Stop scrolling. Take a long, slow inhale. Mute the group chat speculation and say to yourself, “I do not need to know what happened between Alix Earle and Alex Cooper”. No, really. There's no reason for you to care about a feud between the world's biggest influencers because it's probably all fake anyway. Seriously, it's all a PR stunt. You'll be sooo embarrassed when their joint Call Her Daddy episode drops next week. Just watch.
Sound familiar? If you've been following the ongoing Alix v Alex drama (cheat sheet here), you'll be more than familiar with this take. It's in the comment section under Cooper's TikTok video that triggered the media frenzy on Monday ("Alix Earle […] stop hiding behind other people and just say it yourself.”). It's even been suggested in a piece by The New York Times. Everyone is completely consumed by the drama – and everyone convinced it's fake. We're all holding our breath, waiting for the big gotcha reveal, when we can all sit back and smugly say: “Told you so.”
This instinctual scepticism is not without logic. As social media has broken down traditional barriers between celebrities and fans, the mechanics of publicity more visible than ever, we've all become more literate in the game of PR stunts. We know, for example, that when two actors starring in the same film suddenly get all flirty, it's probably to help promote said film (we're looking at you Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson). Or that when high-res photos of a topless celebrity caught on a run, muscles glistening in the sun, there's a chance they might have called the paparazzi themselves (Jeremy Allen White). Thanks to a never-ending feedback loop of celeb news and social media commentary, we're all well-versed and primed to call out deception when we see it – at least, that's what we like to think.
But the internet is changing and the fakes are getting harder to spot. Only a few weeks ago, the world was duped into jumping on a hate campaign against Chappell Roan, after she was accused of asking a bodyguard to confront an 11-year-old fan (she didn't, by the way). Now, we know that nearly a quarter of the posts attacking Roan were generated by bots, which fanned the flames of outrage into a full-blown witch hunt. We've seen this before, of course. Amber Heard was also a victim of a bot campaign during her trial against Johnny Depp, while its suspected that astroturfing – AKA the planting of fake stories and social media accounts – played a hand in the 2024 Blake Lively backlash, later revealed to be an orchestrated smear campaign by the team of her It Ends with Us co-star Justin Baldoni. So many people fell for those misogyny-fuelled deceptions. And so many felt shame when they realised they'd be duped.
The other major fraud wreaking havoc on our feeds? AI. Whether you've fallen for a cute video of bunnies bouncing on a trampoline, or been tricked by an uncanny deep fake, trying to decipher whether or not you're looking at something real is harder than ever before. And it's getting sinister. From Grok-generated nudes to AI-generated videos of airstrikes in Iran, the harms of fake content now go beyond the slop-ification of culture and pose a genuine threat to society. It's all getting a bit heavy – and we need to protect ourselves against the onslaught of misinformation.
You might be wondering what all that has to do with a silly little influencer feud. But this is the context that's helped seed doubt over the legitimacy of Alix v Alex. As we constantly brace ourselves for the next scam, distrust has become the default. Scepticism is now a necessary tool to survive the internet. The fact that people are obsessing over whether the drama is real just as much as what they're fighting about is a reflection of our times. We're so used to being lied to that it's hard to believe anything at all.
Who can blame us? No one wants to feel like they've been taken for a ride – not least by petty online beef. In the grand scheme of things, whatever's going on between Alix Earle and Alex Cooper is pretty inconsequential compared to all the other hazards on our feeds. Wouldn't it feel good, for once, to be one step ahead of the hoax? To know that we can still sniff out fakes, that our grasp on reality isn't totally slipping. To have the glorious pleasure of sitting back, in a week's time, and saying: “Told you so.”
