From the Prime Minister in Lebanon to fake porn: Toto Wolff becomes a cult figure on the Internet and takes the viral wave amazingly calmly!
Toto Wolff is no longer just one of the most successful team bosses in the history of Formula 1. But at a time when the Grand Prix Sport is booming and with Brad Pitt in the leading role of “F1-The Movie” even makes the kinocasses ring, the 53-year-old Austrian has also become a global social media icon.
A photo appeared on the Internet in 2019, in the middle of nationwide protests against corruption in the country and the head of government Saad Hariri, where a man kept a banner up. On the banner said: “I would like Toto Wolff as our next prime minister. His strategies are just great!”
Six years later, Instagram, TikTok & Co. have developed and changed, and it is now more trashy content that go viral worldwide. Real photos of Wolff mix with a naked torso on the beach under manipulated AI content, which have little to do with reality, but are liked and spread by tens of thousands of users.
A phenomenon to which Wolff only dedicates very limited attention: “My target group is not social media users,” he says at an appointment with Dutch media representatives in Zandvoort. “My target group are more adults. But from time to time I also look in what is invented. Sometimes it’s even with AI fake photos. But I look at it more amused.”
Wolff has to laugh when he says: “With Deepfakes you can falsify everything. I think there are even a few porn videos with my face on some body.” What does not bother him as long as “how it is a good -looking body and I perform well in the scenes,” he grins.
Fakes on the net: a serious topic
It speaks for the family man that he deals so relaxed with the topic of social media and the abuse that is driven by some and does not let such posts do. Everyone with a reasonably common sense can judge that Toto-Wolff-Pornos are not real. However, if less publicly exposed people are attacked on the Internet in such a way, the fun ends very quickly because the boundaries between fake and reality are blurred and less easy to distinguish.
People of public interest, how Wolff is one, and international organizations such as Mercedes have learned to deal with “fakenews” at a time when social media and reporting in the media take place on so many channels. And that happens not only with obvious AI fakes, but also in classic media.
“I learned not to take everything so personally”
Because the times when only a handful of journalists in the paddock have long been gone about Formula 1 are long gone, someone like Wolff runs the risk of being misunderstood today in every interview. Even if it is correctly placed in the original interview for platform X, the story of platform Y, which quotes from platform X, may not be quite as accurate.
“Nowadays there is such an abundance of information. And with every publication of a story it continues from the original. You read something today, and the next day it will be interpreted differently. Everything for a lurid headline. And when you read the article, it is usually not as spectacular or controversial as the headline suggests,” explains Wolff.
“I learned not to take it all personally. At some point I asked Bradley Lord, our Head of Communications, to show me the worst examples at the end of every day. And if he wants to flatter me, then the best. At some point he stopped showing me the best. Either there are no good ones, or he thinks I shouldn’t take too much,” laughs.
What Wolff thinks of the social media hype
But as much as the stars of Formula 1 of false representations may be annoyed on the Internet: The almost exploding number of stories and posts also has something good: “It is good for Formula 1. It is a proof of how strong our sport is and in which new target groups it has been excellent.
He himself looks at such content “from time to time”, “to laugh about it. But that’s not part of my daily routine.” It is positive “that our target audience is getting younger and more and more feminine. I prefer that any Deepfake porn puts online as if nobody is interested in us. Because the times when this was the case and nobody was interested in us existed too. And I still remember it well.”