So, last week I announced on Bluesky and Instagram that I’m doing a newsletter bundle deal with Marisa Kabas and Katelyn Burns. The response was immediate and huge! Like, exceeded our wildest expectations within the first couple of hours!

As more journalists and writers and creators have gone independent, more people have struggled to keep up with the growing number of newsletters and subscriptions. Marisa and Katelyn and I are offering a one-month trial where you can subscribe to all of us for 50% off. It’s a one-time payment, so you can upgrade again afterward if you want, but no pressure! We wanted to keep it pretty lowkey for this initial offer.

We’re doing this with Trustfnd, a new collaboration platform for newsletters. This has been in the works for a while now, and we’re so grateful for the support! If you aren’t already familiar with their fantastic work, Marisa writes The Handbasket, where she publishes her essential reporting on Donald Trump’s second term. Katelyn writes about news and politics at Burns Notice and co-hosts the podcast Cancel Me, Daddy, which I joined last year to talk about Charlie Kirk.

It has been surreal and exciting and challenging to be a part of this growing newsletter field. As bleak as the traditional media landscape can be—not to mention the news we cover—there is a lot of promise in the independent model of journalism. It’s a rare thing that gives me something to look forward to. 

If you’re new here, welcome! And now, back to more of my regularly scheduled content.

Last week, I joined Caroline Kwan’s Twitch stream with journalist Kylie Cheung to talk about the hate train against Chappell Roan. Kylie also wrote this amazing piece about it, which does such a great job of explaining how the backlash fits into our cultural obsession with bandwagon hate campaigns against celebrity women. And if you don’t think celebrity gossip matters, you should know these digital smear tactics and this specific misogynistic rhetoric is already affecting women and girls from all walks of life. The anti-woman bigotry and manipulation at the heart of this case is nothing new, but the scale, automation, and platform incentives have undeniably shifted on the celebrity discourse battlefield that is X (formerly Twitter).

If you’re unfamiliar with the Chappell Roan discourse from this past week, let me quickly break it down:

Last weekend, actor Jude Law’s 11-year-old daughter spotted Chappell Roan at breakfast at the fancy hotel they were both staying in for Lollapalooza Brasil. According to the girl’s mother, Catherine Harding, her daughter crossed the dining room to see if it was really Chappell—she didn’t try to take a picture with her, nor did she approach her—and shortly afterward, a security guard came up to Harding’s table and scolded her for letting her daughter roam around a room full of celebrities. After that, Harding’s husband (not Jude Law, but rather a very famous soccer player named Jorginho) posted an Instagram story about the incident, blaming Chappell and calling for her fans to stop supporting her. He wasn’t there, of course, and had not spoken to Chappell, of course, but people immediately ran with his narrative, of course. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro even announced he was banning Chappell from performing in the city, which is particularly galling considering male touring musicians get away with actually harming women and children all the time.

According to Chappell, she had no idea any of this happened until it became a global news story accusing her of making a little girl cry. Since then, the security guard confirmed he was not acting at Chappell’s behest and was not even her personal security guard, but approached Harding and her daughter based on information he had received from the hotel. We still don’t really know all the details, but this fits into a now well-established pattern of backlash against Chappell for stuff she didn’t even do.

This case in particular boils down to Chappell Roan being “held accountable” for a random man’s behavior. And despite the offense being so minimal that it would not constitute a crime anywhere, Chappell is being held to a standard that not even most criminals are subjected to: days of viral online smears. Even offline, at an IRL event I attended while all of this was happening, the host made jokes about Chappell hating kids. This is what happens to women and marginalized people all the time: people make stuff up about you and it becomes your reputation, even though you never did what they accused you of doing. This is supposedly the great threat of the #MeToo movement to permanently tarnish innocent men’s reputations, but in reality, it happens all the time to women over significantly less serious allegations.

And with the Chappell Roan backlash, I specifically want to talk about the role Elon Musk’s X played in cultivating this discourse, because I saw a lot of the platform’s antisocial incentives at play.

Since Musk radically changed X’s verification system into a pay-to-play one, AI spam and bots have thrived. Before he took over Twitter and turned it into X, a blue checkmark next to your name meant you had been verified by an internal team at Twitter. The checkmark signified authentic accounts belonging to celebrities, politicians, journalists, and other high-profile figures. Now, you pay a subscription fee for a blue checkmark, and these users can earn money on X by stoking engagement on their posts. That means blue checkmarks are now incentivized in the opposite direction—these are now predominantly anonymous users trying to stoke inauthentic discourse to reap a monetary reward.

