The fact that “plants” can be placed into fandom to make the Harrie stan culture slightly less toxic, to lessen bullying of other fans and other boys even a tiny bit, and yet here’s another TPTK sweatshirt to purchase in a different color, but keep up with the good work, guys! Bury those m*f*.

Creepy spying and manipulation are par for the course, and we expect it, but the effort to use other fans to destroy Harry’s competition— at the expense of exacerbating those fans’ mental health issues (while Harry tweets, “Go see your therapist, I’ll wait.”) is the height of hypocrisy. Harry knows. He condones. He is the artist, he profits from it, he is responsible. Maybe he was naive, but the article clearly states that Harry is aware of details of the project and has ample input. He knows how this works.

As much time as the marketing team put into sprinkling crumbs across the internet, Columbia director of Digital Marketing John Salcedo says they spent almost as many hours watching and listening to how fans were reacting and revealing tidbits, working in real time and pivoting the treasure hunt based on what the amateur detectives dug up. "When they found [something] we adjusted and/or leaned on it to make sure that they could further go down the rabbit hole," says Salcedo.

The "real-time marketing" meant that the plan shifted every day, with the team working around-the-clock to read comments, dig into chat rooms, Reddit and elaborate Twitter threads filled with clues they'd planted and some they hadn't in order to see where the audience was going so they could toss seeds in the right places.