desymbol: “Influencers” Are Renting Studio Sets To Pretend They’re Taking Private Flights

The coronavirus pandemic has hit the travel industry hard and wrecked a lot of people’s plans for this year. Now, our adventures mostly consist of heading to the exotic realm of The Kitchen or visiting the fabled lands of Netflix-on-the-Couch. Sometimes, we even head to the local park. [Gasp.] I know—daring, right?

However, some influencers and travel bloggers are far from happy that their revenue is drying up and that their ability to travel is restricted. So some of them are actually using studio sets to make it look like they’re jetting off to glorious adventures on private planes. One of these sets is in Los Angeles, California, and costs 64 dollars per hour to rent. Now, people are taking note and warning others that what they see in their social media feeds could all be fake.

People have noticed that some influencers are using a studio set in LA to pretend they’re flying on a private jet

Image credits: maisonmeIissa

Here are some examples of influencers who appear to have used the same set

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Image credits: BriannaValido

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Found another one. I really thought that they were jetting of somewhere pic.twitter.com/dcwAosBK9p

— Shante (@thorkiebabyz) September 26, 2020

Image credits: thorkiebabyz

Here’s what the inside of the studio set looks like. It’s not too expensive to rent out

Image credits: peerspace

Image credits: maisonmeIissa

The influencer industry has been hit hard by the pandemic and people have had to adapt. Fashion and travel influencers in particular aren’t doing as strongly as before. Meanwhile, fitness, gardening, cooking, and other categories have taken off and influencers are doing very well with them as the public’s priorities change.

Bored Panda previously spoke about the changes the pandemic has brought upon the influencer industry with Brooke Erin Duffy who is an associate professor at Cornell University.

Most of the influencers she’s interviewed think of their careers as profoundly unstable. That’s because they believe they’re at the whims of advertisers, audiences, and social media platforms’ algorithms.

Duffy said that the pandemic has exacerbated issues within the industry and caused some influencers to branch out and develop “different vestiges of their brand persona.” Especially on TikTok.

This could help explain why some influencers decide to fake their travel photos, in order to keep their followers’ attention. However, this is also risky because once found out, the influencers could lose a large portion of their fans (and, more importantly, revenue).

In Duffy’s opinion, the pandemic has sparked two interrelated responses in the influencer industry, neither of which is entirely new.

“The first involves ringing the death knell on influencers because of brands’ dwindling advertising budgets; the second stems from the belief that aspirational imagery and markers of privilege are less and less relevant in a moment of widespread social and economic upheaval,” she said.

“The latter response, crucially, seems to be especially gendered. Indeed, while women influencers have long faced backlash for being what audiences deem inauthentic, excessively self-promotional, or ‘fake,’ the critical blowback seems to have intensified in the wake of the pandemic.”