By Kalhan Rosenblatt -
NBC News
What should be an innocent video of a young woman surprising her long-distance boyfriend
has become, for all the wrong reasons, the new obsession of the social network TikTok
.
The clip, posted on September 21 by Lauren Zarras, shows her boyfriend, Robbie, now known online as
Couch Guy
(the guy on the couch), surrounded by friends and sitting with three other girls on a couch.
Many of the 126,000 people who have commented on the post, which as of Thursday had been viewed more than 60 million times,
suggested that Robbie was not happy to see Zarras.
Some even accused him of being unfaithful.
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Shortly after it went viral,
hundreds of TikTokers began meticulously perusing the video, zooming in
and out of parts of the footage to see if Robbie's phone was being held by a girl next to him on the couch and analyzing the reactions of the girls. other people in the room.
Zarras did not respond to an interview request.
It's just the latest example of when people scrutinize internet videos.
While this content is often well-intentioned, it can also be problematic.
"It's a phenomenon where people gravitate toward the mysteries of the human condition and experience,
whether it's loss or, in this case, love and relationships," explains Brooke Erin Duffy, associate professor of communication at the University of Cornell.
Experts say that the desire to analyze these types of videos for clues, from something as harmless as the
Couch Guy
to something as serious as murder,
is a symptom of people's obsession with crime and the desire to be part of a gossip.
[Experts insist on the dangers of the lack of control over social networks]
Rookie detectives and online investigations have long been a niche on the internet.
Websleuths, a site launched in 1999, is a community of thousands of people who focus on crime and missing persons.
These days, a new community of detectives has thrived on TikTok
,
spawning
a culture of content creators who have become famous for their ability to uncover treasures about the self-proclaimed protagonists of the internet.
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Sometimes these creators act as bloodhounds to identify racists and those who spread false news on topics such as COVID-19 vaccines.
In other cases,
the desire to discover details about someone online can spiral out of control
in a case like
Couch Guy's
.
Before him, many netizens took notice of the recent disappearance and death of Gabby Petito.
[Brian Laundrie's dad shows the police the trails his son used in the swamp where they are looking for him]
Some said their search helped draw attention to the case: The #GabbyPetito hashtag had more than 1.4 billion views as of Thursday.
Petito's body was found on September 19, and
police credited a YouTube video with helping them focus the search area.
Others say it did more harm than good, as TikTok served as the platform for many conspiracy theory videos about Petito's death.
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Duffy explained that the
Couch Guy
clip
departs from the nature of the online investigation because "the stakes are not as high" as, say, a murder case.
However, he said, “that so many people came together to reconstruct different elements of the video and used production techniques to focus on different elements of this very short clip, speaks to the culture of collective research on the internet and how this becomes a form of social bonding ”.
[How to teach children and adolescents to use social networks like Instagram?]
Morgan Forte, 23,
You've experienced how it feels when it seems like the entire
internet has collectively decided to tear your life apart
based on a few seconds clip
.
Forte, from Jacksonville, Florida, said she posted a short video of her parents dancing a few years ago.
Some claimed that their mom looked grumpy on the recording.
When the video exploded, getting about 15 million views, some users began to say that Forte's father should leave his mother for his behavior in the clip.
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"They thought they knew a lot about my parents' lives and their relationship
from this it was literally 10 seconds of them dancing," said Forte.
"They just took it and created their own narrative," he lamented.
Forte said
Couch Guy
felt similar to his experience.
"This mob mentality is massive cyberbullying
,
"
said Forte, who made his own TikTok defending the Zarras video.
[Facebook dismisses accusations of the former employee who testified in the Senate]
Another user of this social network, SoMyMomsATherapist, 47, a licensed marriage and family therapist and trauma psychotherapist, supported Forte's concerns about people inquiring into the life of the
Couch Guy
.
"Everybody thinks now that he is in
CSI,
"
claimed the therapist, who asked to be identified only by his username for security reasons.
"I think in this culture there is a lot of going in and investigating everything we can find, but we forget that they are real people."
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Some users who commented on the
Couch Guy
video
or made their own trying to decipher Robbie's behavior said that his intentions were good.
Precious Fregene, 18, originally from Texas, said she made a video about the
Couch Guy
because she
wanted to warn Zarras that something was wrong with the recording
.
“We started this to teach (Zarras): 'Hey, these are red flags.
Please don't ignore them, ”Fregene said.
"But now people are trying to 'solve' it in order to prove it wrong," he acknowledged.
According to her, if she were in Zarras's position, she would want someone to tell her that something is wrong with their relationship.
One factor that influences the flood of users who have commented on the
Couch Guy
saga
is that
the TikTok algorithm pushes content with many interactions to the users' “For You” page
, TikTok's home section with infinite scrolling.
"I have heard time and again that the experience of creators is that
platforms algorithmically reward drama
, and for them this means that their experience of hate and harassment is accentuated
, because it plays well in the business model of networks", Duffy said.
A post from a young woman surprising her boyfriend, now known online as the 'Couch Guy', has become TikTok's new obsession. NBC News / Getty Images
Forte and SoMyMomsATherapist, whose videos defending Zarras and Robbie have been pushed by the algorithm to the 'For you' page, said they
have been attacked in the comments for going against the "accepted narrative"
that Robbie was unfaithful to Zarras.
“What I noticed was that there were a lot of people, that if I said, 'This is my clinical observation,' they would say, 'No,” SoMyMomsATherapist said.
"What I hear there is: 'I can't even consider that, because then I would have to lose what he gives me.'
Because I think it gives them something ”.
[People in the United States check their phone about 96 times a day, according to research]
Forte's comment section got so egregious - one user even accused her of sympathizing with a murder suspect - that she nearly deleted her video.
But then he remembered his message:
someone's life cannot and should not be deciphered in a clip of a few seconds
.
He knew he had to keep the video posted.
"I think people need to hear what I have to say," Forte said.
"I keep it.
I do not regret".
