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The Rise of the Internet Fan Bully - Linville - 08-13-2016
interesting article.
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The Rise of the Internet Fan Bully
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65098)][img=768x0]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/08/13/arts/15FANBULLIES1/15FANBULLIES1-master768.jpg[/img][/color]
[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65098)]Normani Kordei, a member of the girl group Fifth Harmony, has been the target of online racist taunts from the band’s own fan base. Mauricio Santana/Getty Images [/color]
Normani Kordei, a member of the girl group on the rise Fifth Harmony, sat for a lighthearted Facebook Live interview earlier this month. Within a week, she had been chased off Twitter by a mob spewing racist insults.
“I’ve not just been cyber bullied, I’ve been racially cyber bullied with tweets and pictures so horrific and racially charged that I can’t subject myself any longer to the hate,” she wrote. Her account has been silent since.
Online harassment has become a depressingly common workplace hazard for people of color in the public eye. Last month, the “Ghostbusters” star Leslie Jones temporarily quit Twitter after weathering a deluge of racist abuse. And last year, the Brazilian actress Taís Araújo reported a series of harassers to the police after they had inundated her Facebook page with similar comments.
But the racist taunts hurled at Ms. Kordei didn’t originate from some white supremacist message board, or even from a crew of Fifth Harmony haters. It came from within the Fifth Harmony fandom itself.
The incident illuminates some strange similarities between the bands of internet trolls stalking the web and the legions of online fans seeking to stir up some drama. They both know that the most hurtful online weaponry to wield against black women include images of apes, threats of lynching and a tossed-off N-word.
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[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65098)]Members of Fifth Harmony, from left, Camila Cabello, Ally Brooke, Lauren Jauregui, Normani Kordei and Dinah-Jane Hansen. Kevin Winter/Getty Images [/color]
Fifth Harmony is a Simon Cowell-assembled girl group that snagged its first Top 10 hit this year with the saucy single “Work From Home.” Its brand would best be described as “gyrating girl power.”
But when Ms. Kordei sat down with the digital lifestyle magazine Galore for the Facebook Live interview on the subject of female friendship, one question — “Describe each girl in one word” — ripped a fault line through the group’s young, female fan base.
Of her bandmate Ally Brooke, Ms. Kordei said: “Sunshine, because she is literally the light of the group.” Of Lauren Jauregui: “My therapist, I can go to her about absolutely anything, and I feel like I can trust that she won’t judge anything that I say.”
And Dinah Jane: “She’s like the turn-up queen, she just has a good time anywhere she is.” When she reached Fifth Harmony’s final member, Camila Cabello, she paused. “She is … let’s see. Camila. Very quirky. Yeah, very quirky. Um, cute. Quirky.”
Continue reading the main story
That’s it. But that was enough to enrage some fans of Ms. Cabello, the 19-year-old who has been positioned as Fifth Harmony’s breakout star (and earned a spot in Taylor Swift’s squad). To this set, Ms. Kordei’s answer was apparently insufficiently effusive. “Camila is a lot more than cute and quirky she’s kind, classy, mature and hardworking,” one fan tweeted.
“Be kind or move on.”
Most Fifth Harmony fans, who call themselves Harmonizers, are not racists. As the abuse mounted, support for Ms. Kordei poured out under the hashtags #IStandWithNormani and #WeLoveYouNormani. Still, racially tinged remarks about Ms. Kordei have been a low-level presence amid her rise in popularity — fans have expressed surprisethat she reads books and called her “ugly” and “ape”— and the abuse tends to flare at dramatic moments within the roiling fan narrative of imagined alliances and feuds (like the supposed ongoing beef between Ms. Kordei and Ms. Cabello).
A similar dynamic has played out among One Direction fans, some of whom have greeted Zayn Malik, the group’s lone Muslim member, with death threats and slurs like “terrorist.” He briefly quit Twitter in 2012, citing Islamophobia, and left the band last year. And when Robert Pattinson started dating the singer FKA Twigs in 2014, a subgroup of his fans inundated her with racist abuse on Twitter that left her “genuinely shocked and disgusted.”
Some level of infighting is embedded within pop fandom itself. Like One Direction before it, Fifth Harmony is a Cowell-engineered pop group that’s been perfectly primed to exploit differences in personality, style and ethnic background of the group’s singers. The Spice Girls played this trick most baldly, naming and dressing members after a singular trait — Baby, Scary, Sporty, Posh and Ginger. But supporting a favorite bandmate can easily degrade into trashing a least favorite. In a New York Post article from 1998, one 9-year-old Spice Girls fan said of Ginger (Geri Halliwell): “A lot of people don’t like her. I think some people hate her the most out of all of them.” She added: “I personally don’t like Scary Spice, though.”
Typically, girl group loyalism falls into the benign end of human self-sorting. But in the crucible of online fandom, demographic distinctions can coarsen into warring factions. A fan fantasy that frames the band members as hating one another — and paints one of them as rude, stupid, evil, and deserving of death because she is black — is no longer just idle fan fictions. As Ms. Kordei put it in one of her notes to fans, “For those of you who enjoy speculating creating drama that doesn’t exist, please keep in mind that myself and the other girls in the group are PEOPLE.”
She added: “This is our story so let us write it our way, instead of you trying to write it for us.”
RE: The Rise of the Internet Fan Bully - barq2 - 08-13-2016
I don't know the group, but that sounds horrific for Normani Kordei. I hope her management look after her.
But on the subject of fans, I met one of 1Direction a while back. It was purely chance. Naively I thought fans would be pleased to see my pic and the info I posted about him. But a minority attacked me. It was unfair I had met him when I wasn't a fan (I have nothing against 1D, but I'm not a teenage girl). That ramped up over a few hours. How dare I have met him! My description of him seeming "quite a nice guy" wasn't good enough for the superfans. Attack, attack, attack! Next time I won't bother.
RE: The Rise of the Internet Fan Bully - Grandote - 08-13-2016
No one should be harassed but the main point seems to be that they used the dreaded "n word" like that made it 100 times worse. I happen to know that facebook and twitter both will act on complaints about that sort of language. Maybe the fans were unhappy about something in particular? I'm not justifying harassment if indeed it happened but she may be trying to divert attention about criticism she got to make it sound like just racism rather than whatever they were unhappy about.
There are trolls and bullies all over the net, get used to it.
RE: The Rise of the Internet Fan Bully - Linville - 08-14-2016
Yeah, I just could understand the point of how hard it would be to be subjected to the online bully part as it would be so hard to go thru.
And to get stopped and how so many think it is okay if it is online but would you say it to someone's face....