Snapchat is already a menacing platform to begin with. But unfortunately, its presence has been graced with a 30-something divorced father and family channel owner named Austin McBroom.
This forbidding presence starts posting thirst traps — a little embarrassing for him, but not unheard of on the platform. And it only gets worse.
On Jan. 11, Catherine McBroom announced her and Austin’s divorce on Instagram. She wrote, “Our paths as a couple have shifted and has created challenges that are irreconcilable.” I assume the challenges include but are not limited to the multiple public cheating allegations from his end.
After this announcement, Austin began posting more on Snapchat. He posted his journey of finding God, his new mobile home and his days as a UCLA psychology graduate student. His content has become progressively weirder, and he seems to be lost without his family.
Back in 2016, Austin and Catherine created one of the most famous family channels, the ACE family, earning over 18 million subscribers.
“Our main priority will be to stay united as parents and continue creating a stable, happy and loving environment for our children,” Catherine also wrote in her announcement. But “stable, happy and loving” are not words I would use to describe Austin’s recent social media stunts by any means.
On Snapchat, Austin recorded his application process for a job at CVS and “temporary” move to an RV, which he parked outside of his ex’s house, among other shenanigans.
He manages to orchestrate all these callings all while not posting his children, and maintaining a naive victim mentality when in reality he is making millions through his Snapchat stories, which exploit this broken and unhinged persona he has developed over the past month.
His immature and unethical behavior is not raising the questions among viewers it should. Online commentary is more focused on the ridiculousness of Austin as a person rather than why he deems it okay to expose his personal life to such a dystopian degree.
Austin has reached an untapped market that appeals to the constant stream of unadulterated and seemingly honest content from live videos, while stripping it of all honesty and fabricating every post with staged theatrics, all for more views and profit.
Similar to the nature of family channels, Austin is exploiting his personal life for money, now identifying as a Snapchatter instead of a YouTuber.
It’s obvious a lot of what Austin is posting is dramatized for the camera, but the extent he’s going to in order to get attention is unsettling. Immediately following the divorce announcement, he posted somewhat normally with little life updates — selfies and inner musings.
But as his stories started gaining more traction and becoming very popular on TikTok, it looks to me as though he fed into the idea of a person people could ridicule online.
He began to play dumb in different scenarios he would curate daily. During these supposed comedy “skits,” Austin would not break character and seriously portray these situations — at the expense of his dignity.
Distorting his life path into strange contortions for a couple of laughs is far from the greatest show— rather, one where nobody is laughing with Austin.
The exponential success in his Snapchat stories seems to be the reason for his erratic behavior, though to his viewers, he masks it to be some sort of a mental breakdown out of heartbreak. I think it is a mix of both, but heavily influenced by the money.
The scenarios Austin creates are becoming more calculated and difficult to watch by the day. A simple solution would be for him to delete Snapchat and maybe hang out with his kids. How is this entertainer juggling it all?
We know from the YouTube channel that he has no problem recording his children, and as evident from his nonstop Snapchat posts throughout the day, the kids are not present in any of his recent content.
Social media has reached a point where anything is content, and the lines between private life and content have been blurred by the high rates of monetization and virality. I am sure Austin is hurting, but it is obvious that these Snapchat skits are for profit and shock value more than anything else.
Love can make you do crazy things, but money and fame can make you do crazier things, like thinking you’re the ringmaster of the show when you are really just the spectacle.
