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Young women are attracting hundreds of thousands of online followers by declaring themselves alone and friendless. “Loneliness” and “solitude” influencers are gaining traction by posting their nights in, accompanied by captions such as: “POV you have no friends and live alone so this is how you spend your Friday night.” Americans have worried for years about whether social media is making us lonely, but these influencers demonstrate that loneliness itself has become content.
This trend points to a cultural problem, one bigger than a few solitary female influencers. Social media is not just chipping away at real-world interactions but actively rewarding people for performing loneliness. Platforms and their users can cash in by glamorizing behavior that inherently makes society — and content producers themselves — worse off. One 24-year-old influencer told New York Magazine that after titling her first TikTok video “You’re single, you don’t have kids, you live alone, and you’re an introvert,” it drew around 200,000 views.
Society gets more of what it rewards. Another “full-time influencer” rebranded her account away from posts about her dog to videos of herself as a “single introvert” after one Friday night post about having few local friends “blew up”. If being a lonely, friendless influencer is a successful online brand, we shouldn’t be surprised when it produces more people who are lonely and friendless.
Continue reading the entire piece here at UnHerd
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Carolyn D. Gorman is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.