Photo: Steve Granitz (Getty Images)
The specter of naked Sydney Sweeney, a rom-com actress whose boobs recently joined the culture war, is getting the horniest (and dumbest) members of X—the website formerly known as Twitter—to click malicious links.
Even Twitter Can’t Kill Twitter | Letter From the Editor
404Media was the first to report that the social media platform is swimming in “Sydney Sweeney leak” scams, the likes of which are encouraging hopelessly aroused web users to click through to bad websites that seem to be laced with malware. These scams popped up last week, not long after the actress guest-starred on SNL. The term “Sydney Sweeney leak” has been trending on the platform ever since, with a variety of sketchy users promising naked videos of the starlet. Posts advertising the “leak” link to Linktree sites, which link to websites that have all the markings of the digitally unsafe.
It doesn’t look like X has done anything to crack down on these scams. Sure enough, when I visited the site this morning and typed in “Sydney Sweeney leak,” a rush of posts like this populated my feed:
Screenshot: X/Lucas Ropek
The posts show blurry images of what appears to be a naked woman, though the identity of the person isn’t at all decipherable. It’s easy to imagine that someone took videos and/or screenshots of porn clips and then blurred them out to encourage interest.
Twitter did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Journalist Samantha Cole notes that she “clicked around on a bunch of these [sites]” and “not only didn’t see any boobs, Sweeney’s or otherwise,” but found that her computer’s antivirus software blocked her “from accessing the sites and flagged them as potential risks.”
Thanks to a goofy op-ed in The National Post, people with nothing better to do have been debating whether the appearance of Sydney Sweeney’s boobs on SNL means wokeness is dead. Such is the status of political discourse in America. We are doomed—hurrah—and so is your computer if you click on that “leak” video.