YouTuber Natalia Taylor decided to dupe her fans into believing that she was in Bali when she was actually shooting at an Ikea store.
The influencer shared how she faked her Bali holiday on her YouTube channel on a video titled “i FAKED a vacation at IKEA”.
She called it the perfect place to “fake an influencer holiday and lie to all of her followers”.
Taylor said many influencers had been caught in the act before, and decided to test the theory and see whether her followers would fall for it. Spoiler: most did!
Taylor is not the only influencer to fake it.
Travel blogger Tupi Saravia was outed in August for photoshopping her images with fake clouds. Saravia told BuzzFeed News last year she uses a photo-editing app to enhance or impose clouds into her photos when the camera does not pick it up.
Then there's Johanna Olsson who photoshopped images of her at Paris landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower. She claimed at the time the reason she photoshopped the images was she did not think it “looked nice”. She still maintains she was in Paris.
YouTube and Instagram’s Gabbie Hanna faked attending Coachella last year. The influencer posted a series of pictures of herself at the festival, some with her wearing colourful wigs, in front of the stage and some seated on the lawns. She later shared the inspiration behind the fake travel posts and revealed what went into sharing the “fake images” in a 20-minute video on YouTube.
Lastly, UK blogger Carolyn Stritch “treated” herself to a trip to Disneyland for her 22nd birthday. The 32-year-old downloaded FaceApp and uploaded a heavily-edited photo to Facebook.
She decided to trick her thousands of followers into believing she was 10 years younger and in Disneyland, which most of them believed. She did so to show that not everything you see on social media is what it seems.