As I scroll through my Instagram ‘Explore’ page, I’m met with a barrage of pink turtleneck sweaters, a garment now inseparable from Belle Gibson’s notorious 60 Minutes interview. A split-screen reel loops her evasive stare as the cancer con-artist is unable to answer a simple question from journalist Tara Brown. Word-for-word, shot-for-shot, the 2025 Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar recreates the scene to a tee, tightening the focus on a con artist who turned cancer into content.
Netflix has perfected the formula by now, pulling true crime stories from their rolodex and dramatizing them with abandon. Every few months it seems, the Netflix algorithm surfaces another serialised tale of some infamous true crime character for audiences to swoon over. Late last year, the world circled back to the case of the Menendez Brothers – jailed for killing their parents in California two decades ago – after Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story made waves. Anna Delvey, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, the list goes on. It’s a carousel of infamy, rebranded for binge-worthy consumption. And viewers lap it up.
It’s not just Netflix subscribers talking about the recent Netflix hit. Many of Australia’s top news sites have been dutifully dredging up the story that circulated global headlines, questioning Belle Gibson’s current whereabouts, questioning the authenticity of onscreen characters, or simply commenting on the miniseries while mining their archives for relevant click-friendly headlines.
Leveraging pop-culture trends is a familiar method for news outlets churning out content to maintain the 24-hour news cycle, particularly when the original story had such a strong news hook. More often than not, these will gain greater traction than a hyper-localised yarn, or even news direct from Parliament House, irrespective of its gravity.
This is how the media ecosystem works now. Pop culture feeds the news, which feeds pop culture, until both are indistinguishable. A streaming miniseries revives a long-dormant scandal. Social media amplifies it. News outlets jump on board. Brands, sensing a trending topic, find ways to monetize the moment. The machinery is efficient, the results are predictable, and yet, somehow, we’re surprised each time it happens.
Our around-the-clock digital lifestyles ensure we have access to infinite swathes of information we can’t possibly curate or even stay on top of, so we allow it to be done for us. An omnipresent content cycle pedestals certain subjects and snuffs out others.
We often hear that people tune out the news because it’s too bleak. And lately, the bleakness has been hard to avoid: war, ecological collapse, democratic backsliding, the grinding cost of living. And I say this sitting from a place of safety, comfort, and privilege. It’s no wonder viewers gravitate to those more immediate, even trivial stories like Gibson’s; stories that feel contemporary and familiar, but also feel safely enough removed to never be fully relatable. There’s a greater sense of escapism to her deception, a neatness to the story arc, much moreso than a climate drama series or one involving current ongoing conflict. We know how this one ends.
'In the end, the purpose of the content machine isn’t justice, or truth, or improving anyone’s quality of life. The purpose is the machine itself; its endless, seamless self-perpetuation, and the profits it generates.'
Looking back, Gibson’s claims that a healthy diet cured her brain cancer (which, spoiler, turned out to be a sham if you’re unfamiliar with the story) seem almost quaint. But in the 2010s, she was ahead of her time. It’s hard to imagine a world where everyone is not tuned in to social media to glean advice and contribute to a wider social dialogue around health, but wellness culture in the online space was far less saturated than it is today. Instagram was new. Influence, as a business model, was just taking shape.
And, inevitably, corporate tie-ins have followed. Days after I’d finished watching Apple Cider Vinegar, I received an email from my health insurer Bupa. Usually, these have a fast-tracked path to the trash folder, but the subject line caught me.
‘Nikki, these superfoods could help reduce the risk of cancer’.
The language was careful. ‘Reduce the risk’, not ‘cure’. Still, the timing was hard to ignore, and, honestly, a little tone-deaf. Was this just a routine health tip, or was Bupa quietly ‘newsjacking’, riding the same wave of media attention? It’s possible the health insurance industry was already positioned as the villain in my subconscious given Luigi Mangione’s trial for the alleged killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is filtering through the current news cycle — Netflix, watch this space — but if news and popular culture can together frame public discourse, the next logical step includes marketing.
Curiosity got the better of me, and I got in touch with Bupa about their e-newsletter to see whether they really were piggybacking off a pop-culture discussion. A spokesperson assured me the newsletter had nothing to do with Belle Gibson, or Netflix. ‘Bupa focuses on a key health topic every two months, with cancer selected to align with World Cancer Day (February 4th, 2025).’
Fair enough. I hadn’t even registered World Cancer Day until then. I’d been too busy caught up in the Gibson story content consuming social media and news feeds and now, apparently, my inbox. Maybe I was projecting.
Or maybe this is exactly how the system works: a closed circuit of trending topics, endlessly refreshed, where news becomes entertainment, entertainment becomes marketing, and marketing, inevitably, becomes news. It creates a tuneless symphony of interaction where no one can talk – or think – about anything else. The cross pollination of news, entertainment, and commerce has created a hurricane-level force in public discourse far louder than any traditional linear model of communication ever was.
In some ways, it feels like a full-circle moment, given they’re the same digital forces that elevated Belle Gibson in the first place, only now updated for a more crowded, more cynical, and infinitely faster internet. And misinformation and disinformation thrive in this environment, as Gibson so clearly demonstrated, with each blooming conspiracy presenting an ongoing threat to social health.
The online ecosystem, of course, also offers great potential for positive collective action. Any population, given the right circumstances, can raise its voice in unison and demand change. But in practice, the reality is far messier. The modern media ecosystem has made public discourse relentlessly chaotic, a constant, swirling noise machine that orients itself not around shared purpose, but around whatever dominates the content cycle at any given hour. Today’s scandal is tomorrow’s meme. The cycle never resolves, it just refreshes. The result might be the erosion of public faith in serious journalism, sacrificed in the name of consuming something more bingeable. And yes, I’m fully aware how, in writing this, we’re functioning parts of that same system.
On balance, it’s not always a net loss. Now and then, the machine might manage something useful. For instance, it might influence us to think twice about which corporations we reward with our money and attention, or dredging up some long-buried wrong, giving it just enough oxygen for some belated measure of justice. But more often, the machinery does what it was built to do: bend public perception at the edges, distort our sense of proportion, and quietly rearrange our understanding of what matters and where our attention belongs. Because, in the end, the purpose of the content machine isn’t justice, or truth, or improving anyone’s quality of life. The purpose is the machine itself; its endless, seamless self-perpetuation, and the profits it generates.
And so the cycle holds, the practice of endless media consumption remaining firmly entrenched, driving the conversation as reliably as any political speech or policy paper once did. The algorithm sets the agenda and the rest of us follow.
By now, the next true-crime docuseries is probably deep into production. Maybe Bupa will sponsor it. Maybe, before long, we’ll forget Belle Gibson entirely.
But the algorithm never forgets. And we scroll on.
Nikki Richardson is a writer and freelance journalist originally from Melbourne.
Main image: In Apple Cider Vinegar, Kaitlyn Dever reimagines the story of Belle Gibson, who admitted to lying about her cancer in a now infamous 60 Minutes interview. (Netflix)