Confusion Is the New Clickbait

My problem is my habit of scrolling through Instagram Reels only at night, right before I go to sleep. Defenses worn down by the day, I am susceptible to nonsense, and unsure of whether what I’m seeing is “real.”

For example: I saw a video the other night of a young woman sitting in a normal-looking bedroom and telling a straight-faced story about how she had been proposed to at a Taylor Swift concert, and said no. “I was not saying no to the man. Like, my boyfriend is the love of my life. I’m gonna marry him,” she explained. “I was saying no to the proposal, if that makes sense.” She said the concert was in Liverpool, and she has no emotional tie to that city. She has no real passion for Taylor Swift, in fact. She doesn’t even have “Love Story,” the song during which the proposal was made, saved on Spotify. “It just wasn’t specific to me. You know? The girls that get it, get it.” I didn’t get it. Was she serious, and quite strange, or was I being tricked for some purpose I may never understand?

Another time, I watched a video from a woman whose Instagram bio reads “girly girl + future girl mom.” She was demonstrating how she does a full face of makeup every morning before her husband wakes up. “This is just what makes me feel good about myself,” she said. Like the people in the comments, I wished I knew whether this was a joke. Then I came across some guy telling the story of a woman who’d sent him “trick-or-treat candy” after he had ghosted her—he thought this was funny, and now they are married. No one in the comments thought this one was a joke, but some suggested it might be a stupid lie told for no reason.

Our befuddlement appears to be the point. These videos are short and, like all other Instagram Reels, they auto-play on a loop. That’s how they succeed. The people who produce them don’t want me to understand whether they’re sincere; they care only that I take the time to wonder—and that the loop keeps looping while I do. As such, their work appears to represent a novel form of content, distinct from any other classic form of baiting for attention (trolling, pranks, hoaxes, etc.). The videos aren’t meant to make you angry or upset. They aren’t playing off your curiosity. They’re just trying to confuse you—and they work.

In the past, engagement-baiters could win on social media only if you clicked on their post, or shared their post, or responded to their silly prompt. But those efforts weren’t hard to thwart. On Facebook, you could stare at a post for a few seconds, riddle out its hidden aims, then scroll past once you decided not to be fooled. On Reddit, you could give a suspiciously sensational story a read or two before participating in the comments.

But different rules apply to modern social video platforms, where the algorithms are especially aggressive at stuffing viral content into people’s feeds. Traditional engagement metrics—likes and shares and comments—are still important, but creators on these platforms are seeking views above all else. (This was the case even with older social video platforms like Vine.) Racking up a lot of views is crucial for achieving greater visibility, as well as moneymaking opportunities—and confusing people is a pretty innovative way to do it. Let’s say you come across an auto-playing TikTok, YouTube Short, or Instagram Reel that you find a bit unsettling. By the time you’ve watched it to the end a couple times, or spent however long it takes to make your judgment on what the video really means and whether it’s sincere, you’ve already given the creators what they wanted. When I saw that young woman talk about rejecting her boyfriend’s marriage proposal at the Eras Tour, it didn’t matter that I didn’t click, didn’t buy, didn’t like, and didn’t share. I only watched the video—and then, because I was nonplussed, I watched again.

Emily Hund, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and the author of the recent book The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media, told me that these videos are “really smart and almost artful.” Instead of shocking or enraging you, they merely need to be weird enough to give you pause. Hund sees them as a response to users who have spent the past 10 years looking at influencers and doubting whether what they’re saying or presenting is sincere. The new creators “are messing with our conceptions of authenticity in a way that really makes the viewer feel it,” Hund told me. “Previous genres of influencer content didn’t incite the viewer to be so uncomfortable.”

[Read: Trolling’s surprising origins in fishing]

The proposal video turned out to be the work of an online trickster named Louisa Melcher who’s posted on X about having “niche internet fame for being a liar.” (More accurately she has gotten niche internet fame by being a liar.) Sometimes people will post in the comments on her Instagram videos to make this clear for others. For instance, on a recent video in which she gave a chipper presentation about how to make money by selling the books out of your neighborhood’s Little Free Library, somebody responded, “I am BEGGING people on this app to learn to recognize Louisa Melcher.” So some viewers are gaining media literacy re: Louisa Melcher. Others are not. The Daily Mail has credulously written up Melcher’s videos not once but twice.

