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Podcast: PRETEND
Episode: Bonus: The Psychology Behind Parasocial Relationships (Cracks in the Fandom)
Description: This bonus episode is a chance to step back and make sense of everything that just unfolded in Cracks in the Fandom. If you listened to the series, you saw how an Instagram unfollow spiraled into harassment, infighting, and full-on chaos inside the SVU fandom. This series was petty, confusing , and pretty revealing about how people form attachments online.
I wanted to understand why this happens. Why someone can feel personally betrayed by an actor they don't even know. So I reached out to Bradley J. Bond, a professor at the University of San Diego who studies...