That Time I Got Harassed For a Review I Didn’t Write (And What It Might Say About Modern Fandom)

No, I did not write a review for The Tortured Poets Department, okay?

So, on Friday night, I was sitting on my couch, watching Taskmaster and screwing around on my phone, when I got a Twitter notification. It was from a Taylor Swift account berating me to “do better” for some reason. Assuming it was related to an old post I’d written or whatever, I clicked on it, and then things got weird.

Taylor Swift released her latest album this week, The Tortured Poets Department. It was an immediate record breaker and creator of Discourse. How could it not be? Swift is one of the biggest musicians on the planet and she has been utterly inescapable for the past year or so. Between her re-records of her back-catalogue, a commercial smash world tour, and a new relationship with a major American football player, Swift had thoroughly cemented her status as a megastar. Also, she won a few more Grammys.

Reviews for The Tortured Poets Department have been very strong. It has a Metacritic score of 78. An exception to those generally positive reviews is the one from Paste. As the website explained on Twitter, due to the negative nature of this write-up, they had chosen to publish it without a byline. This is because, when they published a bad review for a previous Swift album, Lover, the critic has harassed and threatened for their troubles. For some reason, a bunch of Swifties decided that I was the offending critic and sent some baffling harassing messages my way.

I didn’t write the review. I freelance for Paste, yes, but only movies and books coverage. I’ve been a full-time pop culture critic for about seven years now and I truly cannot remember a time where I was ever hired to write about music. It’s not my field of interest. Honestly, I find writing about music to be very difficult. It’s not in my skillset.

Explaining so didn’t stop the nonsense. A few avid Swifties doubled down and got mildly conspiratorial with their responses. There was at least one death threat, although, according to Twitter’s rules, it’s not a “real” one if they write “d-word” in lieu of “die.” Funny that, eh?

In the grand scheme of weird harassment and abuse I’ve received over the course of my career from stans with no hobbies and a mild saviour complex, this experience was admittedly pretty tame. I’ve survived far scarier death threats for doing the earth-shaking job of offering opinions on films. Mostly, this Swiftie skirmish just confused me. I still have no idea why they focused on me as the probable critic who besmirched their favourite singer. Again, I have never written about music for Paste (and having to repeat that fact made me feel weird because it felt like I was feeding an inexhaustible machine of fantasy and denial.)

What disheartened me more, to be honest, were the responses and retweets to the original Paste tweets. One person asked if the site would prefer to have one staff member harassed or all of them. I saw people making threats towards the company of multiple occasions. There were threats to dox the writer, as well as bomb threat “jokes.” Amid the noise and fury and attempts to add a community note to the tweet to let everyone know that it wasn’t a real review because it was just one person’s opinion (uh…), everything began to feel a little bit “this is about ethics in music journalism.”

The worst part was that none of it surprised me.

There’s honestly a lot we could talk about here. We could delve into how these threats mirror the wider attacks on journalists across America and the world that have led to direct physical violence towards people just doing their job. I’m half-tempted to drag out a whiteboard and offer a brief history of Gamergate, which feels painfully relevant almost nine years later as pop culture of all kinds finds itself easily hijacked by angry “anti-woke” losers and their ginned-up culture wars, much of which acts as a gateway to wider radicalization. It’d be easy to dive head-first into the ever-popular toxic fandom conversation, something I’ve written about a lot from many angles over my career (and faced the ire for it.)

But it really all boils down to one detail I cannot help but return to time and time again: why is this normal now, and why are fans so proud of their cruelty?

It’s not just the Swifties, obviously. It’s the sports fans who start punch-ups and yell bigoted slurs during games. It’s the tinhatters who smear the spouses of their favourite singers and actors as evil harpies who fake pregnancies to keep these poor helpless millionaires entrapped. It’s the Barbz going after the graveyard where Megan thee Stallion’s mother is buried. It’s Johnny Depp cultists participating in a bot-driven hate campaign against his ex-wife after he lost a libel trial in England. It’s K-pop “fans” demanding an apology from the singer Karina because she “betrayed” them by having a boyfriend. It’s the conspiracies and the berating and the obsession over numbers. It’s calling someone “poor” because they can’t afford to buy $500 concert tickets. It’s discarding all the wonderful qualities of fan communities in favour of an endless competition where victory is the sole goal of your cultural pleasure.

