If you feel like your partner might be unfaithful, do you:
A. Seek a second opinion from someone in your circle.
B. Communicate these feelings openly to said partner.
C. Pay a random person on the internet to conduct a ruse through social media DMs to “test” their loyalty?
The road to bypassing all reasonable courses of action to option C seems laughable but this form of “loyalty testing” has recently surfaced on social media – and, worryingly, it’s taken over my TikTok FYP.
TikTok has become a new frontier for our societal fascination with infidelity and embracing voyeurism by perving on the drama of complete strangers. We only have to remember the “couch guy” saga of 2021, right?
On the app, there are 129.3 million videos related to the phrase ‘loyalty test’. Pages are then filled with many self-proclaimed “testers” showing screenshots of DMs during their “missions” and the people gobbling it up.
WTF is loyalty test?
Loyalty testing is made up of normally three parties: the requester, the random tester and the partner being tested. It’s a way to “prove” infidelity in relationships, where a third party tester is requested to flirt with someone through social media to gauge their response for the requester.
Normally, the requester is a partner in a relationship with the person being tested but anyone can be a requester! Requesters have expanded to:
- Friends of someone in the couple.
- People who have only been on casual dates or just texting with the person they’re interested in.
- Even parents, like this father asking someone to test if his daughter was being faithful to her partner (what the actual fuck?)
Requesters can find their testers on social media like TikTok or Instagram, with some testers doing the test through their own social media accounts while others create fake accounts. Some loyalty testers offer their services for free while others only offer them for free if they can use the messages for social media content.
Influencer Becca Moore’s loyalty test is one to watch. (Credit: TikTok / @becccamooore)
Some testers charge their own amounts and manage their own stream of requests. But the demand for loyalty tests is so consistent that requesters can also go to Uber-style third-party platforms, like Lazo, where verified testers charge for and take on as many requests as they desire while the platform takes a cut.
The test can go for as short or as long as the requester is comfortable with, usually aligning with what the requester perceives as adequate proof the person they’re suspicious of has “passed” or “failed” the test.
What does passing or failing even mean?
This may seem obvious at first glance, but it’s actually an area of contention in loyalty test subculture. (Yes, we’re calling it: this has become a subculture.)
Now there’s the obvious failures — lying about being single when they do have a partner and asking if the tester “doesn’t mind” if they have a partner, that kind of thing.
However, for some people if the person being tested simply follows back the tester, it’s considered disloyalty, but for others it’s replying to the initial message, using certain emojis or sharing their number that’s the deal breaker. TikTok comment sections are a hot mess on what ‘counts’ as cheating. Some requesters push for hard proof, to see how far someone will go and ask testers to request photos or organise to meet in person.
Often, this benchmark for proof is assessed by the tester sending screenshots to the requester before seeking instructions to either push further or block the person and end the mission.
What’s the issue with exposing cheaters?
This form of loyalty testing is just one of the latest iterations of a long held social fascination with infidelity and catching cheating partners in the act.
It seems like people love funnelling our insecurities, anxieties and suspicions into so-called tests on the people we keep close to us and feel vulnerable with. Cheating has existed as long as relationships have and we know it happens a lot. Although getting hard statistics is impossible, we know that according to Ashley Madison – a dating website for married people with the tagline “Life is Short, Have an Affair” – Australia is the sixth most unfaithful country in the world.
There’s always been a global market for private investigators and honeytrappers, but that used to be done as a private transaction – someone was paid to investigate, they would report their findings and the deal was done. Today’s loyalty testers are mining for content and going incredibly viral for it.
“The history of honey- trapping goes back a long way and is not a new invention with social media,” Dr Julia Carter, a senior lecturer in sociology specialising in marriage and relationships told Grazia. “Therefore, ethically, I wonder if it is very different from enlisting an IRL detective to uncover infidelity. Nevertheless, since social media allows and enables a more public invasion of privacy as well as communication and connectedness, we are still in the process of working out where our moral and ethical boundaries fit with its use.”
On TikTok, members of the public are playing self-appointed love and fidelity detectives – ranging from the loyalty tests to reporting overheard conversations or even what they saw on the screen of a stranger’s phone all to the vast expanse of the internet.
While we may see this as aligning to our anti-cheating morals and delivering public justice to the cheater, do we understand the emotional implications on the cheated party?
WhenMaroon 5 singer Adam Levine’s cringey sexts to an Instagram model were going viral, culture writer Shannon Keating pointed out that his jilted wife, Behati Prinsloo, was probably not top of mind for anyone.
“Holding the injured party in your mind’s eye for longer than required to make a joke and move on would start getting uncomfortable, because what if she were you?”, asks Keating, “A mother of young children whose husband has publicly humiliated her on the grandest of scales. Who now faces the impossible choice of forgiving the schmuck and keeping their family together or blowing her own life to pieces.”
While the videos are entertaining, is it ethical to exploit the anxieties of strangers on the internet so you can post screenshots flirting with their partner? Is this a shame ritual that exposes everyone involved to embarrassment, judgement and ridicule? If we’re constantly consuming cheating content, what are the ways we can see this impacting our own relationships and our ability to communicate our feelings?
Due to the ever-changing landscape of the internet, we’re going to be exposed to new and different ethical challenges about age-old topics. Cheating has existed since the dawn of time and will continue to exist (unfortunately) but questions will also continue to be raised about how we use new technology available to address it.
I, personally, would go with option B: Communicate these feelings openly to said partner.
Lead image credit: TikTok / @n1glez, @danibosey, @becccamooore.
