We need to start recognizing stan psyops
+ peak Chicken Shop date, policefluencers, proteinmaxxed ice cream, and the best outfits from the Tompkins Square Halloween dog parade
Last week, a pop music stan account posted that they were deeply offended by Carpenter’s performance of “Juno”. “Im 17 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter when she's performing,” they posted in a long thread bashing Carpenter and calling her performance overly sexual. It amassed nearly 18 million views.
Carpenter is a former Disney kid who is now a 25-year-old international pop star. Several of her songs deal with sex. "Juno" has lyrics like, “I like the way you fit. God bless your dad’s genetics” and “explore me, I’m so fucking horny.”
All of this is completely fine, again, because Carpenter is a full grown adult. But the thread went viral and sparked an entire outrage cycle of discourse about whether it’s appropriate for a female pop star to talk about sex. The “Im 17 and AFRAID” language quickly became a meme and people began to post it as copypasta all over Twitter.
News outlets wrote up the viral meme, aggregating tweets and boosting the original poster even more. But there is a very crucial detail that was ignored: The “I’m 17 and I’m AFRAID of Sabrina carpenter” account is not some neutral observer of pop culture; they are an anti-Sabrina, anti-Selena Gomez, pro-Taylor and pro-Ariana stan account who is successfully trolling for engagement, smearing Sabrina in order to drive more eyeballs and attention to threads that promote their favored artists.
On the same thread where they bash Carpenter, they boost Taylor Swift, saying “You never see Taylor showing herself on stage like that. Queen Tay Tay remains Sabrina's ender.” This is not even the first time that this pop account has trolled for engagement. They’ve picked fights with Nicki Minaj’s stans – the barbs – by encouraging followers to reply to a post about Ariana Grande with "Nicki Tanked."
While this sort of posting strategy might seem trivial, the same engagement farming and stan-baiting tactics that pop culture accounts use are now being replicated across the rest of the news and politics ecosystem online. Big political accounts troll for engagement and feed into fandoms. X has become overrun with large accounts attempting to mainstream memes for their own benefit, and often profit. Developing a nuanced understanding of stan Twitter is a crucial form of media literacy.
Stan accounts are masters of engagement farming, using emotionally charged, often misleading content to spark viral outrage or intense support. They manipulate algorithms by flooding timelines with memes, copypasta, and viral phrases that seem organic but are carefully crafted to drive specific narratives.
This strategy of boosting or derailing discourse can be benign in pop culture, but it paves the way for similar manipulation regarding real, important issues. These techniques are no longer limited to entertainment, they’re being deployed in ways that shape public opinion on critical social and political matters.
The far right has excelled at this. For instance, look at accounts like the right-wing troll page “Richard Strocher” (yes, that’s Dick Stroker). I made a video about this months ago, but the white nationalist account is constantly posting engagement bait around news events and issues to amass attention and boost their posts in the algorithm. When tunnels were discovered under the synagogue in Brooklyn, he pretended to live above them. Thousands of users fell for the bait and boosted his following.
Nick Adams, a self-professed “alpha male” is another right-wing account that has amassed over 575,700 followers using stan Twitter tactics. His series of Fortnite posts, for instance, are aimed at baiting average people who enjoy these things to respond, set off discourse, and ultimately push his toxic, pro-Trump narratives around masculinity.
X’s monetization schemes for blue check accounts only exacerbate these dynamics. Blue check accounts can now receive monetary payouts based on the level of engagement they drive on their posts. “Stans pioneered this before there was even a monetization element,” said journalist Kat Tenbarge, “but fan-bait has definitely boomed with monetization and the For You Page algorithm.”
If people can't recognize these basic stan tactics when they appear in pop culture contexts, such as a Twitter thread claiming "I'm 17 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter," how will they ever recognize the same strategies when political actors use them to influence elections, policy debates, or global narratives?
The ability to manipulate public discourse and quietly push certain agendas online is powerful. It can directly impact real-world decisions and democratic processes. We need people to recognize these sorts of campaigns for what they are in order to navigate not just fan wars but a rapidly evolving digital landscape where the lines between entertainment and politics continue to blur.
The Andrew Garfield episode of Chicken Shop date is perfect
Ever since clips went viral of Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg and Andrew Garfield having a series of meet cutes on the red carpet, fans have been dying for a collab.
