Some speculate he’s joining ISIS, or that his girlfriend broke up the band, or that he never really left. According to Slate‘s Amanda Hess, many believe One Direction’s management company, Modest Management, is to blame. Indeed, some believe every move the band makes is controlled by the organization. She compares the speculation to what happened with The Beatles decades ago, and the “Paul is dead” rumors that some continue to believe (despite Paul McCartney being clearly alive and well).
“Modern boy band skeptics have a lot more material to work with than their pre-Internet predecessors did,” Hess writes. “Conspiracy-minded Directioners scour fan-shot concert videos to prove that Management is directing the boys from the sidelines. They digitally enhance paparazzi photos to zero in on clues that the boys’ girlfriends are hired beards. They analyze timestamps of the boys’ Facebook and Twitter posts to intimate that they couldn’t possibly have been in control of their own accounts at the time of that tweet. They reproduce screengrabs of apocryphal emails ostensibly sent by management to pesky fans. They use the boys’ public silences as confirmation of whatever theory is gaining traction that day. When some random Twitter user posed as a Modest employee and claimed that he had quit the firm because it was treating the One Direction members like slaves, his tweets were favorited and boosted tens of thousands of times; but when Zayn himself gave his first post-exit interview to the Sun, fans instantly dismissed it as a fake.” (Slate)