As humans grow and change, so do the things that grab our attention. Newsletters, gossip rags, tabloids or even social media accounts filled with blind items; it doesn’t matter the medium, people will talk. And as would be expected, a good few do so just to hear the sound of their own voice. This is never more common than in the field of influencers or those who profit off of the internet in general. An odd sort of expectation has been established in that we as a world tune in to these individuals to hear their thoughts and insights. Their original content, lived experience or expert opinions are expected to enrich, engage or entertain us. In turn, they get compensation and exposure. The wonders of technology!
This expectation is rarely met, as we all know, and more often than not- shock sells. Bold headlines and hastily made reaction posts garner more attention (thus engagement, thus money) than a thoughtful presentation of ideas and information. This is most likely due to the shortening attention spans and media cycles that govern the public, and content creators know this full well. They fall victim to it on their own time, but that’s a conversation for another day.
This places both consumers and media outlets in a position of responsibility for all this content floating around out there. The sheer mass of fake excitement and incitement inherently desensitizes people to the daily horrors of the world we live in, and the cycle repeats. People lose interest because they’ve seen it all a million times, which forces influencers and digital content creators to enter a rat race of one-upping each other when it comes to newsworthy scandals.
It would be easy to discount this as silly egotistical Hollywood nonsense if it was only that, but we don’t live that way. There’s a difference between microcelebrity twitter beef and a grown adult sharing hate speech with their tens of millions of fans. Trivial issues don’t often make news (not big news anyway) so people have to catch big fish if they want to make waves. In 2021, what could be a better way to do so than racism?
We’ve seen it happen time and time again: a big influencer’s true nature is revealed, a mudslide of hate and discourse follows, they meekly apologize and scurry off to their Valley house and return to the internet a month later. If they can afford that long of a break. Besides generating nothing useful but fuel for “cancel culture” discourse and revenue for the influencer in question, these events mean virtually nothing anymore. Fans lament and backtrack, parasocial boundaries are shattered, but nothing is truly gained or lost because these people had nothing meaningful to contribute in the first place. What’s interesting, though, is how these “cancellation” cycles are so quickly brushed aside and rehabilitated only when the scandal at hand is rooted in racism (specifically antiblackness).
Ask any person over the age of 13: what did Trisha Paytas do? Blackface, stereotyping, slur slinging, public disrespect and misinformation concerning those with psychotic conditions, general stupidity; A laundry list of accusations and receipts of reprehensible behavior on the internet would follow, but what would be more telling than the acquisition of this common knowledge? As you can see above, drama outlets still discuss Paytas multiple times a week for millions of views, nagging over whatever recent feud has captured social media’s attention. Paytas actively profits off of this discussion; remember the connection I drew earlier? Attention begets engagement begets big bucks.
This defeats any introduction of the concept of deplatforming Paytas or any other longtime internet scumbag, because this requires that people be (1) informed of their vile actions, (2) care about said actions and those affected by them, and (3) care enough to want this person to never have the opportunity to share those actions and profit off of them again. I can’t dismiss this as frustration with bad people making a lot of money because of the tangible effects of the harmful actions Paytas has committed. This same phenomenon applies exactly to each of the influencers shown in the screenshot I shared, and it will continue to be replicated forevermore it seems. My greatest concern (as a self professed aspiring linguist) is what implications these scandals will have on language as a whole, some of which we are already beginning to observe.
The trivialization of hate speech starts here. When nonblack people violently hurling the n word with explicitly malicious intent can be dismissed as trivial internet drama, that’s when I hurt the most. The empty words and hypocrisy of fans who rushed to show flimsy support to black people and our needs last summer go sour the second they run at breakneck speed to defend their celebrity of the month whose vitriol is actively harming those around them. The double sided coin of audience reaction says “on one hand, this is just another internet blip” and “on the other, this is a highly reactionary piece of news, I want to know the tea”. In both instances, no genuine concern is granted to the people or groups the individual being discussed harmed, and said individual is able to center themselves once more. The significance of the hate speech they spread is negated, and the world moves on.
At the root of this is the kind of pathological pride required to pursue a career of such high caliber on the internet. The process of commodifying oneself, especially if you’re stupid and racist, is a risky business transaction that could buckle any minute. This suspense somehow victimizes influencers, and as they beg for mercy and forgiveness from their army of 14 year olds, they bulldoze any possibility of genuine apologies or reparations to the communities they wounded.
What’s particularly sinister about these people is that they breed their audience for this specific purpose. Shane Dawson and David Dobrik captured a generation of terminally online kids with sensationalized videos and skits chock full of racism, pedophilia and more, conditioning them to applaud these efforts as “stylized content”. By the time people started listening to those pointing out the blaring red flags in these creators, they were less likely to push back against content they’d been observing for years.
Pause. Deep breaths.
There’s a lot of things, but one most discouraging about all of this is that with all the beautiful and good things there are in the world, the cycle persists. There are bright cool days, and lots of sunshine, and animals and family and phenomenal stories and innumerable ways to share them with the power of the internet- and yet. We’re still observing the same people do the same things to the point of despair. It can be all too easy to slip into the doom scrolling of all the horrendous things people on the internet have done, which is something I’m still trying to fight. I’m surely not as consumed by social media as I once was, but the knowledge still sits with me. This permanence of witnessing racism and consequent lack of concern about it is the exact opposite of the transience of public opinion that those despicable human beings depend on. Not to The Lorax y’all or anything, but as long as we do not forget, at some point something can change.