A credit specialist has received threats and online abuse after an edited video of her began to circulate on social media, giving viewers the impression she had abandoned her children. Yvonne Arvizu, a California-based credit counselor, had in fact been recounting something a male client had told her during an appointment.
Arvizu, also known as La Reina del Credito, operates a successful firm in Downey focused on helping her primarily Spanish-speaking clients restore their credit after bankruptcy, debt, identity theft, or other negative impacts. Arvizu has established a cult following on TikTok and Instagram for her flamboyant personality and lifestyle, boasting over 40,000 followers on each platform.
But while Arvizu’s videos are often geared towards advertising her business and offering credit tips to viewers, one TikTok has gone viral after it was edited and circulated by accounts on social media.
In the video, Arvizu opened by flippantly talking about abandoning her child because parenthood didn’t fit with her “lifestyle,” and complained that she was being required to pay child support.
“In November, I decided I no longer wanted to be a responsible parent, and I gave up my kids. I was just tired of being responsible and caring for them, and I wanted to go out there and experience life,” she says, casually filming the video in her car. She goes on to claim that she was upset because she couldn’t claim the child on her taxes.
But abruptly, the video switches tones, with Arvizu asking “what the f*ck?” and revealing that the words had actually been those of a male client who had visited her office.
“That’s exactly what my conversation was like right now with a client. The craziest thing is, men, unfortunately, tend to do this a lot. They tend to walk off and pretend those kids never existed,” she says.
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Arvizu goes on to call attention to the double standard, noting that “deadbeat dads” were a common phenomenon in society while acknowledging how angry the first half of the video had likely made viewers who had thought she was the one speaking from her own experience.
“You probably wanted to kill me for the first 30-40 seconds of this video,” she says, before mentioning how many men come into her office seeking her services after their credit was damaged from refusing to pay child support. In a separate video, Arvizu shows her office’s credit restoration work on a man who she alleges owed over $100,000 in child support.
While the video was originally posted in early 2023, it has now taken on new life as “rage bait” on social media after some accounts edited out the second half of the video where Arvizu reveals that a male client had been the one who said he abandoned his children.
The edited video has gathered millions of views on TikTok and X, with many calling Arvizu a “bad mother” and blaming her neglect on “feminism.”
Others called her “vile” and “evil,” while others still expressed a desire to harm Arvizu or have her put in prison. Reaction videos featuring the edited video began to circulate on TikTok with the video being accompanied by gasping commentators or spooky music.
While an immense amount of online vitriol has been directed at Arvizu as a result of the deceptive edit, she appears to be taking it in stride, and has even used a negative tweet with backlash to advertise her business.
The outrage caused by Arvizu’s edited video is just the latest in what appears to be a new trend of the deceptive posts, videos, and images flooding social media sites for the purposes of boosting account engagement. Colloquially known as “rage-baiting,” the technique capitalizes on the ways in which the algorithm of many social media platforms are tuned to favor controversy and rapid-fire interaction.
In 2022, Business Insider journalist Tanya Chen stated that rage bait was bound to become even more pervasive as time went on as social media platforms “don’t care if the message is uplifting or toxic. As long as people are interacting with it, platforms will spread it even further.”
On X (formerly Twitter), some expressed concerns that rage bait would become a problem following the roll-out of the ad revenue sharing program, which entitled some X accounts to a bi-weekly payout based on their engagement.
In apparent response to those concerns, CEO Elon Musk announced that posts which were found to be deceptive would no longer be eligible for monetization.
