Kate's Social Site

When actor Jim Carrey appeared at the César Awards in Paris just last month to accept an honorary lifetime achievement award, the moment was meant to celebrate a decades-long career in comedy in film. Instead, the internet quickly turned the appearance into a viral conspiracy theory; some social media users claimed that the person on stage wasn’t Carrey at all, but rather a clone, body double, or someone in an elaborate mask.

The controversy began almost immediately after clips from the ceremony circulated across social media platforms. Many viewers commented that Carrey looked “unrecognizable” pointing to differences in his facial structure, demeanor, and voice compared to previous public appearances. In just a few hours, speculation escalated beyond simple curiosity. Some users suggested plastic surgery, while others proposed more extreme theories– that Carrey had been replaced by a clone.

The rumors gained additional traction when performance artist and makeup illusionist Alexis Stone posted an image online implying he had turned into Carrey for the awards using prosthetics and masks. The photo Stone posted of the Jim Carrey mask was later proven to be AI, and while the post appeared playful, it amplified confusion and helped further spread the conspiracy across social media. 

Eventually, both the organizers of the César Awards and Carrey’s representative confirmed that it was Carrey himself who attended the ceremony and delivered the speech. Carrey had reportedly prepared for months to accept this great honor and even delivered his acceptance speech in French. Despite the official clarifications, the rumor has continued circulating online, demonstrating how social media ecosystems can sustain misinformation even days after it has been debunked. 

From a social media perspective this incident illustrates several dynamics that define the modern digital information space. First is the algorithmic amplification of novelty. Algorithms across platforms prioritize content that generates engagement. Unusual or sensational claims, such as a celebrity being replaced by a clone, naturally attract comments, shares, and reactions. (I myself sent the first video I saw on the topic to my boyfriend almost immediately.) As a result of this behavior, speculative posts often spread faster than genuine, factual, explanations.

Second, the situation reflects the declining trust in visual-digital media. In an era of deepfakes, hyper-realistic makeup, and AI generated imagery, audiences increasingly question whether what they see online is authentic. For example, for the past few weeks the internet had been consumed with a video in which a man seems to encounter a woman that looks eerily similar to the supposedly imprisoned convict, Ghislaine Maxwell. All along, the video was a deepfake, but initially these explanations were buried under the noise surrounding the initial video. Ironically, the technologies that make this kind of deception possible also make people suspicious of legitimate images. When Carrey appeared slightly different after some time away from the spotlight, viewers were primed to interpret the change through a lens of technological information, rather than the old Hollywood way of just assuming they got some work done. 

Finally, this incident highlights the power of participatory conspiracy culture on social media. Online users don’t simply consume the rumor as they once did in one-way communication models like Broadcast television, instead they can build these theories together. Threads, memes, and speculative posts allowed participants to contribute “evidence,” turning the narrative into a collaborative digital puzzle.

In the end, the clone theory says less about Jim Carrey and more about the current social media landscape. In a media ecosystem driven by speed, virality, and spectacle, even a routine celebrity appearance can quickly transform into a global conspiracy narrative. For communicators, journalists, and public relations professionals, the lesson is clear: in the age of social media, perception often spreads faster than reality– and managing public perception before it gets out of hand is a central challenge of digital communication today.

In previous weeks I’ve discussed some of the darkest sides of the internet, but today is a bit of a palate cleanser. If you haven’t heard of the next big boy band, Boy Throb, one of two things must be true, you’ve avoided social media completely throughout the past few months or you live under a rock. Boy Throb, comprised of Anthony Key, Evan Papier, Zachary Sobania and Darshan Magdum, have taken the internet by storm with their customized pink tracksuits and confident declarations of an upcoming Grammy win. Their ultimate goal however? Get their fourth member Darshan, who currently resides in India, a Visa so that he can join his fellow band members in America. How do they plan to do that? Simple, get a million followers. 

Following their emergence on the scene, Boy Throb gained popularity fast hitting their goal of one million within a month of their first post. They left audiences asking if this whole ordeal was simply satire or if one million followers was a viable method to get Darshan to the states. The band quickly responded, reassuring that they couldn’t be more serious about their budding music careers, and posting a handful of song parodies educating viewers about the O-1 Visa. The O-1 Visa provides a pathway to live and work in the United States and is reserved “for individuals with extraordinary ability in the arts, entertainment, sciences, athletics, or business.” Eligibility is determined upon evaluation of an individual's full body of work, considering professional achievements, collaborations, press coverage, peer recognition, and work in the states to come. 

