THE LATEST CELEBRITY DIET: CYBERBULLYING
Reality TV star Rob Kardashian had a family matter to discuss, so naturally, he turned to Twitter. “Didn’t invite the Mother of my child to a baby shower you all were trying to throw for me!!?” he tweeted late last month, reigniting the feud between the Kardashian-Jenner clan and his model fiancée, Blac Chyna. “You all must have lost your damn minds.” In retaliation for the slight, he tweeted out his little sister Kylie Jenner’s phone number.
Kardashian, in internet parlance, had doxxed Jenner — he published personal, private information about her online, seemingly without her consent. It’s a maneuver harassers use to humiliate, intimidate or silence their targets. It also helped Kardashian score his most popular tweet ever.
Lately, celebrity feuds have taken on the contours of cyberbullying, with famous rivals integrating the tactics of online harassers into their PR offensives. What looks like a public display of immaturity can actually be part of a sophisticated image management strategy. Retweet counts and Instagram followers are the new Billboard 100, and celebrities can gin up their numbers by instigating feuds with one another in increasingly nasty or technologically intriguing ways. But the game can have a dark side, especially for the losers.
The modern celebrity arsenal incorporates these other digital bullying tools: • Secret Recordings: The celebrity squabble of the summer exploded when Kim Kardashian West released a surreptitiously recorded Taylor Swift talking on the phone with Kardashian West’s husband, Kanye West — a bid to prove that Swift had preapproved his controversial lyrics about her in his song “Famous.” Kardashian West posted the video evidence to Snapchat in July. (Such recordings are illegal in some states, including California, and run afoul of YouTube’s harassment rules.)
• Sexual Humiliation: When rappers Wiz Khalifa and West tussled on Twitter in January, Amber Rose, their mutual ex, stepped in to tease West about their sex life. And when Justin Bieber’s ex-girlfriend Selena Gomez waded into his Instagram comments to scold him for posting pictures with a new girlfriend and to accuse him of cheating on her, he struck back by accusing her of using the relationship for attention.
• Revenge Porn: After teenage actress Chloe Grace Moretz tweeted dismissively about the Kardashian-Swift feud, yet another Kardashian — Kim’s sister Khloé — responded by posting a photo of a woman resembling Moretz. She had jumped onto a young man’s back on the beach, and her bikini bottoms were yanked to the side, revealing everything underneath. Moretz tweeted back to debunk the depantsing, writing that Kardashian had instead exposed “some girl who was wrongfully photographed.”
• Mob Deployment: For celebrities with the most rabid fandoms, even an oblique nod from the star can set off a fan stampede. After Kardashian West posted the Snapchat video of Swift’s phone call, Kanye fans and allies — many aligned with her spurned ex-boyfriend Calvin Harris — gathered under the #KimExposedTaylorParty hashtag to shovel out cruelly exultant GIFs and memes. (A commemorative T-shirt reading “In Memory of Taylor Swift, RIP, 1989 to 2016” was soon offered for sale online.) And when Kardashian West cryptically tweeted a line of snake emoji, revelers bombarded Swift’s Instagram with snake after snake after snake.
It’s no coincidence that a Kardashian fingerprint can be lifted from many of the most highprofile incidents. While most celebrities use the internet to promote their mainstream careers — movies, albums — Kardashian West’s core product is herself. Stirring up dramatic personal narratives on her reality television show and social media accounts is her main event. Swift, who studiously avoids confrontation while writing veiled riddles about her ex-boyfriends and frenemies into her songs, didn’t stand a chance.
Kardashian West’s assault was part of a multiplatform offensive. On Twitter, she leveraged Swift’s phone call to advertise her new Snapchat account.
And she went on to milk the publicity by posting another Snapchat video of herself singing along to the “Famous” lyrics in question. Her clip became an internet blockbuster not only because of the story it told but also because of the tactics it deployed.
Meanwhile, Swift was put on the defensive, left to quibble about the details of the exchange in a long-winded message she typed on Apple’s Notes app. She then took a screen shot of it and posted it to Instagram. Her self-serious response to Kardashian West’s raucous exposé — “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative” — soon curdled into a mocking meme. Who was in the right didn’t matter — Kardashian West won the game.
Blac Chyna, who recently clawed her way into the Kardashian universe through her relationship with Rob, has proved a quick study. A few days after Rob Kardashian doxxed his sister, Chyna posted his number to Twitter, too, then toggled over to Snapchat to explain that she’d done it to compel her fiancé to change his number — and flush out all the women who had been texting him. It was a strategic move, both personally and professionally — it locked down her man, drew attention to her suite of social accounts and stirred interest in the couple’s E! reality series, “Rob & Chyna.”
You’d think that the utter savageness on display here would horrify fans. Online celebrity feuds capitalize on some of the most vile and destructive social ideas: that sexual shaming is an acceptable response to a stated opinion; that women are manipulative liars; and that a person who missteps in a private dispute deserves to be punished by the crowd.
Occasionally, celeb-on-celeb attacks backfire: In May, the rapper Azealia Banks posted a racist tirade against the pop star Zayn Malik and soon found herself booted from Twitter for violating its harassment policy.
“Bullying” and “harassment” are amorphous categories, and the seriousness we attach to these tactics varies considerably depending on the power dynamics at play. Unlike the muscled jock who picks on the scrawny nerd, the straight teenager who harasses the gay kid or the jilted boyfriend who uses the cover of the internet to mar his ex’s reputation, these celebrity cases can make us feel like mere mortals peering up at a couple of Greek gods shooting lightening bolts at each other.