I’ve been online for 30 years, longer than many people who use the internet today, especially those who came of age online. It’s likely that many of them don’t even know what life is like without this other dimension of reality. Each social media site seems to have its own little town where news circulates through algorithms, connecting people to viral ideas, and eventually a consensus forms. I first noticed this when the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial on TikTok suddenly made Johnny Depp the hero and Amber Heard the villain. I went along with it and was totally involved. It seemed to make a difference, at least a little.
But of course, as you can see, the industry continues to shun both Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, although they hope for a more lenient comeback for her than for him. The next weird thing I noticed was that all of a sudden, Jennifer Lopez was the target of TikTok bashing. She was being mocked relentlessly. People were coming forward to talk about their encounters with her, and it went on for weeks, even though she hadn’t actually done anything. She was the target, for some reason.
Suddenly everyone on TikTok started hating her. Or hating her was considered cool. And it immediately seemed to tarnish her brand. What’s interesting about this is that in the mainstream of our culture — Twitter, Facebook, all of the entertainment press — Lopez had to do something to be demonized, canceled, purged. But on TikTok, she hadn’t done anything. All of a sudden, it was time to attack her en masse. I’ll admit that some of it was funny. It was over the two movies she released. One was a musical biopic that she spent millions of dollars on, and the other was a documentary about the making of that biopic.
Her videos talking about her childhood in the Bronx – when she was still “Jenny from the Block” – have become some of the most lampooned, imitated and mocked videos on Tik Tok.
Follow But I love her and this clip will live on in my head forever 😭 #jlo
♬ Original Sound – mitsy
Lou Holloway She’s from New York 💔 #JenniferLopez #POV
♬ Five Minutes of Silence – Dan Close
@officialreinaldogarcia My entire FYP recently #jlo #jenniferlopez #jennyfromtheblock #thegreatestlovestorynevertold #thebronx #bronx
♬ Original music – Reinaldo Garcia
It seemed to come out of nowhere, and while we were consuming TikTok, we never made it out of that bubble. No one was talking about it, including the mainstream entertainment press. But then she had to cancel her concert tour, and now she’s getting divorced. Are these things related? I don’t know, but it’s worth noting that whatever happened with TikTok, it wasn’t Lopez’s fault and it wasn’t something her publicists could control.
Now we’re seeing the same thing happening with Blake Lively: Her movie comes out, it does well at the box office, and then all of a sudden she starts getting attacked on TikTok.
There’s an interview where Blake Lively and Parker Posey are nasty to a reporter who asks about their clothes. They respond in a way that clearly makes the reporter uncomfortable. Sure, it’s nasty, but does it deserve this level of abuse? The reporter says it made them feel awful and it stuck with them for a long time. So it makes sense. But still.
What you’ll notice right away is just how popular this kind of thing is: content creators need to feed to keep view counts high, and nothing works better than focused posting.
I don’t know how you can get through this situation where you’re in trouble and now everyone is criticizing you for something you didn’t do. The people criticizing you don’t seem to realize that sooner or later they’ll be the ones being criticized. These young people growing up like this have a very strong fear that they might say something that will make them the one to be publicly shamed.
I speak from personal experience: it’s terrifying when all eyes are on you, and when you turn away from people who are critical, hateful, nasty, dehumanizing, and deciding it’s time to destroy you. I’ve been in this world a long time, so it’s a little easier. But I worry about young people who have been raised to believe that all of this is OK. It’s not. We need more people who resist and fewer people who go along with it.
