The Orange Army may come after me for this

New in Mountain Gazette: Inside the drama-packed society of anonymous snarkers, sleuths and undercover Instagrammers breaking the #vanlife aesthetic.

I just received Mountain Gazette issue 197, and I’m thrilled to see my first feature for this storied magazine in print. The large-format outdoor culture magazine, known for publishing wild yarns by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, relaunched in 2020. I’ve been watching MG grow these past couple of years as other outdoor mags have been acquired by a crypto company and reduced to digital publications. I do think print magazines can still thrive, but only if they offer experiences you cannot have on a computer. The new team at Mountain Gazette seems to have that figured out. So I was excited to contribute when the editor messaged me on Twitter last year offering an assignment.

He wanted me to look into rumors that a few prominent outdoor influencers were funding their lavish lifestyles with emergency funding during the pandemic. At least, that’s where it started. I’d soon find myself dissecting all kinds of fraud allegations against some of the biggest #vanlife stars on Instagram while finding myself pulled into the story as the subject of a conspiracy theory on Reddit.

There’s the Utah-based influencer who has been voting in Florida despite telling her followers about her involvement in Utah politics. Another had nearly $50,000 in Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven while he was remodeling his home. One raised almost $100,000 for her dog’s medical care while omitting the fact that her husband had hit the dog with their van. But I found the real story to be about the public reaction to these scandals and the ensuing conflicts between these influencers’ diehard fans and their fiercest critics.

In July 2020, a new subreddit emerged where self-appointed influencer watchdogs could snark about the hypocrisy of certain outdoor content creators who would, for example, post on Instagram about environmental ethics after sharing videos of their off-leash dogs trampling on desert flora. This group uncovered, or at least spread word about, those previously mentioned scandals (among others).

What interested me about this subreddit was that I thought its members wanted to hold content creators in the outdoor industry accountable. I soon realized I was off the mark. Very few redditors were willing to speak to a journalist. They wanted to remain behind their cloaks of Reddit anonymity and carry on with their trash-talking, not to stand behind their words publicly. They were scared of the “Orange Army,” one influencer’s notorious fanbase, called such because of the influencer’s trademark orange aesthetic in her Instagram posts. The Orange Army can be ruthless in the DMs of influencer detractors. The snarkers were also worried about legal threats by the content creators they had criticized, and they eventually accused me of being an undercover lawyer representing an influencer after I’d asked several of them for interviews.

One problem is, there can’t be accountability via anonymity. On Reddit, there’s no way to know the motives of the people sharing information or where they got that information, making it pretty unreliable. (I used public records to verify or debunk much of the tea.)

That’s not to say the subreddit can’t be a venting spot. But outdoor media could use more commitment from its journalists to holding content creators accountable (trust me, there’s plenty to cover). Otherwise, people will just turn to Reddit gossip at the risk of spreading misinformation.