Stans: bullshit and misinformation
On stan Twitter, everyone's a DSA member when it comes to Taylor Swift.
I used to be a big swiftie; a stan of Taylor Swift. While I still listen to Swift's music, I could care less about her personal life. I, like other college students, have much better things to care about. But even as a swiftie I could acknowledge that my so-called idol had flaws. Not to brag, but I was educated enough to know that everyone, even superstar Taylor Alison Swift, was not perfect.
As someone who knew of Swift's flaws, but still a swiftie nonetheless, what astounded me was all the criticism she got that seemed inauthentic, or straight up false and was still accepted as good-faith critique.
This is not just about Taylor Swift. This is not a think-piece to defend her from valid criticism. Instead, I aim to critique online discourse within pop culture fandoms and how they are vehicles to spread misinformation.
Stans spread misinformation
In my experience as a swiftie, I would encounter the same old tired posts about Swift. By a certain point, they felt like copypastas. For example, there's this one photo of young Swift posing for a photo with a young guy who has a swastika on his t-shirt. If you were also a swiftie, you'd likely see this photo posted without context at least a few times a week if you spent as much time as Twitter as I did.
The context doesn't matter for my purposes, but if you want to learn more, Snopes did an article on it. What does matter is that people would reply to swifties with this image, again, without context. The intentional lack of context is proof that the poster at the very least does not care about how the image came about, or even if it is real (it is). The simple truth is that things from niche communities online eventually permeate into general pop culture, and enters the knowledge of normies.
An example of this is Millie Bobby Brown's homophobia. She isn't homophobic, but in 2017 and throughout 2018, trolls and stans on Twitter posted about Brown's alleged homophobia in ways that, while mean, I now unfortunately find funny as a gay man. But back in 2018, long before I ever became active on Twitter, I passed by an image of Brown posing for Sunglass Hut. I mentioned to my friend that I have a cousin who loves Brown, to which my friend replied, "I heard she's homophobic."
This permeation of discourse is a combination of the sleeper effect and ContraPoints's third cancel culture trope, essentialism. The sleeper effect occurs when a message marinates in your brain long enough for it to stick and gets disconnected from its original source, even when that source isn't credible. And essentialism, defined by ContraPoints, "is when we go from criticizing a person's actions to criticizing the person themselves." Do the math with me. The sleeper effect + essentialism = my friend remembering that someone said Brown is homophobic. You and I are regularly effected by the sleeper effect. Whenever we say we read something somewhere or heard someone say something without remembering where we read it or who said it, we are falling victim to the sleeper effect, and it's one of the many reasons that misinformation can be so powerful. When stans are more prioritized with ending your fave than being engaged in good-faith discourse, claims of wrongdoing are stripped from their original source, context is removed and it doesn't matter if something is true or not. All that matters in the point of view of a stan is if a piece of information is useful. Factuality is irrelevant. What the stan themselves thinks is irrelevant, too. This behavior is what Harry G. Frankfurt calls a bullshitter; "a person who utters bullshit is not interested in whether what (s)he says is true or false, only in its suitability for his or her purpose."1
Let's make a new equation: (bullshit + essentialism) ⨉ the sleeper effect = the diffusion of misinformation. Now that we have this equation, much of online discourse can be and its effects can be explained.
Political bullshitters
As already proven with my Taylor Swift and Millie Bobby Brown examples, stans are bullshitters. But I wanted to briefly mention that this behavior can be found all over the place, especially in politics. In the U.S.'s current political polarization, partisans find themselves bullshitting to make the other side look bad, further committing them to their own side.
One example I always point to is a made up quote from Donald Trump, in which he allegedly said:
"If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they'd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific."
The image used to spread this quote cites People Magazine from 1998. However, a quick search online will show you that Trump never said this, but because it seems like something he would say, many people post this quote as if it was really said. What especially annoys me about this example, though, is that Trump has already said things that should make anyone weary of supporting him. We don't need to start spreading fake quotes around.
Remember this
My whole inspiration for writing this is to tell you to not believe everything you read in a comment section, on Reddit, or in a Twitter thread. I've heard so many friends of mine repeat bullshit that I had to do my own research on to find out whether it was true or not. Most of the time it wasn't true, or at the very least it was exaggerated.
When people are able to post anonymously, they feel almost no responsibility to act with good intentions. And of course, always consider the source. Are you reading something from NBC News, or from a stan account whose bias is pretty obvious? (I know NBC isn't perfect, no news source is, but it's not like I could use CBS News as an example anymore.)