Lil Miquela
While we’ve all been debating fake news and social data breaches, there’s a new ‘fake’ in town that’s capturing the attention of the internet.
The phenomenon of virtual influencers is causing both confusion and controversy. Take Lil Miquela. Pushing 900k followers, she’s lighting up people’s feeds around the world – and she’s not even real…
So, who is she? Like most Insta-famous, Lil Miquela appears to have a picture-perfect lifestyle. She wears designer clothes, hangs out at all the ‘to be seen’ places and shares regular snaps featuring her celeb pals. Vogue even went as far to dub her ‘Instagram’s new It Girl’. The only catch is that she’s computer-generated.
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With a constant stream of comments trying to decode her morality, it appears that Lil Miquela is somewhat of a modern-day enigma, and a perplexing one at that. The fact that some don’t notice her fakeness highlights just how much we’ve become desensitised to high levels of filtering and curation on Instagram.
It’s commonplace, especially within specific passion points like fashion. Even those that are savvy to her virtual nature, can’t seem to make sense of where the line between reality and fantasy exists. There’s over 2000 conspiracy theories on YouTube debating whether she is 1) based on a real person, 2) run by a real person or 3) created by a music label/brand for publicity.
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Source: creative review