Nostalgia functions like a drug: It's mind-altering, it's habit-forming, and it can derail your whole day if you don't use it responsibly. And much like a key with some white powder on it being passed around at a party, nostalgia consumption is easy to miss if you're not paying attention—whether it be in listicles about the best rom-coms of the early 2000s or in reboots and remakes of our favorite television shows and movies of yore. Take, for example, Ariana Grande's "Thank U, Next" video, with its re-creations of memorable scenes from Mean Girls, 13 Going on 30, and Legally Blonde.
Naturally, this demand has given way to nostalgia dealers, people who proliferate on social media with the type of posts designed to stop us in our tracks and engage with our memories. That engagement, in turn, gives these purveyors content that can be monetized for cold, hard cash. And whether you're sentimental for Y2K-core, indie sleaze, pop-star music videos, or the two good years J. Lo and Ben Affleck had before their second divorce, there's an online dispensary waiting for you in the form of a verified account that knows exactly what you want to see. But what happens when these accounts need pure, uncut nostalgia to keep the cash flowing, but there are no relevant anniversaries or news to post about?
Simple: Make something up.
"We accept information if it seems like it's coming from a reputable source, which now can be anybody with a blue check."
As with any other profitable market, digital nostalgia has its share of bad actors ready to game the system with a little clever deception. When Twitter became X and implemented premium tiers to ostensibly offer verified creators a cut of a post's ad revenue, engagement farming on the site increased exponentially, incentivizing users to get people talking about the content they post in any way possible. Although X's creator monetization standards stipulate that users are forbidden from misleading people to engage with their content, this hasn't stopped a growing market of pop culture news and nostalgia accounts from fudging and falsifying their post s for a payout, giving rise to massive amounts of quickly spreading misinformation. And when fabrications are consumed alongside the truth, our ability to appreciate the true value of pop culture and its history evaporates.
On Aug. 3, an account called Sleepin' on Gems posted, "14 years ago, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé released their smash hit, 'Telephone,' " along with a clip from the song's music video. My brow immediately furrowed. As a devoted Gaga fan in my teenage years, I remember "Telephone" like it was yesterday. The song dropped in November 2009, with the music video following in March 2010—nowhere close to August.
Confusion gave way to frustration after an examination of Sleepin' on Gems' feed revealed that the account pulls random pop songs from the past to trigger nostalgia in its followers. But instead of just posting the songs, the account phrases the posts as though the songs are celebrating anniversaries today. And the more popular the song was, the more likely users will be willing to commemorate its birthday by engaging with a misleading post.
All of this distorted nostalgia content goes out to Sleepin on Gems' 49,000 followers, with the "Telephone" post amassing 3.4 million views and more than 10,000 likes on X. One might argue that what Sleepin' on Gems, who did not respond to requests for comment, posted isn't completely untrue. Fourteen years ago—at some point in 2010—the "Telephone" video was released. But these posts are worded in a spurious way that allows users to be misled into thinking that the videos or songs were released on the day the account posts them. Other posts, however, have been entirely incorrect. The same day Sleepin' on Gems posted about "Telephone," the account dispatched a clip of Britney Spears' debut single "… Baby One More Time," saying it had dropped 24 years prior. Except "… Baby One More Time" will turn 26 at the end of September. Sleepin' on Gems isn't the only account boosting incorrect dates and unsourced info either. The trend extends to other nostalgia accounts, artist fan accounts, and even your favorite pop culture updates pages.
Subscribers to X Premium stand to make close to $300 per payout cycle. That number isn't huge, but consider how much it is for the 30 seconds it takes to paste a link to an embedded video, do some erroneous quick math, and hit post. The money might be the driving force behind the growing amount of misinformation.
Jake Bookbinder, a senior digital strategist at the agency Beautiful Digital who has worked on social campaigns for Rita Ora and Taylor Swift's "Eras" tour opener Maisie Peters, further attributes this trend to a lack of proper social media regulation. "In terms of misinformation, this is what podcast culture, YouTube video essays, and educational TikToks have done to people," Bookbinder said. "We accept information if it seems like it's coming from a reputable source, which now can be anybody with a blue check."
X gives blue-check verification to anyone willing to pay for its premium services; this has opened a can of worms, especially among pop culture and nostalgia accounts. While no other users have come close to matching the worldwide popularity of Pop Crave—which has become its own glorified wire service—imitation accounts with similar names and blue checks have cropped up all over X. Take Pop Tingz, which boasts 189,000 followers and specifies in its bio that it posts rumors and opinions as well as sourced news. That mixture inevitably produces confusion for the account's followers, causing them to run with undefined rumors as fact.
