When the Influencer is a Fiction

Picture a typical classroom in Suhr, Canton Aargau. Teenagers, likely resigned to another well-meaning but predictable lecture, are listening to a social media influencer explain the mechanics of generating attention. It is a scene that plays out in countless schools trying to get to grips with the digital world their students inhabit. Then, the script is violently torn apart. A man enters, an argument erupts, and the carefully constructed presentation collapses into a raw, personal conflict.

The students, caught in the crossfire, would be forgiven for their confusion. But the confusion is precisely the point. The influencer is an actor, the intruder is her colleague, and the entire chaotic episode is a piece of theatre. This classroom intervention is the work of Theater Marie and Bühne Aarau, two local cultural institutions that have decided the best way to teach critical thinking is not through a PowerPoint presentation, but through a live demonstration of deception.

The project’s goal is to arm young people for a world where distinguishing truth from fiction has become a daily, and increasingly difficult, task. The students’ own experiences confirm the urgency of the mission. One 14-year-old admits to having been fooled by a video, only catching the fabrication after actively verifying it. Another observes with a worrying pragmatism that for many content creators, fake news simply gets better results—more likes, more views, more engagement. The truth is often less entertaining.

This is no longer about crudely edited images. The students speak of sophisticated AI-generated videos that are becoming nearly indistinguishable from reality. This technological advance complicates the challenge, making passive consumption of media a high-risk activity. One young motorsport enthusiast notes how supposed expert channels are rife with false reports, but his real concern is more profound: a growing sense that many people simply do not care whether the information they consume is real or not.

This creeping indifference is what elevates the issue from a simple matter of media literacy to a societal concern. The youth welfare organization Pro Juventute warns that when young people lose the ability to tell right from wrong, they risk losing faith not just in media, but in society itself. The erosion of a shared reality is, after all, an erosion of the trust that underpins a functioning democracy.

That a small theatre company feels compelled to step into classrooms with such a project is both commendable and slightly unsettling. It suggests that traditional educational structures are struggling to keep pace with the speed at which disinformation spreads. The initiative is a creative, hands-on attempt to build a cognitive immune system in the next generation. One can only hope that a single, well-acted lie in the classroom can prepare them for the millions they will encounter outside it.

Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com