Many of the viral posts about Chappell Roan over the past week have come from these types of accounts, as well as your typical pop culture news aggregator accounts like “Pop Crave,” “Pop Base,” and “Poo Crave” (yes, that’s a real parody account of Pop Crave with over 200,000 followers and a blue check) accounts pushing hearsay and mischaracterizations of the situation to millions of viewers. There were even accounts posting AI videos of Chappell attacking the 11-year-old, because real footage doesn’t exist, because it didn’t happen. Despite it being revealed that Chappell didn’t actually interact with this child at all and most likely did not encourage a security guard to confront her either, it was too late. There was already a profitable algorithm in place pushing anti-Chappell content to millions of people. (I was one of them; my algorithm-driven FYP on X was swamped with this kind of content for days.) So these accounts just pivoted to making up blatant lies about her.

They lied that she grew up rich (she had actually fundraised in high school to attend a $3,000 “Grammy Camp” to learn from Grammy-winning artists—now she is one), they smeared her as a “fake” lesbian (I can’t “debunk” this, but as a lesbian myself I cannot emphasize enough how harmful this kind of discourse is), and they were reportedly joined by a ton of bot accounts, according to BuzzFeed. One of the clearest examples of how X incentivizes antisocial mis/disinformation and then broadcasts it to millions of people is this account that stole a TikTok user’s profile picture, made up a whole thread about knowing Chappell in high school using photos sourced from around the internet, and even offered to pay people for engagement on their thread. The thread is still up and it got over 10 million views, according to X’s view counter. Those views are likely inflated, but it also has thousands of replies and quote-tweets, so a significant number of people engaged with this disinformation. And the blue-check user? Well, they probably made some money.

This is the exact same pattern of inauthentic online behavior that contributed to the smear campaigns against Amber Heard and Blake Lively. But if it feels like these campaigns are cropping up more, getting faster, getting bigger, and encompassing a huge chunk of pop culture—well, you’re not imagining things.

I suspect there are a few variables encouraging the proliferation of these astroturfed (which refers to an inorganic movement—the opposite of grassroots) anti-celebrity women movements, and X’s new platform incentives is one of them. It’s perfectly aligned with Musk’s own politics, which fit into the overall landscape of #MeToo backlash. Musk and the other tech oligarchs, as well as people like Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, benefit from so-called “accountability” culture online becoming a zombified version of itself, attacking women and minorities instead of people like them who actually possess systemic power. Musk has reverse-engineered X to make it so that his own posts dominate the platform. I don’t think he has his finger on the pulse of stan culture, but it’s no surprise that he has cultivated the most reactionary, most conservative, most toxic and misinformed for-profit version of celebrity news and speculation possible. Once upon a time, tabloids did the bulk of this work and they certainly helped streamline the backlash against Chappell Roan to an even bigger, more mainstream audience. Now, anyone with $8 a month can become their own tabloid with zero standards and accountability.

Lively has been trying to make inroads against this culture through the legal system, but she received another enormous round of backlash for subpoenaing X accounts in her social media retaliation suit, so I don’t think Chappell would fare much better if she tried to sue her detractors.

Another aspect of this is how social media audiences have fractured in the age of X. A lot of millennial women and pop culture fans migrated to Threads, as evidenced by how it became the nexus of Lindy West discourse (West is a former Jezebel writer and bestselling author of Shrill and other feminist works who has endured her own controversy over the past few weeks because of her husband—classic). In the days of Twitter, you’d probably have more voices defending Chappell Roan, but people like me stopped posting there a while ago. And even if you try, you can’t truly beat a right-wing algorithm directed by the world’s richest and most obnoxious reactionary man. The platform has become skewed against women like Chappell Roan and her defenders on purpose.

Bluesky, which is where I am, doesn’t incentivize pop culture posting at all. Sometimes that is to the platform’s own detriment, since most people care about pop culture (hence pop being short for “popular”), but it’s kind of refreshing to not even have the latest smear campaign of the week over there. Meanwhile, on X, I saw big liberal accounts who still post there writing their own fanfiction-esque takes about Chappell Roan and getting tens of thousands of likes, because these sorts of pile-ons are so irresistible for cheap and easy engagement on platforms that incentivize cheap and easy engagement.

There are lots of other reasons people hate Chappell Roan: She’s an outspoken lesbian, she supports Palestine and vocally criticizes Israel, she wants the Democratic party to be better (this does not mean she’s a Republican, it’s the opposite of being a Republican), and she purposefully doesn’t conform to the pop star ideal. Some people have said Chappell should try to be more like Taylor Swift, which is hilarious, because people hate Taylor Swift for all the opposite reasons. Highly visible women will be judged and smeared and hated no matter what they do. But because of the way our biggest communications platforms have been disrupted by billionaire oligarchs, misogyny is no longer just popular and profitable. It’s an artificially constructed information feed you can’t opt out of unless you leave the entire platform—and even then, it has already seeped into the offline world.