Caroline Konstnar: Faked pregnancy to promote Patreon

Online influencers often have a precarious road to tread when it comes to parasocial relationships. In this instance, YouTuber Caroline Konstnar played a prank on her audience with the end goal of promoting her Patreon.

Her defenders claim that she was just poking fun at parasocial relationships, but her detractors are offended that she played with the emotions of so many people who have dealt with real tragedy and fertility hardships.

Maybe her experiment revealed more about parasocial relationships than she intended.

After not posting for a year, 20-year-old Caroline released a video on April 18, 2024, announcing that she was pregnant. The 5-minute video took viewers on a journey from Caroline not knowing what to do with her life to freaking out in her car over finding out she was pregnant.

Then, in a voiceover, Caroline asked her audience to remember a surgery she had when she was 16 on her uterus. Without explaining exactly what happened, she said she had “surgeries to get stuff removed, so my fertility has always been a little weird.”

She goes on to say that if she needs surgery, like a C-section, she might not be able to get pregnant ever again. Following this thought, here’s a brief shot of her crying in the dark, saying, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” This sequence heavily implies that she’s considering not going through the pregnancy.

Then, a cut to the polaroids of her growing belly as happy music plays. “I’m going to be having a baby very soon,” Caroline said at the end of the video, promising to take her viewers on the journey with her.

On May 1, 2024, Caroline posted an update video with the title, “I lost the baby…” which would be quite a shock if you thought she was sincere in the pregnancy announcement video.

The video starts with upbeat music and Caroline, visibly not pregnant, throwing things around as if she’s looking for something.

“When you’re a content creator, the line between entertainment and reality is very blurred,” Caroline stated in her video, admitting the fakery in response to the hypothetical question of why she would lie about something like this.

She goes on to explain her harrowing experience when she first started posting videos on YouTube at age 15. She said she would get daily threatening SA comments that she had no way to reply to meaningfully. Caroline goes on to proclaim that neither the viewer nor the creator is real to the other. “None of this is real,” she says as she sweeps her arms.

She explains how parasocial relationships can result in viewers getting personally attached to an abstraction of the creator or who they think the creator is

Caroline then says that she lied about being pregnant as a joke, and the joke was that people “connected to something that wasn’t real.”

She notes that creators and viewers come to social media looking for a connection but never really find it. Then, she turns the whole thing into a pitch for her Patreon. She states that the whole “stunt” has been advertising for her Patreon and to announce that she’s coming back to YouTube.

What, exactly, is on Caroline’s Patreon?

Caroline offers three tiers on her Patreon page; all amounts are per month:

≈ $7 for behind-the-scenes content and General Support
≈ $15 for all of the above and Exclusive content
≈ $50 for all of the above and TOP SECRET INFO as well as live chat

In the $50 tier, Caroline promises to share what she’s really been doing for the past five years, promising some degree of connection and intimacy she said could not be found with online connection.

At the time of this writing, Caroline has 483 members and is making $881.4/month from her Patreon subscribers.

Understandably, many people were upset with the prank Caroline chose to pull on her viewers.

Caroline pinned a comment that read, “If you’re mad at Caroline, then you must be new here.”