Social media has blurred the lines between fans and celebrities – with disturbing results | Hannah Ewens

A a few months ago, I saw a video of predators closing in on and devouring a pair of zoo animals. Sorry—a clip of a couple of young women interrupting Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco cuddling during a picnic in a New York City park. They didn't ask about Gomez's work, nor did they respect her privacy, but went straight to the point: the photo. A vulnerably positioned Blanco, lying on Gomez's lap, seemed to be distancing himself, his hood pulled over his face. Since someone was filming the entire encounter, it was clear that the fans weren't interested in meeting an idol. They were interested in maximizing the moment's potential as social media content.

Gomez has rarely complained about her fans, mostly admonishing them to be kind and respectful, which is the typical message celebrities use to avoid biting the hand that feeds them. But Gomez is decidedly old-fashioned, a Disney child grown up. A new generation of artists is more outspoken about their fans going too far.

In Rolling Stone's latest cover story, American musician Chappell Roan spoke of a fan grabbing and kissing her, fans getting their hands on her flight information to be at the airport when she arrived, her father's phone number being leaked online and someone calling her, and having a stalker – all of which have understandably left her upset.

Roan is not alone. Recently, several young artists have spoken out against the increasingly self-righteous behavior of their fans. Phoebe Bridgers recounted how a fan publicly criticized her for not taking a selfie – as she was on her way to her father's funeral. Billie Eilish and Clairo have raised similar concerns about how online fandom distorts perceptions of artists' private lives.

The funny thing is, as anyone who works in the music industry knows, they are just expressing what many artists have always felt: that fans are a necessary evil (their paycheck), and that they may a frightening and disturbing force that must be handled with sensitivity. Roan's stories may sound hellish and perhaps shocking, but that's exactly what fans, stalkers and the public have long done to celebrities.

But we are now in a whole new era of fan-artist relationships, shaped by younger artists who have the language to talk about “boundaries” and “parasocial relationships.” Bridgers already predicted it. Celebrities and famous artists are no longer the archetypal gods of culture, and their fans no longer worship them like they once did. While they have a strong bond with them, it's different. Everyone and everything has become potential content, including favorite artists, their bodies, and their personal lives. No one is above this collective urge to document, engage, and create discourse.

Another problem is that it is difficult for artists online and offline to distinguish between fans, anti-fans (the term for people who are strongly committed to an artist, but in a negative way), or the public. Even Roan has since clarified this in a video from the VMAs red carpet. “We're not really talking about fans here, we're talking about people who are harassing, and if you happen to [also] Be a fan, we're talking to you,” she said.

The entire cycle of fandom has been disrupted since the pandemic. It used to be artist, fan, and fandom in a Venn diagram that held the shared world that artist and fan created together in the overlapping middle. Now it's artist, fan, fandom, and online audience—and in the middle, a nebulous space that no longer feels like a shared secret, but a battleground for that artist's narrative.

This is what bothers artists: the destruction of the decades-long, mutually beneficial relationship between them and their fans, in which fans paid money for basic services (records, concerts) and could expect the occasional interview to get worked up about. Personal interactions between fans and artists remained limited to the fan base (what the artist was wearing, a photo together, a piece of advice they might have given), because who else would care? There was no sense of wanting to upstage an artist, contribute to their story, or be anything other than enjoying the moment with that person.

In other words, when fans kiss an artist or tweet abuse at them online today, it's no longer a fan-artist interaction where a fan wants to feel seen by the artist (and then might later share it with the fan community). It's about being seen online and sharing it with the world. Like everyone else, fans increasingly see themselves as public storytellers and knowledgeable participants in online discourse.

If I had to predict where the situation will go in the next decade, I would say that surveillance of artists will increase. Artists may ask not to be spoken to in public, and more and more artists will withdraw from social media altogether. Perhaps some will change their public lives and spend more time in high-security areas. and I wouldn't be surprised if meet-and-greets and other activities where fans can meet their favorite artists were eliminated entirely, thereby limiting fans' expectations of being entitled to access. Constant surveillance poses a real security risk.

The public reception to Roan's comments has been generally positive. Not long ago, this would have been seen as a sad story of a rich and famous musician, and anything other than Gomez's cheerful participation in a photo would have been condemned as selfish. But we sympathize with Roan because many of us have now experienced our own mini-online invalidation, had our picture posted without our consent, been stopped on the street by TikTokers, or seen our online comments become fuel for the discourse of the day.

We don't want this to happen to us, but we can't stop ourselves from doing it to others. If a young and sophisticated segment of fans continues to treat artists as mere actors in their Instagram stories, we lose something of what makes being a fan so fun and exciting: the connection between creator and audience. This should be a moment to rethink how we cultivate our own online lives before we find ourselves in a venue with an empty stage.

• Hannah Ewens is a freelance editor and writer and author of Fangirls: Scenes From Modern Music Culture

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