It shows up when you are most vulnerable. Maybe it’s under a reel of Fleabag’s season 2, episode 5 confession scene, in which Phoebe Waller-Bridge finally gets together with Andrew Scott’s “hot priest.” Or maybe it’s slapped on a TikTok of an industrial hydraulic press squashing some gummy bears. No matter what, it’s always the caption of the video you find yourself transfixed by without quite knowing why: “The Tesla Cybertruck Is an All-Electric Battery-Powered Light-Duty Truck.”
For the past few months, Instagram and TikTok users have been inundated by posts with the same caption, a seemingly AI-generated paragraph about Tesla’s Cybertruck, providing a “comprehensive overview of its key features and specifications.” The caption could be applied to anything and pops up seemingly at random, creating the disconcerting effect that Elon Musk is lurking around every digital corner. This is not because legions of social media users have suddenly become lunatic Cybertruck stans, however (though there are certainly some of those, too). Rather, it’s a technique for spam accounts to game the algorithm and boost their engagement.
Allow me to explain: According to the social media experts on Reddit, while hashtags were once an easy way for accounts to get more clicks without having to spend too much time producing actual content, they are now out of fashion. Instead, both Instagram and TikTok have started rewarding posts with original captions — i.e. those that would cause someone to stay on a post for longer or even save it. That might be easy for influencers, who have their own voices and curated audiences, but not so much for “spam accounts,” which only repost what is already popular. The solution? A well-written paragraph about the Cybertruck, of course!
For the owner of @fucksayingx on Instagram, who posts clips of famous movies and TV shows (and who didn’t want their real name to be used), longer captions seem to attract wider audiences. They told me they have only used the Cybertruck caption on a few posts and noticed that one of them (a clip from the rom-com Love & Other Drugs) got almost 1.7 million views — though they’ve gotten more views on other posts without it. It seems that the Cybertruck hack is no more effective than any other engagement-juicing technique. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
A similar trend was going on in the beginning of the year, when accounts started posting a very similar paragraph about the Mercedes CLR GTR, which is likely a mistranscription of the Mercedes CLK GTR, a rare internal combustion racing vehicle from the 1990s. That might mean the Tesla caption also won’t last for long, especially as the apps shift more and more toward prioritizing originality. (Funnily enough, Musk thought that shift was a terrible idea when Instagram announced it in the spring, claiming that there’s virtually no originality to be found in those platforms.)
At some point, Zuckerberg’s algorithm will realize that no one is actually that interested in the Cybetruck and the caption will lose its power. As for which car will be next, I’m hoping Ford’s Mustang Mach-E. Who doesn’t love a classic car suped up for the post-fossil fuel era, am I right?
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comment from an Instagram user on the success of the technique.
