Stop scrolling. Take a long, slow inhale. Mute the group chat speculation and say to yourself, “I do not need to know what happened between Alix Earle and Alex Cooper”. No, really. There’s no reason for you to care about a feud between the world’s biggest influencers because it’s probably all fake anyway. Seriously, it’s all a PR stunt. You’ll be sooo embarrassed when their joint Call Her Daddy episode drops next week. Just watch.

Sound familiar? If you’ve been following the ongoing Alix v Alex drama (cheat sheet here), you’ll be more than familiar with this take. It’s in the comment section under Cooper’s TikTok video that triggered the media frenzy on Monday (“Alix Earle […] stop hiding behind other people and just say it yourself.”). It’s even been suggested in a piece by The New York Times. Everyone is completely consumed by the drama – and everyone convinced it’s fake. We’re all holding our breath, waiting for the big gotcha reveal, when we can all sit back and smugly say: “Told you so.”

This instinctual scepticism is not without logic. As social media has broken down traditional barriers between celebrities and fans, the mechanics of publicity more visible than ever, we’ve all become more literate in the game of PR stunts. We know, for example, that when two actors starring in the same film suddenly get all flirty, it’s probably to help promote said film (we’re looking at you Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson). Or that when high-res photos of a topless celebrity caught on a run, muscles glistening in the sun, there’s a chance they might have called the paparazzi themselves (Jeremy Allen White). Thanks to a never-ending feedback loop of celeb news and social media commentary, we’re all well-versed and primed to call out deception when we see it – at least, that’s what we like to think.