Life hack: use my referral link

How the Internet is lying to you about making your life better.

Oftentimes, when misinformation enters the public conversation, it’s on a systemic or platformed scale, be it from the government, fake news sources, or fudged medical or academic resources. We see it in niche communities’ claims about vaccines and Tylenol singlehandedly causing autism or in the politicization of shooters’ motives and backgrounds. I think what we often fail to consider, or even actively notice, is lower-stakes misinformation infiltrating our consciousness through small but constant messaging in the digital sphere. I remember coming across the Spiders Georg meme as a kid, an overexaggerated joke explanation for the dubious factoid that we, on average, swallow three spiders in our sleep every year. The post claimed that the fictional being, Spiders Georg, was actually responsible for the creation of this average, as he eats thousands of spiders in his sleep while living in a cave. It passed me by on early social media, I believed it, and then stopped believing it when I saw another post on another social media platform ‘debunking’ it. It wasn’t until writing this that I actually looked it up and realized that while the meme existed, none of it was legitimate. 

I believe Spiders Georg is a harmless bit that came from an era of the Internet where things were more, well, human. Attention and engagement were in the process of becoming the cash cows they are now, but we were not yet in an era where constant digital engagement (along with carefully crafted implicit or concealed forms of advertisement) was so common. The Internet wasn’t so blatantly commercial in 2013 when Spiders Georg originated. Much of current online misinformation is politically driven, while also having an aspect of ‘rage baiting’ or ‘engagement farming’ attached to it—the practice of saying anything to get a reaction in order to have people arguing with each other in their comment section. Many creators now purposefully curate content with the intent of provoking those who disagree with them to post angrily in their comments. That, in turn, leads to people who agree with the initial content defending it and arguing back. That cycle then repeats.

In a time when engagement farming and rage baiting have become profitable, what is our modern-day Spiders Georg? What kinds of commonplace misinformation may not tangibly affect us, yet still leaks into our understanding of culture and sense of self? Personally, I see two distinctive versions of this kind of misinformation. The first is more in the background. If you use any of the slot-machine style, short-form content scrolling apps like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels, you’re likely familiar with viral sitcom clips sharing the vertical space with some ASMR-adjacent DIY craft or mobile game. So many of these crafts look terrible, are dangerous to use, are simply impossible, or entirely falsified. I have seen people mix cleaners that would inevitably create mustard gas, claim to fill holes in their floor with sunflower seeds and superglue, and flip food by turning the pan instead of just using a spatula. These ‘life hacks’ are only to provide an additional visual stimulus, and if they were to be recreated, they would be useless, damaging, or even dangerous. The second version is the poorly hidden advertisements for cheap, dropshipped products disguised as daily time-savers or miracle products. These are everywhere. The next time you’re scrolling and are seemingly blessed with the visage of a real person on your timeline, take a closer look: check what product they’re using and click on their account—you will see a link to what they are selling. Recently, these short-form video apps have implemented their own in-app ways to sell these products. TikTok Shop, the online marketplace on the app, allows creators to directly post the product they are featuring in their video as a photolink on the screen. YouTube and Instagram have followed suit. 

Both these life hacks and these hidden ads are examples of video content we are taught to passively ignore, as we are meant to focus instead on the Family Guy funny moments sharing the screen, or the beautiful influencer in her beautiful home who just so happens to be enjoying Bub’s Swedish candy with a handy link in the lower left-hand corner. But this constant bonus content is passively entering our psyche. Being advertised to isn’t new, but the viral onslaught of being sold to without being directly told we are consuming advertisements is. Social media companies are constantly seeking new ways to sustain monetization on short-form platforms—after all, failure to do so is what killed Vine. TikTok Shop not only supplements ad revenue but also lowers the barrier to entry for the mass promotion of cheap goods, allowing TikTok itself to profit directly from the trend. As short-form video platforms integrate AI, the next step in this process has already begun. Much of the digital advertising space is being both created and consumed by AI, and the social media landscape is soon going to be covered by it just the same. The ultimate expression of this is the recently announced fully AI social media platform, Vibes, by Meta. Announced just last week, Vibes is a platform where users can post videos created and edited with their AI software. The announcement of Vibes was quickly followed by OpenAI’s Sora—a conceptually- similar app to Vibes—and the implementation of AI video creation tools on TikTok, YouTube, and X. The outcome of this will be a supposed “social media” platform with nothing but generative AI-produced slop. Whether you can claim this is either “social” or even real “media” is, in my opinion, highly debatable. There is no human element besides Vibes’s nebulous prompting, and I doubt they will provide a way to confirm the identity of who is behind the prompts, users, or brand. As annoying as constant online sales pitches can be, at least their products leave you with something tangible, however useless it may be. In the case of Vibes, what is there to gain or worthy of passing along to viewers? Being lied to and told our lives could be made easier by actual products, or that there is a single purchasable solution to life’s problems at least offers the illusion of self-improvement. Given that we are accustomed to being sold to constantly, as draining as it may be, we can potentially learn to recognize and avoid being entrapped in subtle marketing for TikTok garbage. At the very least, that human element of a real person trying to exploit us has a face for us to be annoyed at. Vibes even strips that from us. If every layer of something is a lie, down to the process of its inception, then there is nothing to possibly gain from it.