Internet, I was just as confused as you were about this. Let’s talk about what’s really going on.
Social media star and influencer Emma Chamberlain has recently started trending across all platforms after a listing via her merch website (https://shopemmachamberlain.com/) offered a “personal thank you note from Emma in Instagram DM!” for the price of $10,000.Â
The listing caught lots of attention thanks to a screenshot posted to Twitter by user @itslaylas with the caption, “why is emma chamberlain charging 10K for an Instagram DM this is wild.”
The listing even had options for payment plans of the $10,000 if it could not be paid in full. Through Affirm, a payment installment financial company, customers could establish payments in increments of $902.58 a month for 12 months.Â
In expected internet fashion, users were quick to flood pages with comments, criticism, and of course, memes.
In response to the chaos of the listing, Emma told E! News, “A few days I started seeing comments asking why I was selling a DM for $10k. I assumed this was an online scam, as I had never offered to sell a DM for any amount of money, let alone $10k. People were saying this was for sale on my merch site, so I checked the site to see if it had been hacked and couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary.”
She then added, “I immediately got in touch with my merch company Cozack who further investigated and put the site under construction while looking into the issue.”
So, this has me and the rest of the internet asking: what happened?
Cozack published a statement on Emma’s merch website stating:
“There have been false and inaccurate claims that Emma Chamberlain was offering DM’s in exchange for $10k. As background in 2018, Cozack (Emma’s merch company) was testing a prospective reward program related to Emma’s Merch without her knowledge. In testing, they created an outrageous, never activated reward level that was not intended to be active or purchased. These reward ideas were never run by Emma since they were not meant to be available for sale or reward, but simply intended for internal testing purposes.”
It was said that the “data was activated and crawled by Google’s SEO indexing system.” Cozack also added that Emma has no knowledge of this. “With the internet’s tendency to create false narratives around sensationalized stories, we wanted to provide you with the truth firsthand and from the source. The site is currently down for internal review.”
Emma’s merch site remains under review.