Current Events II

The Youtuber and social media influencer Gabbie Hanna is making headlines for tricking her 3.8 Instagram followers into thinking that she went to Coachella. Hanna is a well-known social media figure, with 6.5 million users being subscribed to her Youtube channel. She posts videos every week, in which she shows her lifestyle, talks about makeup, diet and tries various challenges (such as wearing drugstore clothes for a week) or tells stories from her life. She’s also released a few of original songs.

3 days ago, on April 23, Gabbie Hanna posted a video to her channel called “I Faked Going To Coachella…” In the video, she explains that the pictures she’s been posting on her Instagram from the popular music festival Coachella, are actually fake. All of the pictures that showcase her posing in fashionable outfits have in reality been taken around her neighborhood and then photoshopped in order to look like they are from the festival. In the video, Hanna shows her viewers the editing process and some of the reactions of her followers. While some of them were surprised to see her at the festival, since she has mentioned before that she is not really a fan of big events like this, none of them suspected that the whole thing was faked.

Hanna says that she did this experiment to show how deceiving social media can be. “I know a lot of people look at people on Instagram and social media and they think they’re impossibly perfect - that body, that vacation, that car… So much of it is fake,” she explains. In the video, she also talks about how Coachella has become an event for influencers to go to just to take pictures and gain followers. She mentions that she knows of people that take extra sets of outfits to the festival just for pictures which they can later post and pretend that they attended both weekends of Coachella.

Gabbie Hanna‘s video got a lot of positive reactions from her viewers, praising her for highlighting the issue. However, others called her a hypocrite, since the video is monetized.