Marina Joyce and the fan phenomenon: conspiracies and kidnappings

A few months ago, a British youtuber named Marina Joyce He uploaded a video titled “Date outfit ideas” online. Technically, the content of this video was no different from the others he had already made public and which had earned him a few hundred thousand subscribers. However, there was something strange that caught the attention of part of the audience.

Within hours, some of Joyce's followers began leaving comments calling attention to the attitude and the apparent psychological state of the youtuber. She seemed absent, some said; others, directly, assured that she 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 massively.

Saving Marina Joyce

Stories based entirely on speculation were quickly created. Some users came to the conclusion that the youtuber was in danger, kidnapped by someone, and that she was trying to send an encrypted message without her captor or captors realizing that she was asking her followers for help.

In this way, very detailed theories were put forward about how Marina Joyce's partner she could have kidnapped her, or another unknown person, or directly the Islamic State. Others created equally unsubstantiated theories that Joyce had severe mental disorders or was planning to commit suicide.

All this he did, among other things, for the police to visit the girl's house after the insistent calls from the fans and, in addition, that the hashtag #savemarinajoyce was a worldwide trending topic in just a few hours. Collaterally, the video that triggered the suspicions exceeded 23 million views, and the number of subscribers to his YouTube channel skyrocketed.

But things didn't stop when the first objective signs arrived that Marina Joyce was okay, including statements from the police. The fans of the young woman had created his own account of the events that he 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 fit fiction.

The problem was that even Marina Joyce herself couldn't maintain credibility about what was going on in her own life.

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When the fan is part of the problem

When the youtuber assured that she was fine from one of her social network profiles, a large number of her fans did not believe her. They kept finding signs of the danger Marina Joyce was in, Going through your messages, videos and photos.

Some were convinced that the young woman's body was full of bruises and wounds produced by her captor, and others they were looking for coded messages left as clues by her, as if they were obvious signs that there was something wrong. hid. A lot of information about the youtuber was being disseminated and analyzed as a way to learn more about her intimate life.

There were many who said they wanted defending Marina Joyce from a danger that only existed in her own imagination. However, by doing so they were violating the young woman's privacy, 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 of an audience with the 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 influencer to connect with their audience in time real, but it was also not possible for fans to be in constant contact with each other and massively.

In the case of the myths about Marina Joyce, what occurred was a mixture of various psychological phenomena.

Creating the conspiracy myth

First is the obsession: the fact that someone is famous makes many other people spend more time thinking about them, and this makes them the chances grow that someone will come up with a bizarre connection between two ideas from the earliest clues. minima. It is a matter of probability.

In second place is 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 true herd movement 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 events without anyone knowingly trying to deceive them. The delusional explanations about what could be happening feed one another.