Not every fake person online is pretending to be a real one.
That distinction matters because the internet now contains a growing category of public figures who are openly fictional: computer-generated models, virtual musicians, VTubers, brand characters, and other synthetic personalities whose audiences understand that somebody designed the person they are watching.
Lil Miquela is one of the best-known examples. The Instagram personality has been presented for years as a virtual character rather than an ordinary human influencer. Researchers have studied how the account maintains a coherent identity through images, captions, relationships, brand work, and continuing storylines. A 2025 open-access study in AI & Society describes Lil Miquela as a virtual influencer whose identity is constructed through a sustained social-media performance: “A trans-disciplinary forensic study of Lil Miquela’s virtual identity performance in Instagram.”
The account is synthetic. The existence of the character is not the deception.
Fiction has always had social lives
People have followed fictional characters for much longer than social media has existed. Comic-strip characters endorsed products. Mascots wrote letters. Radio characters received fan mail. Wrestling personas maintained elaborate fictional biographies in public.
Virtual influencers extend that tradition into systems built around personal profiles.
The unusual part is that Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and similar platforms normally imply that an account corresponds to somebody. A virtual character borrows that interface: profile picture, biography, posts, friendships, comments, endorsements. The machinery of personal identity is used to host fiction.
That can still create ambiguity, especially for a viewer encountering the account for the first time. But disclosure changes the ethical problem substantially. If viewers know they are following a designed character, they can interpret the performance on those terms.
Disclosure does not answer every question
Knowing that a character is fictional does not tell the audience who owns it, who writes its dialogue, who approves sponsorships, or how much automation is involved.
A virtual influencer may be operated by writers, artists, marketers, motion-capture performers, AI systems, or some combination of them. Commercial endorsements still need ordinary advertising disclosure. A fictional identity can also be used manipulatively even when its fictional status is technically public.
But that is different from inventing a mundane biography and allowing readers to believe an ordinary human being exists behind it.
For Dead Internet Theory, disclosed virtual influencers are an important counterexample to the idea that every synthetic identity is evidence of hidden replacement.
Some synthetic people are not hiding at all.
They are characters occupying the same social spaces as humans, and the more useful question is whether the audience understands the arrangement.