Natalia Taylor, YouTube
As we saw the other day with 23-year-old social media influencer Sara Puhto from Finland, not everything on the internet, especially on Instagram, is what it seems.
It was quite an eye-opener, and to drive the point home even further, today we present to you Instagram and YouTube influencer Natalia Taylor.
What did Natalia Taylor do? Well, in typical social media influencer fashion, Taylor spent several days recently sharing a bunch of photos and videos of her luxurious vacation to Bali with her 1.95 million YouTube subscribers and over 323,000 Instagram followers.
Looks like a pretty sweet place to visit, right?
Turns out that you can. If you have an IKEA store near where you live.
Because that’s where Taylor was when she shot video and snapped photos of her “Bali vacation” with an unsettling amount of her followers falling for it, hook, line and sinker. (At least she didn’t scam her followers out of $1.5 million.)
Yep, a whole bunch of Taylor’s followers were in complete awe of her trip to Bali IKEA, commenting with statements like “I’m in Bali too!!!” and “She really out her living her best life.”
She revealed the prank on her YouTube channel, remarking, “The point of this video is to show how easy it is to trick people into thinking you’re someone you’re not. And immediately people started buying it.”
Taylor did acknowledge that not everyone bought it, but that was partly by design.
“If you look close at some of the images, you’ll be able to see little IKEA things in there,” she admitted. “Because I wanted to leave little Easter eggs in there for any of my followers who are too smart for this challenge.”
Then again… as one commenter on Taylor’s confession video pointed out, “Maybe she is tricking us into thinking that she was in ikea when she was really in Bali… we can’t trust anything on the internet.”