Angela Watercutter
For every high-profile internet mystery that seems very grave—the Serial podcast listeners who dug deep on the case of Adnan Syed, the sleuths who tried to figure out what happened to the “Mostly Harmless” hiker—there are an equal number of online fascinations that are just fun. The search for the original “Backrooms” image; the Cicada 3301 puzzles. Many of them have been solved lately, including, this week, uncovering the identity of Celebrity Number Six.
Backstories for internet mysteries tend to be long, but we’ll keep this one brief. For something like five years, a few thousand people on Reddit have been looking for a person known only as Celebrity Number Six, or C6. The investigation started when a user with the handle TontsaH posted an image of some fabric with a bunch of mostly famous faces on it and asked who each person was. Over time, Reddit ID’d them: Orlando Bloom, Jessica Alba, etc. Only one, the sixth one, remained a mystery.
After years of false starts and chasing the wrong leads, a Reddit user named StefanMorse suggested recently that C6 might be Spanish model Leticia Sardá. On Sunday, another user named IndigoRoom posted “Celebrity Number Six has been found” alongside what appeared to be the image of Sardá used to make the fabric. IndigoRoom had tracked down the original photographer, told them about the saga, and asked for the picture.
The mystery was solved. All over TikTok and Reddit, the people rejoiced. But the drama was just starting.
Sussing out exactly what happened is tough, and a message from WIRED to the mods of the Celebrity Number Six subreddit went unanswered, but it seems as though once IndigoRoom shared their findings on the community’s Discord, someone replied saying that the image they’d posted was fake, possibly AI-generated. IndigoRoom maintained its legitimacy in the face of several terse claims that it wasn’t authentic and ultimately was vindicated when the model herself confirmed the photo was real. This was followed by calls on TikTok and Reddit for justice for IndigoRoom. “The way mods treated that person on Discord and Reddit was so nasty,” one user wrote. “Fully deserves a public apology from mods (aka Hugh).”
By Wednesday, after everyone declared the case closed and even Sardá had been tracked down and interviewed by The New York Times, one of the moderators made a post saying that the mod known as Hugh had already stepped down from his position and “everyone sending disgusting messages and threats to the modmail should know that Hugh doesn’t even see them and you WILL be permabanned. … Hugh and IndigoRoom also settled the matter days ago and moved on, you should too.”
Moving on from the fighting and the bad blood seems doable, as the hottest online dustups can get very cold rather quickly. The harder part will be moving on from the source of the friction. If the Celebrity Number Six case proves anything it’s that AI has made even the casual pastime of online sleuthing more fraught. When “don’t believe your lying eyes” AI skepticism is involved, investigators get thrown off the trail more often because they are too busy separating the bad actors from the earnest ones. AI foretells a new cottage industry of detectives investigating the sleuths who are investigating the mysteries of the internet. Misinformation abounds, chaos reigns.
Take, for example, the other recently solved internet mystery: The source of the song that became known as “Everyone Knows That.” After nearly three years of online investigative work, a pair of Redditors found the song—titled “Ulterior Motives”—after hearing a similar song in an adult movie clip on YouTube and watching literal hours of porn that had possibly been scored by the songwriters credited on that clip.
During the hunt there had been speculation that the song was AI-generated or part of some stunt. If the detectives had gotten too distracted by that, or if someone had tried to use AI to “solve” the mystery by just making a similar track, those two never would have gotten to watch all that porn. They probably just would’ve gotten embroiled in scores of online fights.
Celebrity Number Six and “Everyone Knows That” are mysteries that, however slightly, predate the current generative AI boom, and as such seem to have avoided at least some of the fallout. While both investigations definitely exhibited the kind of caution necessary when determining the authenticity of anything online, their narrative arcs show the ways in which the internet is now even more untrustworthy than it used to be. This is far more true in the case of C6 than “Everyone Knows That,” but it’s hard to imagine any new mystery that pops up in their wake having fewer disagreements about what is real and what came from AI.
When the Times reached out to Sardá, she noted that she’d been trying to enjoy her new fame. (She’s on TikTok now.) She said she was happy that people had gone to such lengths to find her, but also concerned about “how far this could go” and how much it would change her life. There was one thing, though, that seemed to give her comfort: “I can always hide.”
Loose Threads:
Cat memes are infiltrating the US election. Bear with me, because pretty much all of these threads are going to be about cats. The first one involves a baseless conspiracy that began floating around this week on social media that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats (as well as ducks and geese). Ohio senator J.D. Vance referenced the conspiracy on X, and the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, posted several images of cats (and ducks) with captions like “Save them!” Texas senator Ted Cruz posted a meme-style image macro of a pair of embracing kittens with the text “Please vote for Trump so the Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.” It was accompanied by three cry-laughing emojis. Over on the Republican House Judiciary Committee’s X account, there was a seemingly AI-generated image of Trump holding a duck and kitten in what appears to be a lake.
Cat memes hit the debate floor. The cat-eating conspiracy got an even bigger platform on Tuesday night when, during Trump’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he said, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” The audio quickly migrated to TikTok where it was placed next to images of people’s pets. Memes of Alf, the alien sitcom star who famously always wanted to eat the family feline, also took off.
Taylor Swift (and her cat) endorse Kamala Harris. Lest you think the cat chat stopped there, it didn’t. Mere moments after the debate ended, Taylor Swift grabbed her phone (presumably) and typed out an Instagram post that both decried AI misinformation and endorsed Kamala Harris. Swift signed it “Childless Cat Lady.” In the photo, she’s holding a cat. As of this writing, the post has more than 10 million likes. Musk seemingly responded to Swift’s endorsement by writing on X, “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” He followed that up a few hours later with “Toxoplasma gondii is a danger to our democracy,” essentially saying that a parasite that is carried by cats—and can make animals like mice not afraid of cats—could reshape the government in America.
Kendrick Lamar dropped a new song on Instagram. After causing a major ruckus online by announcing that he’d perform the Super Bowl halftime show next year, Kendrick Lamar dropped a new track. Listen to it here.
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