I want to talk this week about some backlash to Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, but this isn’t a newsletter about Swifties, it’s about digital manipulation so hang in here with me.

When Taylor’s new album dropped, the main discourse was that it was a flop even her diehard fans couldn’t defend. It has a song on it about her boyfriend’s dick. Max Martin couldn’t save it.

I’m not here to defend Showgirl. It’s been a grower of an album for me — and I will unapologetically belt out Fate of Ophelia and Opalite in the car, but it’s never overtaking my love for 1989. It also doesn’t matter, Tay’s doing just fine:

Here’s what I found more interesting. On social media (I noticed it on tiktok but presumably it was also happening elsewhere) people started posting that the album was racist, white supremacist, and that Taylor had aligned herself with nazi iconography.

Here’s where I need to jump in with a giant disclaimer — as a pākeha woman, I’m absolutely not going to shout over the top of fans of colour who tell me that they find lyrics racist. In this case, one of the examples involved interpreting the lyrics from Opalite:

You were dancing through the lightning strikes
Sleepless in the onyx night
But now the sky is opalite

Some fans took this to be a reference to Travis Kelce’s previous girlfriend (a woman of colour), being contrasted with Swift (the whitest woman alive). Others saw this just as another conflation of black=darkness=bad vs white=lightness=good.

Regardless of your opinion of these interpretations, or how they made fans feel, this was just the beginning. In the song Wi$hli$t, Taylor talks about her change in priorities since hooking up with Kelce: “I just want you…Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you.” This, came the tiktoks, was a clear example that Swift was a white supremacist, or a eugenicist, or worse. It didn’t refer to her wanting a football team full of little Kelces, it referred to her wanting to move to an all-white gated community. Or at least to spreading her very white genes:

People were quick to point out that, especially given the cultural climate, expressing a fantasy in which two Aryan-esque rich people populate a neighborhood with blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies is a little… insensitive, at best.

Obviously, Taylor Swift didn’t sit down to write a pro-white (not to mention, deeply cisheteronormative) line here; I don’t think she did, not in the slightest. However, pushing the idea of passing on one’s genes, in the context of whiteness, has history to it – history that the pop star who is often lauded for her genius (“her brain!”) has to be willfully ignorant of for this not to occur to.

And then, like a final boss level, came the accusation that Taylor was flogging nazi merchandise associated with the album.

This necklace decorated with lightning bolts was now a nod to an SS insignia.

At this stage I swiped away and moved on with my life, but it kept nagging at me, this escalation from real fans expressing disappointment with a fave through to the unhinged idea that Taylor Swift was selling nazi memorabilia with her whole chest right there on her website. And it nagged at me because, of course, I’d seen it before.

Finally, this week, Rolling Stone published an article showing that data analysis of social media posts painting the singer as a Trump supporter or white supremacist revealed a network of inauthentic accounts.

The article goes on to say, “once the provocations were injected into the Swift discourse — often they appeared in edgier online forums like 4chan or KiwiFarms before migrating to popular social apps — they were organically sustained by the people challenging them on mainstream platforms. This, in turn, algorithmically reinforced their visibility.”

Back in 2022, I wrote at length about the online hate campaign against director and actress Olivia Wilde. It took a bunch of fan conspiracy theories and whipped them up into a frenzy that went mainstream in a way that made no sense. In that piece I linked to a Media Matters investigation:

“Right-leaning pages have posted over 300 times about Wilde and the movie, earning over 200,000 interactions,” Media Matters said.

Right-wing sites include The Daily Wire, Breitbart, and social media platforms like Gab, Rumble, and Telegram. Terms like “commie whore,” “Hollywood harlot,” and “bimbo” have been used to describe Wilde.

And while 200,000 interactions may not seem like a lot, “right-wing outlets like The Daily Wire appear to be exploiting this situation to get more engagement on social media,” said Pam Vogel, a senior adviser with Media Matters. “We’ve observed that right-wing media, really all media, are eager for the downfall of women who are outspoken on progressive issues.”

This came on the heels of the online tarring and feathering of Amber Heard, with right-wing outlets spending tens of thousands of dollars boosting anti-Heard propaganda.

Since then, we’ve had the ongoing dispute between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni over the filming of It Ends With Us. My tiktok algo seems to ONLY want to show me content that contends that Blake is “going down”, “getting what she deserves” and so on. If you still believe that, you need to dig in to Kat Tenbarge’s reporting on the subject.

And look, obviously Taylor Swift leaves a vacuum for people to say these things through her silence — which at this particular moment in US political history can be a tough thing for her fans to swallow. Luce wrote a great piece about this recently: the one about whether celebrities should be activists.

I get it — but if you’ve watched Miss Americana, you’d have to imagine Taylor’s gone through quite the redpilling to get from those personal politics to the kinds she’s being accused of now. And when she had to cancel her Vienna concert because of a bomb threat, and three of her young fans were stabbed to death in Stockport, I can also imagine her personal calculus for what she wants to speak out about might have changed. But I’m not stanning for Taylor, or for rich white women in general. They don’t need my help.

What I’m concerned about is our inability to see these campaigns for what they are: organised, entirely artificial, and designed to have left-leaning people turning on women who’ve achieved status or power.

My friend Mike (hi mike!) recently referred to Showgirl as “an album for cop wives” — not a phrase he came up with, and one he describes as a vibe rather than anything specific. And this is what happens, isn’t it? We don’t even need to be soaking in these hate campaigns to catch the vibe. There’s something “smug” about Lively, something “talentless” about Wilde, Taylor’s turning into a MAGA-aligned trad wife.

I think what freaks me out most is how easy it is to become unpaid staff for someone else’s agenda. You see something wild, you quote-tweet it to dunk on it, you stitch it to correct it, you send it to a friend with “???” — and congratulations, you’ve just done the distribution. You’ve helped the algorithm learn what to show. You’ve helped the story cross the river from the forums into the mainstream.

So if we want to get better at spotting this stuff, the question isn’t “is this take correct?” It’s “where did this come from, who’s boosting it, and what happens if I touch it?” Sometimes the most radical thing you can do online is refuse to launder a narrative — even one you hate — into everyone else’s feed.

So keep holding artists accountable, keep listening to fans of colour when they tell you something landed wrong. But also: get curious about the machinery. Notice how often “accountability” is just a costume on a campaign. And when you feel that familiar rush of oh, she’s going down — take it as a cue to pause, not post. The internet doesn’t need our help to be cruel.

more good stuff

• unfortunately Aotearoa’s Minister of Education has said that we’re going to follow Australia into a social media ban for under-16s. If you need help understanding or explaining why this is terrible — here’s my explainer from earlier.

• loved this piece at Fansplaining about fans as tourists in Korea.

  

• in the spirit of my ongoing plea that we should all make more websites, I loved this project to gather together a huge bunch of introductory resources to do just that: F*ck it let’s make a website.

  

finally, in my lego city

Forward this email to someone who hates Taylor Swift.