In January 2023, Pop Tingz wrote that the video for Miley Cyrus' song "Flowers" was shot in a house used by her ex-husband, Liam Hemsworth, to cheat on Cyrus "with more than 14 women while they were married." The post went viral, causing the rumor to be parroted by others, to the tune of tens of millions of views (not to mention the shock of Julia Fox when it spread to TikTok), until more-reputable sources debunked it.
Pop Tingz's owner, who goes by Moe, tells me that posting rumors is part of the job. "I always make sure to label them as such, to not be called out for posting fake news," Moe added. (It's worth noting that the post about the "Flowers" house included no such caveat.) "The Miley post, or any other rumor post that may go viral, is usually sent in by labels or fans or could be what several accounts have been saying [that's] gaining traction."
"I've noticed this behavior on a few occasions," says X user Gagasyuyi, whose account posts a mixture of current pop culture and nostalgia to its 87,000 followers. "There was even a time when I unknowingly participated by reposting content based on inaccurate information. Since then, I've made it a priority to thoroughly research and verify the accuracy of the information and dates before sharing anything." But Gagasyuyi, who declined to give their name for this story, added that although they believe that authenticity is important in their content, they aren't bothered by incorrect dates or engagement farming from others, as long as it doesn't negatively affect other artists or creators.
Users love to recycle the "Media literacy is dead" joke when approaching art, and while our ability to correctly identify misinformation, propaganda, and hearsay isn't gone entirely, it is dwindling. The number of people who bought into the rumor about the "Flowers" video—and a related piece of gossip about Cyrus' sartorial choices in the clip—is, frankly, shocking. But the gossip seems as if it might just be true, especially given that Cyrus released the song a day before Hemsworth's birthday. Often, a close-enough proximity to the truth is sufficient for everyday social media scrollers to run with it as fact. "It has to make sense and not be very outrage ous," Moe said of how they choose which rumors to post on Pop Tingz. "By now, though, I know which accounts and pages to believe more than others."
It's a swift reminder of how easy it has become to read something in passing and believe it, just because the person posting it has falsely positioned themselves as an authority.
Taking these rumors at face value is a major problem not just because they're inaccurate but because they feed a larger degradation of the importance of culture. If you're a person who cares about pop culture—someone who appreciates artistry and the work it takes to make media compelling enough to be deemed genuinely impactful—you know how significant the moments surrounding it are. The times before, during, and after are all part of the history of whatever individual piece of art we examine. So placing that art outside time, or concocting fallacies about its artist's intentions, has the potential to skew our perception of the art moving forward.
"These things matter," Bookbinder said, stressing the consequence of remembering a full cultural timeline. "Just for the sake of getting engagement, people are able or willing to throw those standards out the window, basically removing the context from any kind of history." He specifically cites the way Pop Crave composes its posts, saying that there is specific psychology to the way its feed operates and rallies its massive follower base.
Pop Crave "is the first-ever truly incidental news source, where you're being told things in a way that is being framed as breaking news, but it's something that would not have crossed your mind otherwise," Bookbinder said. We see Pop Crave posts appear in our feed and, because of our familiar relationship with pop culture, feel encouraged to add our thoughts to the pile. The account is a middleman between social media civilians and major news sources, a springboard for endless user engagement.
No one likes to admit that they've fed the machine by buying into these crafty pleas for engagement either. I've spent time casually correcting friends and family members who have unintentionally brought misinformation into our discussions of popular culture, and each time I can see a flash of guilt pass over their faces. Even as a critic who has spent years training myself to look at the media more closely, I've fallen prey to disinformation too. It's hard to mask your shame in these situations, not because you've done something wrong but because it's a swift reminder of how easy it has become to read something in passing and believe it, just because the person posting it has falsely positioned themselves as an authority.
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We've been brought up with the adage "Don't believe everything you read online," but it's a far more difficult credo to practice when information is recycled at unprecedented rates. Now there's a monetary incentive to tinker a lie to be just believable enough to affect our perception.
Although verified users might not rake in thousands per month, it's no less important that we remain critical of the things we read online. That sounds like turning media consumption into work, but it's really the best part; looking closely at pop culture is so much more fun than leading with unquestioning trust. Is a post trying to legitimately engage you with art, or is it trying to start a stan war? Maybe the poster just wants you to quote their nostalgia bait, to say, "Oh my God, I remember buying this CD—I'm so old!" Once you can recognize which accounts are pleading for your clicks and views, it becomes easier to discern which ones aren't.
Gagasyuyi, the X account, often constructs full threads celebrating blips of pop culture history. They agree that placing a piece of art back within its context makes for a richer, more exciting way to reminisce.
"Archiving these moments, whether well-known or forgotten, helps preserve the legacy of these cultural icons," they said. As we move further into the murky waters of A.I. and distorted tech, true preservation is up to those who revere history over a paycheck. Only then will these flat, digital doses of misinformation permeating our timelines—removed from their place in culture—become three-dimensional again.
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