When I went to the Instagram profile of Robby Witt, the Los Angeles man whose wife supposedly won him over with Halloween candy, I confirmed that his story, like seemingly everything else he says on the internet, is untrue. “I try to be pretty transparent,” Witt told me. “My bio is more transparent than The Onion’s.” This is fair to say, as The Onion’s Instagram bio is “America’s Finest News Source,” while Witt’s includes “Fictional Stories and Satire.” But most people who come across his videos never see his profile. They watch him tell fake-seeming anecdotes only in a decontextualized feed full of all kinds of other strangers doing all kinds of other improbable things that viewers may also have to watch a few times to understand how they should respond.

Melcher’s stories addle viewers because she comes off as kind of a sociopath. Witt’s mostly get people off-balance by presenting banal fantasies. Another common format for confusion-bait appeals to the human instinct to tell people that the way they’re doing things is wrong. If you spend any time on Instagram or TikTok, you will see users correcting the way that other people wash their face, season a chicken breast, or refinish old cabinets. This happens so often in the comments on sincere videos that confusion-baiters have caught on and started doing things wrong on purpose. I’m pretty confident that this explains the woman who posts about what she makes her “blue collar husband” for dinner. She wears a stony expression and never explains herself. The meals are absurd to the point of unbelievability, but viewers can’t seem to resist asking whether she is serious, and telling her that if she is, then she is harming her husband’s health by serving him old pizza fried in canola oil.

Some confusion-baiters get less confusing as you see them more. Alexia Delarosa, a stay-at-home mom who sometimes gets called a “tradwife” (though she doesn’t identify as one), makes a point of being inconsistent: This is how she grabs attention. Many of her posts appear to be sincere. I can easily believe that she’d bake a chocolate cake from scratch, and that she keeps chickens. But other videos are more ambiguous. Does she really cook dinner for her family in an off-the-shoulder gown? Does she really press empty egg cartons into homemade paper? When you first come across her posts, it takes some time, and several auto-plays, to figure out the answer.

[Read: Sharon McMahon has no use for rage-baiting]

When I spoke with Delarosa, she confirmed that she really did make paper as a fun craft project with her kids, but it wasn’t because she just didn’t feel like going to the store, as suggested in the video’s caption. That part was a joke. She jokes often and kind of out of spite. For whatever reason, her early videos about making jam and butter got powerful negative reactions from viewers. “People said, ‘This is so unrealistic. No stay-at-home mom lives like this. This is so crazy,’” she told me. “I started playing things up a little bit, almost poking fun at myself, recognizing that what I’m doing seems a little over-the-top and silly.”

She was candid about the fact that she will deliberately try to make people pause and wonder whether she’s for real. If the papermaking had been presented as a craft project, fewer people would have paid attention. Presented as the activity of a bizarre woman who assigns herself an obscene number of unnecessary chores, the same video was harder to scroll past. “People are more likely to stop and watch it,” she said. “That’s part of creating content and getting views.” She’s noticed that some people now come to her page just for the comment sections, which are entertainment in themselves. “They want to see who gets the video or who doesn’t, who’s been here long enough and gets what I’m doing.”

Whatever their approach, the confusion-baiters are receiving a lot of attention. (Delarosa and the woman cooking for her blue-collar husband each have hundreds of thousands of followers.) What they’ll get up to next remains unclear. Nathan Fielder notwithstanding, it’s hard to make a career out of being inscrutable. Witt told me he has been making videos for 20 months and doesn’t know where he’s going with it. He only just got an agent. He still has a full-time office job. When his co-workers come up to him and say they’ve just seen one of his videos, he says, “that’s how I know something is really popping.”

What I learned from talking with him is that he is actually very nice. Also: that some people are totally comfortable with lying to everyone in the world, and they wouldn’t even be embarrassed if somebody they knew saw them doing it. This is another thing I find confusing. But it’s not a joke—it’s true.