In the lead-up to the release of Swift’s new album, it wasn’t difficult to find some of her more zealous fans “joking” about how they would attack her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn once all the secrets of their relationship were revealed in her songs (he seems to have gotten off pretty lightly as her rebound fling, the gross racist Matty Healy, faced her true lyrical ire.) There was a lot of talk of keeping an eye on critics who didn’t give good reviews. There were, of course, fights with other fandoms. None of this is Swift-exclusive. You could say a lot of this about the Beyhive or the Barbz or Arianators or whatever. The cycle is so prevalent that we now expect it with every major fandom.

And therein is the problem. When you have to expect this all the time, how do you deal with it? if you’re Paste, you have to protect your staff, and it’s great that they did because not every publication looks out for their writers like that. But now this is how critics need to work: they have to go to work with the full and exhausting awareness that the “wrong” opinion could lead to harassment, to threats, to someone finding your home address and sharing it online. That’s the perennial threat hanging overhead, the sword of Damocles painted neon and covered in memes.

And plenty of fans like it that way. They like that power, they like that they truly scare people and that they’re now influencing editorial decisions. It’s not as though they care about the true ethics of it all. If they did then they'd maybe have a bit more self-awareness over Rolling Stone letting Rob Sheffield write an effusive review of this latest album even though he's just announced that he's writing a book about her.

Because the numbers matter so much to some fans. They gather up the Spotify streams, the Grammy nominations, the Metacritic score, and they use it as proof that their singer is The Best (and money, because that’s the real motivation here, not art.) I’ve always found this a depressing way to appreciate art, as an endless series of races that leave no time for pondering or beauty for its own sake. They want bigger numbers and if they have to threaten to physically hurt a few critics to do so, then that’s part of the job.

For many, the nature of fandom is one of identity, a sole marker not only of one’s taste but of their ethics. It’s partly why a lot of Swifties tie themselves in knots to find feminist and progressive excuses to explain Tay Tay’s private jet overuse (yes, all these rich losers have private jets and they could all have them scrapped because the planet can’t take it anymore and calling out one of the worst culprits is not “singling” them out, guys!) What this has also led to is a baffling mindset that decrees some of the richest and most powerful people in entertainment to be helpless babes who should be cloistered away from even the vaguest suggestion of criticism. These multimillionaires are somehow simultaneously unimpeachable bad bitches and beleaguered underdogs. Their followers must protect at all costs, with no room for doubt. It's tedious and the implicit demand for a cultural hegemony that prizes unflinching commitment over the true curiosity of art, to use an academic term, f*cking sucks.

I’m not sure how we really deal with this problem either. Cultural publications continue to be shuttered and strip-mined for parts by CEO bros who don’t understand or care about criticism beyond how it can fuel the plagiarism machines of AI. Billboard’s Hot 100 chart is so easily gamed that it’s beyond parody now, which only further exacerbates the “buy everything now, no questions asked” demands of fans. And that doesn’t even get into how easily even the safest fandom places can be infiltrated by hate movements. No fandom is safe from falling into the rabbit hole either. At best, these communities foster friendship and artistic growth, but any decentralized space focused on one idea or person or piece of entertainment will always have the talk with itself about how not to end up “like those fans.”

I hope the Swifties are finding ways to enjoy and scrutinize The Tortured Poets Department in the way that all art deserves to be understood. That’s the real pleasure in having your favourites and seeing the ways they grow and the ways they don’t. I know these zealot weirdos in my mentions (and going after the writer of the lukewarm Pitchfork review, a critic who has already had to lock her Twitter page) are a vocal minority. But when these “few bad apples” are able to leverage their hate into tangible threats and an atmosphere of terror for a bunch of people just doing their jobs, then maybe it’s time that we look at the barrel and think about how to change things. Because I truly hate that this is an occupational hazard in my field. It shouldn’t be the case for anyone.

So hey, maybe stop threatening to dox and attack people who don’t like the stuff you like. Truly, find another hobby.

(Me watching my Twitter mentions this weekend.)

Thanks for reading. My newsletter is usually far more interesting and less navel-gazey than this, I swear! Check out my most recent piece, on the Vanity Fair reveal of baby Suri Cruise, for proof!

You can find my work scattered across the internet. On Pajiba, I reviewed Back to Black (it stinks!) and Scoop (it’s fine!) For Paste (who are great and don’t deserve all the harassment), I wrote about the brilliant Ken Loach and the Harry Styles romance novel concept. For MUBI, I did a very deep dive into the directorial career of Barbra Streisand. I reviewed Starz’s newest horny historical drama Mary and George for TheWrap. I also talked about how the O.J. Simpson murder trial helped to birth our modern true crime entertainment complex. If you’re in the UK, you can hear me on the BBC Radio 4 series Screenshot talking about censorship in cinema!

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