Justin Bieber’s scandalous eating methods baffled people last week after a photo of the long-haired vagrant biting into the middle of a burrito went viral.
The bizarre Justin Bieber burrito incident reminds us not to believe everything online
Everyone was fooled
Everyone was fooled
Even a casual burrito connoisseur can tell you burritos are eaten from top to bottom, using the tin foil to guide your eating path. Bieber’s supposed decision to bite directly into the middle — resulting in beans, cheese, meat, and lettuce spilling all over the ground — is absurd. Multiple news organizations picked up on the photo, blogging about Bieber’s latest mishap, with Vice even going so far as to re-create the experiment. Everyone came to the same conclusion: either Bieber has never eaten a burrito or someone’s pulling a fast one on the world.
The latter is true.
Yes Theory, a popular YouTube channel that recently made headlines by joining Will Smith for a bungee-jumping session into the Grand Canyon, orchestrated the entire burrito-eating incident. Everything about the photo is fake, including numerous reports suggesting Bieber was the one in the photo.
“Not a single person is questioning whether it’s actually Justin Bieber.”
Yes Theory brought Bieber’s Instagram influencer doppelgänger, Brad Sousa, to Los Angeles to pose in the shot. They spent the day driving around LA and staging different events that could make for a viral story, but the team put their bets on the weird burrito shot. To make sure it was seen by absolutely everyone on the internet — or at least, by people who would turn it from a random photo into a conversation-starter — they uploaded the photo to Reddit’s r/pics and r/mildlyinfuriating subreddits to boost circulation.
“Not a single person is questioning whether it’s actually Justin Bieber,” one of the team members says in the video.
Although Yes Theory’s prank is nothing more than that — a harmless joke done time and time again in the past on shows like JFL Gags and Jackass — it does signal a growing issue on the internet. Misinformation spreads all the time, especially on sites like Reddit and Twitter, where photos are shared and retweeted thousands of times by people who are responding to whether something amuses or intrigues them, rather than whether it’s true. These photos or stories eventually become big enough that news organizations respond to growing pandemonium online.
“The thing is to get this to go viral, we have to have people in the news think it’s real.”
The Yes Theory team addresses the idea toward the beginning of the video, as they discuss how to ensure their prank is successful.
“The thing is, to get this to go viral, we have to have people in the news think it’s real,” one member says. “Those are the people that are going to spread it, right?”
Conor, a Yes Theory member who posted the photo to Reddit, told Vanity Fair he was convinced it was Justin Bieber. Vanity Fair ran the story as such. Paper Mag, Vice, Cosmopolitan, and even the BBC all picked up on the story. Yes Theory’s plan to spread a hoax went exactly as planned. Just about everyone fell for it.
Still, it’s heartening to see that as quickly as the story went viral, debunkers appeared on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit almost as quickly asking for proof that it actually was Bieber in the photo. In a world where photos and even video posted online are often manufactured for nefarious ends, that kind of response is a sign of new-age media literacy. Publications like Vanity Fair tried getting to the bottom of the story by seeking out the original Reddit poster and digging for more information. Celebrity gossip is fun, but spending more time investigating a viral photo or story, even when it’s tabloid nonsense, goes a long way.
Fake Bieber eating a burrito sideways is a harmless prank — and a pretty good one. It’s also a reminder to question everything on the internet. Especially Reddit.
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