If you’re a sound Bachelor fan and have a little too much time on your hands, the traditional practice of jumping on Instagram during the ad breaks and employing your best stalking skills to find the contestants’ accounts is one you probably know well.
Because who needs real hobbies, eh?
Over the years, the Bachelor producers struggled to get a strong grip on how to really navigate the murky waters of spoilers that come through the analysis of social media activity. She’s out drinking? Oh, she’s definitely single. She’s keeping quiet, only ever uploading photos of herself on the show? She definitely gets somewhere in the competition.
But the real theory, which was confirmed by the outcomes of last year’s season of The Bachelor, is that those contestants who keep their profiles on private – they’re the ones who either win, or get really bloody close.
Last year’s top two, Nikki and Alex, both had private Instagram accounts, not accessible to the general public (*cough* plebeians like us), until after the finale had aired.
It was, in hindsight, the easiest way to predict who was going all the way. Nikki and Alex were silent, but it was a smug silence. It was a silence that suggests the powers above didn’t want either giving away anything on social media, which inadvertently gave a lot away in and of itself.
So why, this year, did The Bachelor producers go to hell with trying to keep their contestants’ profiles on private?
Instead, the official Bachelor Australia Instagram uploaded a photo of the Bachelorettes, tagging each woman’s handle over the image.
Top Comments
I've read this is also a major issue for witness protection programmes. When people go to stalk people they've just met (or don't event know), the new identities they create for people have no social media history.
If you added someone on FB and all their photos were only a year old, would you really assume they were in a witness protection program??
Speaking for myself, no. But then I don't really use social media much. But as the article shows, in these current times, it actually looks suspicious when someone doesn't have a social media presence and history.
(Note: there are other aspects of how social media creates issues for these programs, but there's no need for them to be detailed here.)