In an article hosted on the Slate website, American student Robert McCoy recounted how he unintentionally became “the most recent TikTok meme” due to the short video that went viral in which he greeted his girlfriend, Lauren Zarras, in a rather clumsy way. , who had surprised him in September by visiting him at the university after a period of long-distance relationship.
The story of McCoy, known on the internet as “Couch Guy” for the sofa he was sitting on when Zarras arrived, is an example of how some videos shared on social networks to arouse positive reactions among friends can, when viewed by thousands of people, end up being distorted to have a completely opposite effect. With the result of attracting interpretations and judgments on trivial and everyday situations by complete strangers, and of ridiculing or humiliating the protagonists. It's a phenomenon linked to the way TikTok works, but which is often further magnified by the media chasing and reporting on this type of content in an attempt to appeal to younger audiences.
McCoy said he was at the center of “frame-by-frame body language analysis, impromptu diagnoses of mental illness, comparisons with known killers and general discussions about his” negative energies “” by what are called “internet detectives.” “(In English” internet sleuths “), people who obsessively investigate and analyze videos or posts published online trying to solve alleged mysteries, developing more or less credible theories.
It all started with a 19-second video shared on Zarras' TikTok profile on September 21st. In the video, shot with the complicity of friends and accompanied by a song by Ellie Goulding, the girl is seen entering the apartment where McCoy is sitting with other people: initially, as understandable, he seems bewildered by the situation, and after a few seconds gets up from the sofa to hug her.
@laurenzarras
robbie had no idea
♬ still falling for you – audiobear
McCoy said the video had been shared with Zarras' few hundred followers and had been commented fondly by their close friends. Within hours, however, more and more people who did not know the couple had begun to criticize McCoy's attitude, considering him cold, and to suspect that he was hiding something for this.
Many TikTok users had speculated that McCoy cheated on his girlfriend because he didn't immediately get up from the couch after seeing her, while others noted that he hugged her “like hugging an aunt at Christmas dinner.” Then there were those who had seen possible “alarm bells” in the fact that he was sitting with three other girls or who seemed to have quickly taken his phone from the girl who was sitting next to him.
Within just three days, the video had garnered 60 million views (now it has nearly 65). Videos with the hashtag #CouchGuy, McCoy writes, currently have more than 1 billion.
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After the viral spread of Zarras' post, the story of the “Couch Guy” was told by various sites, including Rolling Stone and the New York Post, commented on many TV programs and copied and teased in many other videos on TikTok . The American Eagle clothing company advertised a Halloween costume based on how he was dressed in the video; Trevor Noah, the host of the popular TV show The Daily Show, had jokingly called the morbid curiosity of TikTok users in reconstructing his story “the most compelling forensic investigations since the Kennedy assassination”.
The problem is that if the “Couch Guy” meme was initially a “lighthearted” thing, according to McCoy it “became disturbing” when TikTok users began to intrude “obsessively” in his life and those of his girlfriend. and friends. Attention of this kind “is usually reserved for the Kardashians or the British royal family,” McCoy said in the article published in Slate, and not for people who “had no desire to become famous on the internet, much less to be infamous” .
He told, for example, of students at his university who stuck notes under the door of his room to ask him questions about his private life, and of others who lived on the same campus and had covertly threatened him, writing on the social network that they could ” check who came and went from his apartment in secret ». Still other users had leaked his personal information online, including his name, date of birth and address (a behavior called “doxing”), or had criticized him saying that he could have deceived his girlfriend, “but not all TikTok “.
According to McCoy, the exaggerated curiosity towards the story would be linked to the mechanism by which the TikTok algorithm proposes viral contents among the suggestions. Unlike other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, in fact, the algorithms that establish the visibility of content on TikTok are largely based on the amplification of content from accounts with few followers, if they work. This, says McCoy, makes it “easier than ever to throw ordinary people into the spotlight without them wanting to.”
Her story was also propagated by some newspapers, which created even more interest around the theories surrounding her, and by some online magazines, such as those that had consulted body language experts to find hidden meaning in her movements in the world. video.
McCoy said it was like being under a huge “collective magnifying glass” for him, Zarras and their friends. Interest in their story waned rather quickly (the day with the maximum number of searches for the term “Couch Guy” on Google Trends was October 5, two weeks after sharing the video) and in the last two months he has used to dealing with being recognized on the street and occasional requests to take a selfie from strangers.
At the same time, citing the obsession of social network users for the case of Gabby Petito, the American blogger found dead after a trip with her boyfriend, or that of Sabrina Prater, a trans woman insulted and suspected of being a serial killer after sharing a video of him dancing in a basement, said he was concerned that his is not “an isolated case.”
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As Vox has effectively summarized, in these situations there are “the same dynamics linked to the justice of the crowd” that are typically found in investigations such as those to unmask the serial killer Zodiac, and which however turn against normal people. In the words of technology expert Ryan Broderick, also quoted by Vox, the algorithm of TikTok is rather “sticky” and the trends that go viral have a big impact on user behavior. According to Broderick, the obsessive attention to cases like that of the “Couch Guy” is a manifestation of a problematic and controversial culture of investigation on the internet: all those who frequent the platform think they have the right to analyze “every bit of information shared on the app as if it were a criminal case “, and to form opinions of something and someone they do not know often based on videos of a few seconds.
In the Slate article, McCoy noted that often the funny idea behind a meme seems to overshadow the human dimension of people. “When you see these videos on the 'For You' section of TikTok,” he writes, “I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries that you have to solve”.
