Content creators, stop pretending to be our friends

Every single ad break I've had for weeks has had an advert for a The Nikki Glaser Podcast, and like every advert I get shown too many times I've grown to hate everything about it. Primarily the fact that she refers to her listeners as her “besties”. This isn't anything new or unique but it is the thing that pushed me over the edge.

With a widely recognised loneliness epidemic going on, labeled as genuinely harmful to people's mental health by WHO, people are searching for connection anywhere. And of course parasocial relationships are natural to a certain extent. But I feel like content creators are encouraging these ideas of a closer relationship with little to no regard as to how it affects their audience's mental wellbeing.

It feels deeply manipulative. These influencers will always benefit from your engagement, they are profiting from people's need for connection. They also create content on apps that trap you in your own world.

It's not entirely on the influencers themselves, but they are part of a system that wants to keep you alone. That profits from you staying on your phone engaging with content, seeing ads, and buying products. The systems that were built to connect have reached a point where you have to engage with the online world in a savvy way to build connection instead of distance yourself further.

There's stuff to do about it though, it's possible to escape the algorithms. Follow local groups, unfollow influencers, unfollow companies, if you can't connect these people in a way that they can connect back it might be doing more damage than good. Community is out there and you just need to go out and find it.