Boy Throb’s content isn’t just entertaining, it performs an important educational function, acting as an informal civic educator, increasing public literacy around immigration policy in a time where the topic is hot. They’ve depoliticized the issue without trivializing it, addressing the topic through music comedy and friendship. This approach lowers barriers that prevent people from engaging in the topic, such as avoidance to explicitly political content. In such a polarized climate they’ve created digestible content that doesn’t trigger the same kind of defensiveness that traditional, more in-your-face advocacy does. 

Just a few days ago the band would make their first appearance at the Grammy’s, much sooner than anybody thought that they would. While they haven’t released a Grammy nominated hit yet, they’ve amassed 1.2 million streams on their first single on Spotify alone. As for Darshan, his visa application has been submiited, so now it's just a waiting game. 

https://www.instagram.com/boy.throb/?hl=en

In last week’s blog post, I described the dangerous ideations that prey on young men on the internet, and this week it is time to discuss the opposite sex. And just like last week, this one comes to a head in a very familiar way: attempted murder.

In Montana, on January 13, 2026, at approximately 4:23 p.m., Billings Senior High School teacher Jason Rader was stabbed during an altercation with a newly 18-year-old student, Kaylie Wirkman Lear. The girl then turned the weapon on herself, sustaining three self-inflicted stab wounds. Both were taken to the hospital for their injuries, which proved to be non-lethal, and that is largely where the story ends in terms of journalistic coverage. One look at Kaylie’s online past, however, suggests there is much more to the story.

Kaylie’s TikTok account, @imrealllypretty, reveals the dark content she interacted with online. Her reposts are filled with material romanticizing student–teacher relationships or praising Jodi Arias, the infamous murderer who stabbed her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander, 27 times in the shower as a result of her obsessive attachment to a man who no longer wanted her. Kaylie’s Pinterest account with the same username continues the theme, featuring “aesthetic” stills from films like The Crush, in which a 14-year-old Alicia Silverstone falls head over heels for an older man. When he thwarts her advances, the girl stalks and sabotages him throughout the course of the film. The account even includes a board titled “let’s make love with our teachers.”

Internet users who claim these events are local to them report that Rader was a good man—a dedicated husband and father—and extremely unlikely to have groomed Kaylie. Some even say that Rader approached the school with concerns regarding Kaylie’s obsession with him and that nothing was done in response. Others, however, insist the girl was groomed and that the relationship turned violent when the man refused to engage in a public relationship with the newly legal student. Scouring Reddit reveals additional, more shocking claims about the girl, but the validity of many of them remains in question.

Speculation aside, the information we know to be true is cause enough for a conversation. Kaylie had been seeking out a relationship defined by an inappropriate power dynamic, and whether she was taken advantage of by a predatory man or obsessively attached to an innocent one, the fact remains that the development of this girl’s delusions has been documented online for quite some time. One cannot help but wonder whether the internet helped foster them.

While it is worth mentioning that Kaylie was born as Logan Lear, she spent the majority of her adolescence living as a girl—presenting as a girl and identifying as one. For all intents and purposes, Kaylie Lear is a teenage girl. Describing this kind of behavior from a Gen Z lens to outsiders is difficult, but in plain terms, Kaylie strives for the “coquette, schoolgirl, Lana Del Rey, Girl, Interrupted” aesthetic. All girls are training to become women and can fall into toxic ideas of what a woman should be. They fall into particular danger, however, when they begin to wonder how a woman should be perceived by a man. It seems that in searching for the meaning of femininity—a process made more difficult for Kaylie than for other teenage girls, as it was both physical and mental—she arrived at the wrong conclusion.

This young girl saw images of confident young women online, idealistically feminine and so irresistible that they could bend the will of the ultimate power figure: the older man. The media Kaylie consumes—the artists she claims interest in—are geniuses. Lana Del Rey is a poet, Sofia Coppola a visionary, and The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is one of my personal favorites. But Kaylie is not consuming this media as it is intended. She resonates with the aesthetics of Coppola’s films and Del Rey’s lyricism while ignoring their purpose entirely, missing the point completely.

When algorithms endlessly feed you what you want to see, social media can become an echo chamber very quickly. Kaylie is not the only young girl who thinks she knows who she wants to be because she made a Pinterest board about it, and she will not be the last. There are already ethical issues surrounding the control of content consumption, and controlling content interpretation is impossible. If it were not for Pinterest, I may have never discovered some of my favorite works of literature. Still, it is hard not to feel regretful that Kaylie views these tragic stories of womanhood—recorded in film, music, and writing—and believes that is as good as it gets.

