shit, these guys are actually fighting. This one’s real.
What are those stakes? The central tension that drives conflict for almost every woman on the show is the tension of being stuck between two worlds. On one hand, they’ve all been raised Mormon and all want to be the perfect Mormon wife - a perfect, demure, submissive mother and wife who is in good standing with the church and leads a spotless life. On the other hand, they all want to be famous influencers. They’re all young women who want to be flirty and sexy and fun, and have a good time being famous and partying and enjoying themselves. And it’s very clear they can’t really do both at the same time. Some women lean hard into partying, drinking, and having sex to the point that it’s unclear if they’re still Mormon. Others go in the direction of trying to be squeaky clean and rejecting any impure activities. Most are stuck somewhere in the middle. This tension absolutely defines the show. They wear revealing, tight dresses but also talk about the special Mormon underwear. They’re all breadwinners for their families due to social media fame, but also tend to be fairly submissive to their husband’s wishes. Given that these women are almost all practicing Mormons with practicing Mormon partners and families and communities, the stakes are fairly real if they get caught leaning too much in the wrong direction.
And of course I can’t forget the thesis of the blog: Posting is the Most Powerful Force in the World. I am always fascinated by people who are willing to blow up their lives in order to keep posting, and the show’s breakout star Taylor is a prime example of that. She’s the one who blew up MomTok with a livestream about how all the wives and husbands were swinging with each other, which was terrible for her personal life but amazing for her career as an influencer/celebrity. And remember the Mom who was dancing in the neonatal ICU while her baby was sick? That’s Whitney, the main villain of the show. Posting is undefeated.
This Baby is Haitian
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Katie Trolls Threads
Katie Notopoulos has done a little trolling, and she’s very sorry.
Like many of us, Notopoulos noticed that Threads is gaining users while being a fairly low quality posting experience. I’ve written about the lack of quality on Threads before:
Threads is cringe. We saw this early, and it’s still true. There’s very little quality posting there. It feels tame, it feels corporate. BlueSky is orders of magnitude smaller but gives you a much higher chance of running into something truly funny or viral. Threads, at least when I log in, is often filled with AI slop and very low quality engagement bait. It’s gotten better recently, but this has been a big feature of the site for a while.
So Katie decided to run what the children these days call a ‘social experiment’ and repeatedly post the most annoying bait posts of all time on Threads to see what would happen.
Now to say what we always say here - It’s always on Infinite Scroll first. Shout out to last year’s post on Rage Bait as Influencer Tactic. And whenever we talk about rage bait, I have mixed feelings.
Notopoulos does make some interesting observations about why cheap engagement bait works so well on Threads. Their algorithm seems particularly fine-tuned to promote posts that get a lot of replies rather than just a lot of reposts, which amplifies bait posts that attract hundreds or thousands of angry replies. And let’s note, as Notopoulos does, that they average Threads user is… unsophisticated. That’s probably the nicest word. Unlike the brainrotted crowds on Twitter or Tumblr, they don’t have much of an immune system against this kind of thing. Maybe there’s some value in testing your theories of posting on this fresh, unspoiled audience.
But more cynically, it seems to me that this is kind of hack behavior. Katie is an extremely online gremlin1 who is deep, deep in the trenches of Weird Internet Shit. And she’s being cheered on by other extremely online gremlins for punching down at people who aren’t very online. It would be one thing if it was original, but she’s not even doing new material - all of her rage posts are near-verbatim copies of classic discourses from Reddit or Twitter. Yes, you’ve discovered that if you take the most toxic discourses in the history of the Twitter HellSite and port them over to a virgin audience, they will also be toxic there. This is like taking a flamethrower to a preschool and then bragging afterwards how crazy it is that you ended up with Toddler Flambé. Congrats, I guess? Did we really learn anything new here?
None of this actually matters. We’re talking about the ethics of mild trolling on the lamest Meta property. But it does seem like a sign of a stagnation in social media culture if the best we’ve got going is reheating old drama for unsuspecting normies on Threads.
Talk Tuah
I have a long-standing piece of advice that anyone who gets a little bit of viral fame should sell out as hard and as fast as possible. Get that bag, cash that check. You never know when your 15 minutes of fame will be up, so absolutely do not hesitate to get what you can.
I’m here today to tell you we have a new world champion of selling out. To repeat - I am not saying this as a bad thing. I am, frankly, in awe. Hailey Welch, aka the Hawk Tuah girl, has gone from absolutely nothing to astounding heights of internet fame.
Welch, to be clear, is famous purely for appearing as a random on-the-street interview on someone else’s channel. She was not previously an influencer - she worked for minimum wage at a Tennessee factory. She had never been on an airplane. She did not even have an Instagram account. And somehow, because she has the posting heart of a champion, three months later she has 2.5 million Instagram followers.
It is astounding how well Welch has turned a single funny moment into an entire brand. She is selling merch and making paid public appearances in countries around the world. She landed a podcast with a major podcast network called Talk Tuah2, which appears to have actual celebrities coming on as guest.
I am flabbergasted. This woman took a single blowjob joke on someone else’s YouTube channel and turned it into an A-level influencer career overnight. Whoever is her agent/PR team is a God amongst PR hacks. And Welch herself really does seem to have the exact type of personality and posting energy necessary to make this happen - she’s chaotic and funny now that she’s online. This may be the greatest influencer-from-nothing story I’ve ever seen. Remember kids - always, always sell out.
Links
AI tools can now make near-lifelike videos. Can you spot the difference? While these videos are undeniably impressive, I still got 8/10 correct. And one of the misses was a ‘This is so obvious they’re trying to trick me’ thing that I should have given the obvious answer.
Is Snapchat actually good for your mental health? One study that (as best I can tell) was not paid for or affiliated with Snapchat seems to say that while most social media sites negatively impact mental health, Snapchat actually has some benefits. This would be in line with my theories about the next era of the social internet and Snapchat’s positioning as a non-social-social-network.
MrBeast’s internal employee onboarding document was leaked, and it’s absolutely fascinating. MrBeast hasn’t been having the greatest PR cycle recently, but these pages make me like him more. He really seems like a guy who cares about nothing in the world except for making giant spectacles for YouTube.
Why Google Docs are the internet’s hottest new travel guides.
Posts
A term of affection - I am also a terminally online gremlin
10/10 name, no notes