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The TikTok duo Cassie and Nick have gone viral online after being ‘shipped’ by fans, leading to paparazzi, rumours and no privacy. Why do we feel entitled to other people’s relationships online?
Parasocial relationships have existed between fans and celebrities for a long time, with people feeling connected to their favourite singers, actors and artists. But, with the rise of social media and the public being able to watch influencer’s every move these relationships have gotten stronger.
An example of this is the influencer couple, ‘Nassie’. Nick and Cassie are TikTokers who have both gained millions of followers online, due to their awkward and funny personalities. The pair met through being ‘shipped’ online by fans.
Vance Ricks, a teaching professor of philosophy and computer science at Northeastern University, describes parasocial relationships as, “an imagined relationship to something or someone that is a unidirectional relationship”.
He says: “I think part of what makes it easy to think that we know something about other people is because we have so many different forms of media in which we are in a way invited to or encouraged to take a window or have a window into each other lives.”
Influencers invite you into their lives by posting themselves, leading to fans thinking they know them. “There’s a sort of assumed familiarity and intimacy. It could be acting, but we’re invited to think we are getting some special insight into that person,” he says.
There are a variety of reason why people have parasocial relationships, “some people don’t necessarily have actual relations or enough relations that they find valuable or positive, so many of them therefore will seek out more positive kinds of interaction even if it involved constructing them with people who don’t know they exist”.
There are also people who want to be part of a fandom and find others with the same interests. Although it is not the same as a parasocial relationship it is very near, “there can be a lot of positive elements of finding other people in who are just as jazzed about something or someone as you are”.
A third reason is people relating to someone and therefore feeling like they have a connection, “sometimes it may seem as though this songwriter really got you, the song that they wrote is just for you and they are speaking to you, they have some deep insight to you, and they have a connection to you”.
Cassie’s videos were known for being relatable, where she expressed she had never had any experience with dating before and lived vicariously through books and films.
Nick, however, was known for his more cringey funny videos, which led fans to thinking they would be a perfect match for each other and tagging the duo in each other’s comments, as well as making fan edits. The two were aware of the attention and started posting flirty videos back and forth.
This led TikTok users to become invested in the relationships and waiting eagerly for them to drop another video, as well as other big creators like Haley Baylee, who has 14 million followers, to also post about the situation.
“The way they are discussed is not even as people but more like as archetypes or as almost toy figures that you can move around in the game,” Ricks says.
When the pair first met up in person and posted content with each other fans reacted heavily online, and their videos were getting millions of views.
Although the couple had never met in person before this, fans started to think it was all ‘clout’ for social media and they were already in a relationship. They later confirmed in a TikTok this was not true.
So why was everyone so invested in their relationship and felt entitled to the videos?
Ricks says: “A general failure to treat people as three dimensional and just as again characters. This is a person they’re not just legos that you can stick together in different ways.”
An image of them meeting for the first time was published online before the couple could officially announce their relationship. “There can be a thrill when you are the first person in your group to know something or find something out,” Ricks says.
Although they live in separate countries they have continued to share their long-distance relationship online, and posting videos about each other, which continue to get thousands of views and comments.
Ricks says: “The thing I would wonder and the question I would pose to the fans of them is, do you now consider your work here as done or do you now think, oh now we can continue managing their relationships?”
Do you think it is okay to gossip about your favourite couples? Does being in the public eye mean we are entitled to information?
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