Billings Senior High School appears to be a tight-knit community, quickly launching a fundraiser for the math teacher that was met with overwhelming support. As for Kaylie, little is known about her medical or legal status. One can only hope that she receives the help she needs. This case mirrors last week’s discussion of young men pulled into dangerous online ideologies. In both instances, social media does not simply reflect insecurity, it hardens it into belief. For young men, that belief may manifest as obsession with dominance, appearance, or control. For young women, it may take the form of romanticized vulnerability, desirability, submission to power, or in Kaylie's case, even violence. 

AI Use Disclosure: Chat GPT for Grammar Corrections

On Christmas Eve 2025, popular Twitch streamer and “looksmaxer” Clavicular was recorded on livestream running over a “stream sniper.” Let’s begin this discussion by defining our terms. Clavicular, also known as Braden Peters, is a newly 20-year-old internet sensation who gained popularity due to his shocking content. Peters is one of the biggest names in the looksmaxing community, a group of people dedicated to “ascending,” or reaching their peak level of attractiveness, through rather unconventional—and in Peters’s case, extreme—methods. These can include, but are most certainly not limited to:

• “Bone-smashing”: a technique aimed at reshaping facial structure by subjecting the face to blunt-force trauma (often with a hammer).

• Plastic surgery: Clavicular has discussed operations as extreme as limb-lengthening surgery, despite being 6'2".

• A myriad of Botox alternatives, all administered at home.

• Drug use: Peters was purportedly just 14 years old when he ordered steroids off the internet for the first time. He started with testosterone and has since self-prescribed more intense drugs, such as trenbolone and crystal meth, which he occasionally doses on stream in pursuit of “lean-maxing.”
  
  

Now the obvious question to ask is: how did this young man end up this way, so consumed with physical attractiveness that he breaks his body down more and more each day in hopes of “ascension”? What was he exposed to during his childhood? Both questions can be answered the same way: social media. Peters grew up on the internet, establishing his presence in looksmaxxing forums sometime around his freshman year of high school. Many of his posts are unsavory, displaying a distaste for people in general—but primarily women—and often recommending dangerous methods to members of his online community. It becomes obvious that this was a child who was extremely insecure, isolated, and vulnerable, and by believing that the key to success is physical attractiveness, he gives himself a sense of importance as well as a sense of control.

Young boys are repeatedly preyed upon by these questionable online role models, promised answers to all of their pubescent problems in exchange for blind devotion. The real turning point came, however, when an anonymous source disclosed his not-so-private drug use to his university, resulting in his expulsion and newfound freedom to dedicate all of his time to his online presence. Thus, the Twitch and Kik streams began. With each drug’s negative side effect, he took more drugs, and with every bit of attention he received, he became increasingly detached from reality.

It is clear that his greatest addiction of all is attention—and it is the one breaking him down the most. We are seeing the emergence of people addicted to being on livestream, convinced that if every moment is recorded, they will find success, without considering that some moments look far worse than others. The same reason a then-21-year-old Jack Doherty insisted on streaming his distraught girlfriend crying after being the victim of an armed robbery is the same reason Clavicular was willing to run down another human being live on stream. To these people, the weight of others’ real-time suffering feels light against a sea of roaring, drama-hungry viewers—especially when those viewers are paying the bills.

Clavicular makes for a fascinating and ever-evolving case study of how delusional and harmful ideas can pollute minds on a scale larger than ever before, thanks to social media. As for the events of that Christmas Eve, Clavicular—dubbed “Vehicular” by viewers—would ultimately claim self-defense, alleging that the “stream sniper” was harassing him and even standing in front of the vehicle. This made for a not-so-surprising twist when viewers heard the car drive completely over the man’s body. Despite the streamer’s wishes that the victim had “hopefully” died, he survived.

As if the ethical dilemma has not already presented itself, consider how we once turned on the TV to a handful of channels, and now we can watch a man be run over by a car over and over again, as many times as we’d like. This level of exposure is not good for us, and it is especially harmful for the younger, more impressionable portion of the population. We have become deeply desensitized to both consuming and exposing extreme content. At just 20 years old, Braden Peters has done more than enough to ruin his life—and all of it is public. It leaves one wondering: how much farther will someone like this go to advance their social media career if they truly have nothing left to lose? How many people will keep watching? For how long will free speech remain the norm across platforms, and how do we address its unintended costs?

AI Use Disclosure: Chat GPT for Grammar Corrections