Marina Joyce and the fan phenomenon: conspiracies and kidnappings
A few months ago, a British youtuber named Marina Joyce A video entitled "Date outfit ideas" (ideas to wear on a date) was posted on the Internet. Technically, the content of this video was not different from the others that had already been made public and that had served to earn a few hundred thousand subscribers. However, there was something strange that caught the attention of the audience.
In a matter of hours, some of Joyce's followers began to leave comments calling attention to the attitude and the apparent psychological state of the youtuber . He seemed absent, some said; others, directly, claimed that it showed the symptoms of a drugged person.
It was the beginning of one of the cases in which the fan phenomenon was going to show itself in a more spectacular way , and in a massive way.
Save Marina Joyce
Rapidly they were creating histories totally based on speculations. Some users came to the conclusion that the youtuber was in danger, kidnapped by someone, and that I was trying to send an encrypted message without his captor or captors realizing that he was asking for help from his followers.
In this way they came up with very detailed theories about how Marina Joyce's partner I could have kidnapped her , or another unknown person, or directly the Islamic State. Other people created other equally unfounded theories, according to which Joyce had severe mental disorders or planned to commit suicide.
All this did, among other things, that the police were to visit the house of the young after the insistent calls of the fans and, in addition, that the hashtag #savemarinajoyce was a global trending topic in just a few hours. In a collateral way, the video that started the suspicions reached over 23 million views, and the number of subscribers of its YouTube channel soared.
But things did not stop when the first objective signs that Marina Joyce was well, including the statements of the police, arrived. The young girl's fans had created an account of events that fed himself , and any objective data that did not fit with this was manipulated so that it did not deny the legend that had been created around the youtuber. Reality was forced to adapt to fiction.
The problem was that not even Marina Joyce herself could retain credibility about what was happening in her own life.
- Maybe you're interested: "The 30 signs of psychological abuse in a relationship"
When the fan is part of the problem
When the youtuber claimed to be fine from one of their social media profiles, a lot of their fans did not believe her. They kept finding indications of the danger that Marina Joyce was running, searching through your messages, videos and photos .
Some were convinced that the girl's body was full of bruises and bruises produced by her captor, and others looked for coded messages left as clues by her, as if they were obvious signs that there was something she was hiding. A lot of information about the youtuber was being disseminated and analyzed as a way to learn more about your intimate life.
There were many who said they wanted defend Marina Joyce from a danger that only existed in her own imagination . However, in doing so they were violating the privacy of the young woman, and nullifying her ability to use her social networks in a normal way.
What had happened?
The obsession with celebrities and the Internet
The fan phenomenon is not new: it has existed since welfare societies and the mass media began to produce famous people whose image was disseminated by the media and, at the same time, enough audience with free time to obsess. with those celebrities.
However, the increasingly widespread use of the Internet has made the fan phenomenon take on a new dimension. The case of Marina Joyce is an example of this.
Before there was no possibility for an influential person to connect with their audience in real time, but neither was it possible for the fans to be in contact with each other constantly and massively.
In the case of the myths about Marina Joyce, what happened was a mixture of several psychological phenomena.
Creating the myth of conspiracy
First of all is the obsession : the fact that someone is famous causes many other people to spend more time thinking about it, and this increases the chances that someone will come up with a bizarre connection between two ideas based on the most minimal signs. It is a matter of probability.
In second place is the herding, a phenomenon studied in social psychology.Because of the large number of fans that a person can have, it is possible that a small spark is born a real movement in a pack that does not rely on what is directly observable in reality: it only rests on fantasies and speculations .
Interestingly, thousands of people can agree on a surreal version of the facts without anyone trying to cheat them knowingly. Delirious explanations about what might be happening are feeding each other.
