You’d do WHAT to a starving orphan? Question-swap videos turn disinformation into prank comedy

By David Mack, CNN

(CNN) — Sitting on a couch with her husband, the woman smiles to the camera. “I just asked him what he thinks of my pregnant body,” she says in the video. Then comes a clip of her husband delivering a long “Ewwww,” part retch and part shout.

“If you could date one family member of mine, who would it be?” another woman seems to ask her husband in a separate video. The answer? Her grandfather.

In other videos, people seem to boast about attacking a starving orphan child or discuss how they would go about having sex with 100 firefighters. It’s all part of a chaotic format that’s swept through TikTok and Instagram this summer, in which people record their partners, family members and even colleagues answering harmless-seeming queries, then swap in different, much more embarrassing questions afterward.

The switcheroo trend is one more lighthearted example of internet prank culture, with successful clips in the genre using comically obvious edits to highlight the misdirection and avoid any real danger of defamation. But experts say it also reveals deeper truths about the ways in which younger people think about disinformation, media literacy and online irony.

“Compared to earlier generations, younger people seem more keenly aware of the potential to manipulate media — be it the slick editing of a reality TV producer, the creation of a meme or AI-enabled frauds and fakery,” said Brooke Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell University. “And so, they are using tools provided by platforms to engage in their own deception-based entertainment.”

The videos also seem to turn on another sensitive internet faultline: age. “If you’re in on the humor, then you’re in on it. If you’re not, then you’re old,” said Steffi Cao, a 27-year-old freelance reporter in Brooklyn who covers the online habits of her fellow members of Gen Z. “We all know that you can get lied to online at any point. If you don’t get that this is an obvious lie, then you’re washed and you’re unc and you’re chopped,” Cao said, using several slang words that will likely be indecipherable to older readers.

How would you eat four ice cream cones? How would you greet sexy firemen?

In one iteration of the prank, a user might ask someone to explain in great detail how, say, they would eat four ice cream cones at once. After capturing enough footage (preferably featuring lots of expressive hand gestures or descriptive language), they then record an introduction to the clip wherein they pose an entirely different question that suddenly makes the filmed response seem, well, extremely graphic.

Despite its salaciousness, this genre of video has recruited many parents and grandparents, in particular, including Kathi Julison, the 78-year-old grandmother of 22-year-old Tessani Foster. Foster, a recent college graduate who lives near Chicago, filmed a video earlier this month that made it seem as if she’d asked what Julison would do if four firefighters showed up at their front door, when in reality Foster had asked her the ice cream question. “I would eat one all the way to the bottom and then I would have the next one,” Julison began. “I would lick each one separately — one at a time. Lick, lick, lick!”

“She started going so in-depth, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to look so bad,’” Foster recalled. “I told her right afterwards. She thought it was funny! She was like, ‘Are my friends going to see this?!’” (Foster’s video has been viewed more than six million times on TikTok.)

“I didn’t think it was mean,” Julison said of the ruse. “You know what was mean? That she didn’t give me four ice cream cones.”

In another version of the same idea, women might record their boyfriends or husbands answering a series of questions, then dub entirely new, much more incriminating ones over the top. “Do you love me?” one woman seems to ask her husband in one such manipulated video.

“I’m getting the ick now already. No!” he appears to respond.

Often, part of the joy in watching these videos involves seeing the subjects react with shock and horror at the realization they’re about to be taken out of context. Commenters will often take the joke further, by pretending to take the joke seriously and suggesting that those filmed be canceled. And with many of these videos racking up millions of views, the ensuing embarrassment for the unwitting subjects can be palpable.

“My first thought was that I was definitely embarrassed. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. I don’t know if this is going to hurt business,’” said Jesse Vose, 42, co-owner with his husband, Corey, of the Fiori restaurant in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their server Anna Happney, 20, filmed a video last month of the pair answering a question about how they’d confront an armed intruder — Jesse said with a gun, while Corey replied with an even more inappropriate, sexual answer — before changing the question to one about a hungry orphan asking the restaurant for food.

In the final video, seen more than 18 million times, Corey can be seen with his mouth agape as he realizes he’s about to be taken out of context, but Jesse said the couple has taken it with a sense of humor. “It’s gone viral,” he said, “and believe it or not we are having business from that video. People are coming in and saying they saw us on TikTok. It’s been great.”

“The heartbeat of the internet right now”

The clumsiness of the deception is a crucial feature of the videos. Crystal Abidin, a digital anthropologist at Curtain University in Perth, Australia, said the intentionally amateur editing creates both the tone and the meaning of the joke.

“The cuts are so obvious; it’s all part of the gag, and it’s meant to emphasize that this is not malicious. It’s not intended as misinformation,” Abidin said. “It’s meant to exaggerate all the editing that goes behind the scenes that makes other things look seamless, believable, coherent, and whole.”

According to Abidin, the trend is emblematic of how power and information frequently function in the irony-steeped system of social media. “A lot of it also has to do with the generational context — knowing what is an inside joke at the moment, or having shared pop cultural or social media pop cultural references, which is getting more and more niche by the day,” Abidin said.

Many of the most viral videos that are part of the trend also play with social power dynamics by having the creator make a fool of someone who may be older, male or even their boss — further evidence of how social media use is changing online.

Almost since the app’s inception, TikTok has been a place for younger people to film videos involving their parents, especially clips that can lean into the infantilizing notion of “geriatric cuteness.” But experts said the deployment of this trend in workspaces shows that traditional boundaries between social media and professionalism are continuing to collapse, especially in the wake of the Covid pandemic, which tended to encourage more anarchic, personal content.

Now, not only might a boss be OK with appearing in such a humorous, out-of-context video, they might even stand in front of their business logo while doing so — or even allow it to be posted from the company’s official account. Such playfulness online can make a business — particularly a smaller one — appear more relatable to younger audiences.

As political and financial nihilism grow more attractive to some younger people, the question-swapping trend may also be evidence that Gen Z is adopting a similar attitude of nonchalance — if not a slightly more playful one — when it comes to how they think about their social media and digital footprints.

“I can understand why for a lot of young workers this doesn’t feel like that much of a big deal,” said Cao, the Gen-Z reporter. “You could be taken out of context at any waking moment of your life. It is kind of like this is a natural part of the heartbeat of the internet right now.”

The-CNN-Wire
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