It’s taught me to reel in my doomscrolling
September 30, 2024 1:05 pm
I love a good conspiracy theory. I don’t necessarily believe in them, but I have always found the concept that there could be more than one explanation to an already well-known story or event fascinating. A true-crime documentary or podcast truly hates to see me coming.
The latest event to spawn countless conspiracy theories across social media is music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs being charged with racketeering and sex trafficking, after facing months of civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual and physical abuse.
In an unsealed indictment, US federal prosecutors allege Combs and his associates threatened, abused and coerced women and others around him “to fulfill his sexual desires” – which allegedly includes recording his victims engaging in sexual activity at so-called “Freak Off” parties hosted at his residence.
The evidence already in the public domain about Combs was damning. In May, CNN published CCTV footage it had obtained from March 2016 showing Combs chasing then-girlfriend Casandra Ventura, also known as the singer Cassie, down the corridor of a Los Angeles hotel before beating her near the elevators. Cassie was one of a handful of women who filed lawsuits against Combs concerning allegations of abuse.
Then we learned this month that police had raided Combs’s Miami and Los Angeles homes in March and recovered more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant as well as drugs and guns. The internet, predictably, went wild.
There wasn’t a day I scrolled through X last week that my feed wasn’t awash with Diddy commentary, each post embellishing a little more than the last. Somewhere along the line, people started to falsely claim that the Obamas were involved in the scandal, and the hip-hop industry became a satanic cult.
Not since the madness of Covid had I spent so long indulging in the deep, dark tunnels of conspiracy Twitter. Only this time, I didn’t have to dig very deep (thanks, Elon Musk) – fake conspiracies were everywhere. And every time I engaged with one, the algorithm just kept giving me more to devour.
At first, I was interested in finding information – something to provide context to a truly wild story. Then, I found myself almost obsessively reading through content, like binge-watching a Netflix show the second a new series comes out. I’ve never been much of a scroller, but my screen time report last week was less than complimentary.
I came across videos claiming to be from the parties, videos of people listening to a Justin Bieber song with lyrics that allegedly alluded to him being a victim, and shocking screenshots from a purported tell-all book by Combs’s late former partner, Kim Porter, which her family later said was false.
All of those posts turned out to be fake, but it took me a fair bit of investigating in the comment section to come to this realisation. The posts had seemed believable to me at first, likely because all the previous content I had consumed gave me more reason to justify their validity.
That was when reality kicked in. I felt silly for expending so much energy on a topic that generally had no impact on my actual life whatsoever. Throwing around conspiracy theories is one thing, but what I saw on social media over the past week was an overwhelming volume of fake and AI-generated content designed to encourage engagement. At the end of my quest to find out more information, I was now unable to separate fact from fiction.
It’s no secret that since Musk took over Twitter in 2022, fake content and disinformation has been running wild on the platform. But it’s also our insatiable appetite for the most sensationalised version of a story that has created an atmosphere for this sort of content to thrive. And, in this case, I was perpetuating that. The fake conspiracies also overshadow the very real issue at the heart of this story – the serious sexual and physical abuse suffered by women.
We may never know the full story behind the Diddy debacle, but even if we do, we’re unlikely to find the true version of events on social media. I’ve been off social media the past few days and my sanity has been all the better for it. If anything, my doom-scrolling served as a welcome reminder that sometimes the harder you search for the “truth” on the internet, the further away from it you become.
