Social media have blurred the boundaries between fans and celebrities – with disturbing results | Hannah Ewens

A few months ago, I watched a video of apex predators close in on and devour a pair of zoo animals. Sorry – a clip of some young women interrupting a cuddling Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco on a picnic in a New York park. They didn’t ask about Gomez’s work or acknowledge her personal space, and instead went straight for what mattered: the photo. A vulnerably positioned Blanco, laid down in Gomez’s lap, seemed to dissociate, his hood pulled over his face. With someone filming the whole encounter, it was clear this wasn’t about the fans meeting an idol. It was about them maximising the potential of this moment as social media content.

Gomez has rarely complained about her fans, mostly urging them to maintain kindness and respect, which is the typical line from celebrities lest they bite the hand that feeds them. But Gomez is decidedly old-school, a Disney kid grown up. A new crop of artists are being more vocal about their fans overstepping the mark.

In the latest Rolling Stone cover story , the American musician Chappell Roan spoke of a fan who grabbed her and kissed her, fans who got hold of her flight information to be at the airport on her arrival, how her dad’s phone number was leaked online and someone called it, and how she had a stalker. All of this, understandably, has disturbed her.

Roan is not alone. Recently, a number of young artists have spoken out about increasingly entitled fan behaviour. Phoebe Bridgers recounted how a fan publicly criticised her for not taking a selfie – as she was on her way to her father’s funeral. Billie Eilish and Clairo have expressed similar concerns about how online fandom warps perceptions of artists’ personal lives.

What’s amusing, as anyone who works in the music industry knows, is that they are only saying what many artists have always felt: that fans are a necessary evil (their paycheck), and that they can be a scary and unsettling force, which must be treated delicately. While Roan’s stories sound hellish and perhaps shocking, it’s what fans, stalkers and the public have long done to celebrities.

But we’re now in a completely new era of fan-artist relations, which is being shaped by younger artists who are equipped with the language to speak about “boundaries” and “parasocial relationships”. Bridgers called it already. Celebrities and famous artists no longer stand in for the role of an archetypal god in culture, and fans don’t always worship them as they once did. They feel strongly about them, but it’s different. Everyone and everything has become potential content, including favourite artists, their bodies and their personal lives. No one is above this collective drive to document, engage and create discourse.

An additional problem is that on- and offline, it’s difficult for artists to distinguish between who is a fan, an anti-fan (the term for people highly engaged with an artist but in a negative way) or the public. Even Roan has since clarified this in a red-carpet video from the VMAs. “We’re not actually talking about fans, 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 whole circuitry of fandom has been disrupted since the pandemic. It used to be artist, fan and fandom in a Venn diagram, which held the shared world the artist and fan created together in the overlapping centre. 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 over the narrative of that artist.

That is what disturbs artists: an overthrowing of the decades-long, mutually beneficial relationship between them and their fans, where fans provided money for basic services (records, shows) and could expect the occasional interview to obsess over. In-person interactions between fans and the artist remained within the fandom (what the artist wore, a photo they took together, a piece of advice they might have shared), because who else would care? There wasn’t a sense of wanting to catch an artist out, contribute to their story or be anything other than in the moment with that person.

In other words, when fans now kiss an artist or tweet abuse at them online, it’s no longer about an interaction between fan and artist in which a fan wants to feel seen by the artist (and that they might then share later with the fandom). It’s about being seen online, and sharing for all the world to see. Like everyone else, fans increasingly see themselves as public narrators and knowing participants in the online discourse.

If I were to make predictions of where this is heading in the next decade or so, I would say that the policing around artists will be tightened. Artists might ask not to be approached in public full stop, and more artists will come off social media altogether. Perhaps some will live differently in public, spending more time in areas with high security, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a complete withdrawal from meet-and-greets and other activities where fans get to meet their favourite artists, curbing fans’ expectations that they are entitled access. There’s a legitimate security risk that comes with being constantly surveilled.

The public reception to Roan’s comments has been generally favourable. Not so long ago, this would have been received as a sob story from a rich and famous musician, and anything but Gomez’s cheerful participation in a photo was condemned as selfish. But we empathise with Roan because many of us have now had our own online mini-cancelling, our image posted without our consent, been stopped in the street by TikTokers, or seen our online comments become the fuel for the day’s discourse.

We don’t want it to happen to us, and yet we can’t stop ourselves from doing it to others. If a young and entitled portion of fans continue to treat artists as mere actors in their Instagram stories, we will lose some of what makes being a fan so fun and exciting: the connection between creator and audience. This should be a moment to reconsider how we prioritise feeding our own online lives, before we find ourselves in a venue with an empty stage.

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

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