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Someone Please Explain These Mark Carney Thirst Traps

Is it a joke? Meaningless Gen Z content? Or a sign of the political moment?

The politician licks his lips. The clip then cuts quickly to him winking at the camera before turning his head to the side and smiling. In the clip after, he laughs while readjusting his AirPod in a motion that mimics tucking hair behind one’s ear. The soundtrack is Shaggy’s steamy reggae hit “Boombastic.”

The star of the show? Prime Minister Mark Carney. This Instagram reel, posted last June to an account called markcarneythirst, has nearly 30,000 likes and over a thousand comments. The account has sixty-six posts and over 50,000 followers.

“HUBBA HUBBA!” announces one respondent, followed by: “Sexy, Smart, Sensitive, Sensible, Sensuous!” Another user compares Carney to Christian Grey—the wealthy, brooding heartthrob of the Fifty Shades series—then caps it off with a fire emoji. Some comments express confusion, but most users seem happy to jump on board. “I used to live in Canada,” one writes. Then adds: “I’m thinking of going back now [that] you have this hot Prime Minister.”

These videos have travelled far beyond a single Instagram account. Variations circulate across numerous TikTok and Instagram profiles. In March, British actress Clara Batten shared one with her 1.4 million TikTok followers, interspersing clips from a markcarneythirst video with her own reaction. “Why is Prime Minister Carney hot though?” she asks in the caption. The post drew over 4,000 comments, many earnestly debating the question. Others encouraged her to “check out Wab Kinew.”

Weird things happen on social media all the time. But Carney is a former banker in his early sixties, about five foot nine with grey hair, moderate in every sense of the word—hardly your typical sex symbol. Why is the internet so thirsty for him?

The term “thirst trap” has been defined dozens of times. The oldest available entry in Urban Dictionary—a crowdsourced collection of online slang words—is from 2011, and it defines a thirst trap as “any statement or picture used to intentionally create attention or ‘thirst.’” This definition was written before the explosion of TikTok and Reels, and more recent explanations have expanded to include short-form video, but the idea still holds: a thirst trap is online content meant to seduce or attract the viewer.

There is not much available scholarship on political thirst traps (surprising, I know). So I turned to memes—as per the Oxford English Dictionary, images, videos, or pieces of text “copied and spread by internet users, often with slight variations”—to help make sense of the Carney phenomenon.

In a study of Canadian political memes, communications professor Fenwick McKelvey and colleagues identified two broad categories: those made by political parties and other professional groups and those by everyday people voicing support for a particular party. Professionally created memes can have a........

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