Editorials

What Annoyed the Internet Last Week?

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21 January 2019

By Bronwen

In days gone by, to become a rich and successful celebrity, you usually had to have some sort of talent such as singing, writing or comedy. Now all you need to do is get yourself a couple hundred thousand Instagram followers, call yourself an influencer and claim you can change someone’s life if they pay you $165.

Despite having 831,000 followers on Instagram, I had never heard of Caroline Calloway until writer Kayleigh Donaldson began a scathing thread about her upcoming tour. Now, it seems the whole Internet is talking about this girl for all the wrong reasons.

Some background on Calloway for those of you who have never heard of her:

  • She rose to fame (if you can call it that) by documenting her (heavily romanticised) experiences as an American student studying at Cambridge University.
  • Her Instagram posts earned her a $500,000 book deal which she later pulled out of, leaving her $100,000 in debt.
  • She’s now a writer living in New York City.

At first, Calloway just looks like a very over-enthusiastic twenty-something-year-old who thinks a lot more highly of herself than she perhaps should. She claims to run an ‘Instagram stories account’- “the first of its kind”. After a brief scroll down her Instagram page, the first post I clicked on was this:

https://www.instagram.com/p/rf1mPSHevo/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

I’m not sure what Calloway was trying to do here but the ‘rape jokes’ just feel rather odd and out of place, not to mention the story itself isn’t particularly well written for someone who had a $500,000 book deal.

So what’s happening with this tour?

Calloway offered her loyal fans a chance to meet and learn from their idol. Tickets for the multi-city tour were priced at $165, but this was justified by the many perks that were promised. As well as the teaching of these creativity workshops, guests would receive a homemade lunch, individualised care packages and Orchid flower crowns.

If you’ve been following the whole fiasco from the start, you’ll have seen how quickly the plans unravelled and how each promise was chucked out the window one-by-one; all while the ticket price stayed the same.

To read up on the saga from the beginning, there’s no better place than the original thread.

Enjoy this thread because it’s a wild one.

There are likely to be way more updates to follow as the tour has been uncancelled. The latest update is that Calloway has expressed her hatred of Donaldson via a passive-aggressive T-shirt.

Needless to say, Calloway does not appear to be handling the criticism from Donaldson (and the rest of the Internet) very well.

 

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