Appearing wealthy on social media has become its own industry - Macleans.ca

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Wannabes looking to 'flex' on Instagram and TikTok are using Photoshop, renting luxury goods—and in rare cases, committing criminal fraud:

“Hey yo, rich boy check,” says a male voice.as a well-dressed, well-coiffed teenager flashes images from his lavish lifestyle: crystal chandeliers, Lamborghinis, indoor pools.

Multi-billion-dollar industries are built around the “influence” peddled by popular online figures whose followers have never laid eyes upon them in real life and who almost always appear independently wealthy. Some are explicitly, openly fake: an uncanny-valley “robot” called Lil Miquela has 1.9 million Instagram followers, to whom she recently recommended the Samsung Galaxy S20.It’s hardly surprising that people will go to lengths for a slice of that pie.

Some advice is off-the-wall—take a toilet seat and make it look like you’re sitting by an airplane window. But some of it makes sense. Want to seem like you can afford a Hermes bag? Try one on at the store and take a picture. Just don’t buy it. Want to seem like you dine at high-end restaurants? Post Yelp reviews, with a #richkidsofinstagram hashtag on your posts for good measure.

Neighbours and local politicians were incensed after sports cars and helicopters disrupted the town. One of the helicopter pilots was a convicted drug dealer, thereported, and an ambulance was called to the party after a suspected drug overdose occurred. Shapka, who teaches developmental psychology at the University of British Columbia, says there’s no academic research yet on why people take pains to flex online. But she thinks it’s a combination of exposure to celebrity lifestyles and the knowledge that ordinary people, like never before, can use online personas as a vehicle for success.

Eleftherios Soleas, a PhD candidate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., who is researching motivation, has studied the phenomenon of graduate students using social media to flex—at least, to boast about their success, if not their Chanel outfits. On social media, academic peers see the glass of Prosecco a successful graduate student raises in celebration, not the late nights they spent rewriting articles.

Where’s the blurry line between paying to enjoy a luxurious trip and paying to brand yourself as the type of person who can afford to hang out in hangars and pose in the wilderness with a chopper in the background? Either way, you’re probably taking selfies.

 

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Kinda like the reporting your magazine did when you allegedly defamed that poor guy of trying clear those railway tracks. Like the CBC I don’t believe not too many people read the magazine. Does your magazine receive any corporate welfare monies?

If that isn't the definition of pathetic, I don't know what is.

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