I missed this, what is this about?
I did a summary/recap of it in more detail here:
Thanks to @Erebus for the thread title! Who wants to do a recap?
tattle.life
But long story slightly shorter, Ruby did a group project where she was tasked with making Dickens modern and relatable to a new, younger audience.
She/her group chose to do an escape room, even though it's an activity more suited to murder mysteries and not at all suited to Dickens. Though it was a group project, Ruby very clearly (either by hostile takeover or by group decision) took the lead and did everything.
Ruby claimed the group had designed and built a working escape room, but there was no evidence of this. What she actually did was slap together a half-baked social media campaign for a new hypothetical Dickens-themed escape room. She put as much effort into it as she does her YouTube content: Almost none.
The core promotional images were lazy, 5 minute Photoshops. It failed as a fake business campaign as the Instagram page she made for it had no address, no prices, and she hadn't thought to add even the most basic fake details. There were also sloppy, inaccurate details all over it (Ruby claimed "The Dark Knight is a retelling of A Tale of Two Cities", but it's actually The Dark Knight
Rises which alludes to AToTC).
Most damningly, she posted on her personal Instagram and begged all her followers to go follow the Instagram page for her escape room. There was zero legitimate reason for her to have people do this.
It was a uni assignment. The assignment was not to actually attract a young audience, but to put work into creating something that,
in theory, would. She was supposed to be graded on the work, not her follower count. Nobody should've been aware of the Instagram profile besides Ruby's group and her tutors.
Ruby did this so she could weaponize her big social media following and give herself a big, unfair advantage over other groups. She no doubt included this in her project as a mark of her own success to try to sway the grader - "Our project attracted x thousand followers in one day, proving just how relevant our project made Dickens to the young YouTube/TikTok crowd!
Our work was clearly
FIRST class!
"
Not a single one of those people followed based on the merits of the content. They did so because Ruby the influencer asked them to.