What is the Real Project X on Netflix about? Facebook party invite explained

BACK in 2012, a small Dutch town was turned upside down when a teenager made a simple mistake on social media.
A sweet sixteen party got so out of hand that the notorious night was even made into a Hollywood movie titled Project X.
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What is the Real Project X on Netflix about?
In 2012, a teenage girl wanted to invite some friends to her sixteenth birthday party in her hometown of Haren, Groningen, Netherlands.
She created an event on Facebook, intending for it to be a private gathering.
However, she accidentally set the invitation to public, meaning anyone could see it and RSVP.
What happened next was completely unexpected and soon became a cautionary tale about the power and unpredictability of social media.
Like in the Hollywood movie Project X — released just months earlier, depicting a wild, out-of-control high school party — Dutch teenagers began to share and spread the Facebook event.
In the film, the party quickly spirals into chaos, with hundreds of people showing up, leading to excessive drinking, drug use, property destruction, violence and a full-scale police intervention.
It ends with the main characters facing serious consequences, including legal trouble and financial ruin due to the damages caused.
Project X was reportedly loosely inspired by a real-life event in 2008 in Melbourne, Australia, where a teenager threw a massive party while his parents were away.
He promoted it on social media and over 500 people attended, resulting in property damage and police involvement.
Back in Haren in 2012, the Facebook invite for the birthday party quickly went viral, with thousands of people RSVPing.
Despite being warned about the potential scale of the gathering, local authorities underestimated how big the event would become and failed to prepare adequate security or crowd control measures.
When the day of the party arrived, a massive crowd descended on the small town.
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The situation rapidly escalated from a harmless gathering to a full-blown riot.
There was widespread disorder, vandalism, looting and clashes with police.
The town of Haren suffered major property damage and the event made headlines across the Netherlands and beyond.
Trainwreck: The Real Project X
An episode of Netflix's Trainwrecked documents this extraordinary sequence of events.
Using interviews, archival footage and social media posts, it pieces together how a simple Facebook mistake led to total chaos.
It also examines the role of the Project X movie in inspiring teens to attend the party — blurring the line between fiction and reality.
Episodes of Trainwreck started dropping on Netflix on June 10, 2025, with The Real Project X available for streaming from July 8.

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Age is just a number - but thanks to beauty treatments, sophisticated skincare routines, the subtle plastic surgery, that number is getting harder to figure out based on how someone looks. Back in the '90s, the face of a 30-something-year-old looked very distinct, but now, age-reducing procedures and modern makeup techniques has made age a lot more ambiguous. Gen Z TikTok users are regularly expressing their disbelief when they discover a celebrity has a '3' in front of their age - such as when fans were stunned to learn Bridgerton star, Nicola Coughlan, was 37-years-old. In March, fans were left stunned over Anne Hathaway's youthful appearance after the 42-year-old showed off her stunning glow at the Moncler Grenoble Fall/Winter 2025 Show, with the actress throwing people into a tailspin thanks to her flawless skin. And in May, Kris Jenner - who is almost 70 - debuted a new look that left fans gushing that she appeared decades younger. Social media has certainly changed the perception of what middle-age should look like. In the past, TV shows like Cheers or Seinfeld very painted a different image of what a person in this 30s looks like, with many of the characters appearing much older than what it is perceived today of people in their 30s. 'The perception of 30 has changed because cosmetic procedures have become normalized, especially on social media,' Dr. Ann Monis, a Clinical and Forensic Psychologist at Medical Anti-Aging told the Daily Mail about the phenomenon. '[Influencers and public figures are sharing] their injectables, skin treatments and surgical tweaks,' Dr. Monis explained. 'That constant visibility shifts what we think is typical for 30.' Dr. Monis added that the shift isn't just cultural, but psychological as well. 'This is happening because repetition changes how the brain sets expectations,' the medical professional explained. 'When someone sees the same kind of edited or altered face over and over, the brain will then start treating that image as the baseline. It becomes the new 'normal' even though it is not natural or accurate.' She said in the past, people tried to dial back the clock all at once, whereas now, due to a combination of accessibility and new procedures, the change is happening slowly and from an earlier age. 'What used to be considered early signs of aging is now something people feel they need to erase before it fully appears,' Dr. Monis pointed out. Dr. Joshua Korman, a board-certified plastic surgeon and founder of Korman Plastic Surgery, based in Northern California, agreed, noting that '30 years ago, 50 really was kind of middle age.' 'I think a lot of times middle age may be 70 now,' Dr. Korman, who has worked as a plastic surgeon for 30 years, continued. Dr. Korman claimed the ideal face of a 30-year-old is: 'No pimples and no wrinkles.' '[People are] turning to technologies and medications to make the skin more rejuvenated, even at a young age, like in the 20s and as people approach 30,' he said. Dr. Korman shared that we age in four ways, which can be remedied through various treatments. 'We age with gravity, volume loss, skin texture and dynamic wrinkles, the wrinkles when we smile,' he explained. 'So there's treatments for each one of those things, and surgical stuff really deals with the gravity.' Dr. Monis noted the normalized surgical approach to halting age has resulted in an unrealistic standard being set and normalized - something she personally has noted. 'Patients will bring in filtered photos, not to say they want to look enhanced, but because they believe that's how people their age actually look,' she revealed. Dr. Monis warned this can lead to people constantly aiming for a version of 30 that 'is not even grounded in reality.' 'The constant exposure to curated faces has trained people to see youth as a polished look, not a stage of life,' she said.

The Guardian

an hour ago

• The Guardian

‘Have you heard of this BDSM trend?' What I learned recording thousands of hours of teens on their phones

Reactions to Lauren Greenfield's documentary series Social Studies tend to fall into two categories. Young people think it is validating; adults think it's a horror show. After all, the screen of a teenager's smartphone is a shiny black hole to which access is rarely granted. 'Our kids are right there,' as Greenfield puts it, 'and yet we don't really know what's going on in their lives.' Her five-part series, which tracks the online and offline lives of a group of teenagers and young adults – the first generation of social media natives – is being tipped for an Emmy. Under the noses of their parents, she captures teenagers climbing out of bedroom windows to spend the night with boyfriends, posting sexually explicit images, tracking their longest-ever fast (91 hours) and living out their experiences of rape, cyberbullying, whitewashing, the tyranny of Caucasian beauty standards and suicidal ideation. She makes adolescence look like the wild west. 'I really tried to go into this as a social experiment,' says Greenfield, speaking on a video call from the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, which is hosting a Social Studies photographic exhibition until July. Initially she conducted more than 200 mini-interviews in high schools in LA, and then whittled these down to a cohort of about 25, who let her shoot them at home, at school, at parties, and in discussion groups over the course of the 2021-22 high school year. Crucially, they agreed to screen record, thereby sharing their online lives with Greenfield in real time. The result is a frenetic, immersive collage of a documentary, in which screens are overlaid on in-person lives. It is sometimes hard to keep pace, and hard to know where to look – but that is the point. Greenfield started out in anthropology; her first commission was for National Geographic, photographing Maya people in Mexico. Her mother, Patricia Marks Greenfield, a psychologist, was the writer. 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Metro

2 hours ago

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We would never have got together if our partners hadn't died

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