Trending 20th May 2019 by Megan Roantree
This Blogger Faked Her Entire Trip To Coachella To Prove Instagram Is A Lie
Last month, Instagram was full of pictures of our favourite bloggers standing in front of that giant Ferris wheel in elaborate outfits at Coachella. We’ll admit we were glued to all the influencer’s feeds and living vicariously though them.
It turns out though that you don’t even have to go to the festival to get those money shots, as proven by American blogger Gabbie Hanna. She tricked her 3.2m followers into believing that she was at Palm Springs, when she really just stepped outside her own door.
At the time, she shared a number of photos of her with fun hair and makeup, and arguably casual attire for the festival, which each amassed over 500k likes. Wow.
A few days later she came clean and updates all her captions to reveal that with the help of her talented friend, photoshopped the whole thing.
She later uploaded an Youtube video which explained her reasons behind it, and the work that went in to creative a fake trip. This included printing fake wrist bands to look the part, documenting what she was really doing during the weekend like going to the gym and hanging out with friends.
“I did feel kind of weird and guilty doing this because I don’t feel comfortable lying even if it is a harmless, however elaborate, prank. I did feel bad. I’m really sorry if you guys feel duped… I think that’s kind of a given is how easy it is to fake things on social media, and that was the purpose of this whole thing in the first place…” she revealed.
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She added: “Social media, for the most part, is just a very curated and manipulated version of reality. Just don’t base your life off of the few posts a week from your favorite influencer living this glamorous, amazing, colorful, saturated, hip, trendy, amazing life because the whole time I was living my best life at Coachella, I was really, uh, for the most part, sitting in this editing chair.”
Gabbie isn’t the first person to have carried out a plan like this, in December Natalies Outlet faked an entire trip to Japan, while English Youtuber Carolyn Stritch pretended to go to Disneyland.
Don’t believe everything you see on social media, kids!