The two finally filmed an episode of Chicken Shop Date, Dimoldenberg’s YouTube show where she interviews celebrities and asks them awkward first date questions, together. Pretty much everyone agrees their chemistry is off the charts and the whole episode is extremely charming.
Dozens of police influencers are running for office in Brazil
Rest of World reported that dozens of influencer police officers are running for public office in Brazil’s municipal elections this month. These policemen are using using explicit and violent content to build their online personas and amass attention.
One factor behind the popularity of law enforcement candidates in Brazil is the rise of the podcast policial, or police-themed shows, on YouTube. Many who are candidates today have appeared as guests in the shows over the past years. Podcastro, a police-themed show on YouTube, has featured at least 10 police candidates in the past four months. Fala Glauber, a policeman in Rio de Janeiro, has amassed 2.6 million subscribers on his podcast show and livestreamed an interview with two police candidates last week.
“Police stories have always fascinated people,” Uchôa told Rest of World. While TV and films made cops popular decades ago, social media has blown the interest in them out of proportion, he said.
Buoyed by this obsession, some policemen are going out of their way to create appealing content for their channels. Carlos Alberto da Cunha, a police officer who was elected federal deputy in 2022, recently confessed he had staged police operations for his YouTube channel.
How a network of right-wing influencers pushed anti-Ukraine videos
The AP published a detailed investigation into how Ben Swann, a right wing influencer and TV producer linked to Russian state media, created a 12 part video series called "Zelenskyy Unmasked," spreading wild conspiracy theories about Zelenskyy and Ukraine.
The series was launched right as Congress debated aid for Ukraine and was amplified to millions by a network conservative influencers like Donald Trump Jr., Chaya Raichik and her media brand Libs of TikTok, and more. Posts by those influencers were amplified by at least 9,300 unique accounts on X, with a total of over 33 million collective followers.
The "Zelenskyy Unmasked” series was published to a new media platform called Truth in Media, which Swann said, isn’t profitable, but is funded by wealthy U.S. donors who he refused to name. “Most of them own very large companies,” he told the AP, “if not publicly traded companies.” Swann had enough funds to hire a digital marketing firm to boost views.
As I wrote a few months ago, as influencer-driven media becomes the dominant way people consume news and information, lack of transparency around funding, especially when it comes to new video-driven platforms like Truth in Media, poses a significant threat to media integrity. Unlike traditional outlets, where business models are more regulated and visible, the creator economy is deeply opaque, leaving audiences vulnerable to manipulation by hidden interests.
Nothing dismantles the narratives pushed by these grifters cosplaying as “independent media” faster than exposing where they’re actually getting their money from, and so it’s crucial that we push for more transparency from influence-driven media companies across the political spectrum.
Without full knowledge of who is financing the influencers we follow and platforms where we consume media, how will any of us know whether the content we're ingesting is shaped by dangerous hidden agendas or foreign interference?
More fun stuff
A developer made the ThinkPad nub moan.
Proteinmaxxing culture has gotten to the point where they now make protein ice cream.
Counterfeit Miss Rachel dolls are a big issue as the holiday season approaches.
A wonderful meditation on the end of in-flight magazines.
The Harris campaign is leveraging a popular YouTube format in digital ads targeting college students in battleground states.
The OnionLovers subreddit is having a horny meltdown after a user posted a picture of fajitas featuring his wife’s cleavage.
40% of Gen Z adults cite video games as one of their daily media activities.
Dating app Feeld has launched a print magazine covering relationships, sexuality, and desire.
The Rizzler rizzed up Citi Field.
Some of the best outfits from the Tompkins Square Park Halloween dog parade:
I loved this whole piece by J. Wortham on AI and the dehumanization of the Internet, but this graph in particular really resonated:
As someone who came of age online and on social media, learning how to comport myself into legibility is a familiar act. Lately, it’s more of an uncomfortable act. (There’s probably an entire essay on The Internet We Lost to write some day.) There has never been more distance between who I appear to be online and who I am in my actual life. I relish in the distance. I’m simply unwilling to try and capture the tensions, frustrations, delights, complexities of my exquisite human life on these apps. They don’t deserve it.
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does anyone else report on or even care about getting into the weeds like this? sort of a genuine question. Thank you taylor 🐐