The disgust game: trypophobia on social networks!

Some use these images to lure people into subscription traps, others get a deletion from Facebook because the teaser image doesn't suit the readers, and others play on disgust and use it to engage in clickbait.

Note: The images shown in the article may be triggering for readers with trypophobia (fear of holes).

What is meant is trypophobia, i.e. a “fear of holes”. “Trypophobia” simply put is the fear of holes, drilled, eaten, punched, no matter how the hole was created, it causes fear. We already reported in June 2014 about image creations that make use of this fear. Behind them were mostly sensational titles that lured people into a subscription trap. For example, one of these titles reads: "[Truly frightening] Strange and unusual creatures live on the woman's fingers!"

The post deliberately played with these images and prompted many users to click on the image. After clicking on the link (play button), a new browser window opens. The page you reached now gave the impression that you were still surfing Facebook. But it was not like that. The internet fraudsters took over the layout of Facebook and created a fake page.

Here you end up in a subscription trap with another click. In general, this type of image attempts to arouse the user's attention and curiosity with the most disgusting or unbelievable motifs possible.

Between fascination and disgust

For example, displaying one of these images in our teaser [preview image on Facebook] resulted in the article being deleted because apparently a lot of people and ultimately also Facebook were of the opinion “that has to go”. Since then, we have designed the thumbnails that could appeal to trypophobia in a rather harmless way and pixelated the relevant areas.

Nevertheless, the game with trypophobia apparently works quite well and is fascinating, otherwise a teaser like “How many pictures can you take without getting sick?” [1] no correction of existence.

The term and the phenomenon have only really become known in recent years. A representation of the corresponding search term as processed by Google shows a significant increase since 2013.

The interest in this term has grown significantly.

At the same time, the discussion about the images has also increased. Likewise, precisely because these are fake images, there is the user question about image and copyright. In addition to this discussion, you can also find trypophobia tests, trypophobia photo series or trypophobia make-up tips.

And ultimately trypophobia debunking videos.

t