Marina Joyce and the fan phenomenon: conspiracies and kidnappings
A few months ago, a British youtuber named Marina Joyce uploaded a video called “Date outfit ideas”. Technically, the content of this video was no different from the others that she had already made public and that had helped her win a few hundred thousand subscribers. However, there was something strange that caught the audience’s attention.
Within hours, some of Joyce’s followers began leaving comments calling attention to the attitude and the apparent psychological state of the youtuber . It 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 be shown in a more spectacular way , and in a massive way.
Save Marina Joyce
Stories were quickly created that were based entirely on speculation. Some users came to the conclusion that the youtuber was in danger, kidnapped by someone, and that was trying to send an encrypted message without its captor(s) realizing that it was asking for help from its followers.
This led to very detailed theories about how Marina Joyce’s partner could have kidnapped her , or another unknown person, or directly the Islamic State. Other people created other equally unsubstantiated theories, according to which Joyce had severe mental disorders or was planning to commit suicide.
All this made, among other things, that the police went to visit the house of the young woman after the insistent calls of the fans and, moreover, that the hashtag #savemarinajoyce was trending topic worldwide in just a few hours. As a side effect, the video that started the suspicions reached over 23 million views, and the number of subscribers to his Youtube channel skyrocketed.
But things did not stop when the first objective signs arrived that Marina Joyce was well, including the statements of the police. Fans of the young woman had created a self-fulfilling account of events , and any objective data that did not fit 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 any credibility about what was going on in her own life.
When the fan is part of the problem
When youtuber claimed to be fine from one of her social network profiles, a lot of her fans didn’t believe her. They kept finding signs of the danger Marina Joyce was in, by searching her messages, videos and photos .
Some were convinced that the girl’s body was full of bruises and wounds produced by her captor, and others were looking 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 spread and analyzed as a way to know more about her intimate life.
There were many who said they wanted to defend Marina Joyce from a danger that only existed in their own imagination . However, by 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 and mass media societies started producing celebrities whose image was spread by the media and, at the same time, enough of an audience with free time to become obsessed with those celebrities.
However, the increasingly widespread use of the Internet has given the fan phenomenon 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 his audience in real time, but neither was it possible for fans to be in constant and massive contact with each other.
In the case of the myths about Marina Joyce, what happened was a mixture of several psychological phenomena.
Creating the Conspiracy Myth
First of all there is obsession : the fact that someone is famous makes many other people spend more time thinking about it, and this increases the chances that someone will come up with a bizarre connection between two ideas from the slightest hint. It’s a question of probability.
Second is herding, a phenomenon studied in social psychology. Because of the large number of fans a person can have, it is possible that from a small spark a real herd movement is born that does not rely on what is directly observable in reality: it only relies on fantasy and speculation .
Interestingly, thousands of people can agree on a surreal version of events without anyone knowingly trying to deceive them. Delusional explanations of what might be happening feed into each other.