It was the best of wild blandness: A music video that opens with a boy in nautical horizontal stripes—tapping on the steering wheel of a vintage VW Bug—and proceeds primarily with five boys jumping around and falling on each other, protected from serious injury by clouds of swooping hair. A song with the same chord progression as recent mall food-court hits like Owl City’s “Fireflies” and Katy Perry’s “E.T.,” as well as several Beatles songs. All Abercrombie & Fitch and high-top Nikes. At the end of 2011, One Direction’s dreamily offensive debut single, “What Makes You Beautiful”—“You don’t know you’re beautiful / That’s what makes you beautiful”—was coursing through YouTube and American radio stations, charting higher than any song by a British act in fourteen years.
Within a few months, the phenomenon was compared explicitly to Beatlemania, and the boys were charged with causing waves of teenage hysteria—predominantly online—before a single show had been played on American soil. In March 2012, they performed on American television for the first time, appearing on The Today Show, swarmed by fifteen thousand fans at Rockefeller Center.1 That same month, Up All Night became the first debut album from a British group to reach number one in the United States. In November, Take Me Home made One Direction the first boy band in U.S. history to release two number one albums in the same year. “It’s a real moment,” Sonny Takhar, then president of Sony subsidiary Syco Music, told The Guardian. “Social media has become the new radio. It’s never broken an act globally like this before.”2 Harry Styles’s suggestion that “fame-wise,” One Direction was “probably even bigger” than the Beatles was not quite as scandalous as John Lennon’s infamous insistence that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” but the claim was still interrogated by music critics and journalists. London’s 5 News assembled an expert panel of radio DJs and “showbiz” reporters to assess it: “Well, they’re the biggest pop band in the world right now, that’s fair enough,” BBC Radio 6 DJ Matt Everitt conceded. But the Beatles changed American cultural history, he argued. “I don’t think One Direction are going to change American cultural history.”3
By this time, One Direction fans were already boasting that they had stolen security camera footage from at least one hotel (to see Zayn Malik without a shirt on) and an Australian airport (so they could watch Harry Styles just sitting around).4 They referred to themselves as hackers, and they acted as if they were above the laws not just of their respective countries but of reality itself. They bragged not only about leaking albums and breaking Twitter, but about things they could not possibly have actually done, like acquiring the ultrasounds of each band member in utero, as well as scans of their passports. They made One Direction into the biggest band in the world not simply by loving them, but by sowing chaos on every online platform they touched. Almost everything they did was worthy of media attention because almost everything they did had never been seen before and literally could not be explained. In 2013, one fan account “leaked” the penis sizes of every member of the band, insisting that Liam Payne’s was more than ten inches long. For a year, another fan tweeted in character as “Liam’s 10 inch,” providing the Twitter bio “I AM THE OFFICIAL 10 INCH OF LIAM PAYNE.”5
On Twitter, anyone who doesn’t remember all of that is a “local.” This is one of the more casually devastating labels one can acquire in the digital age. A local is a person who belongs to no subculture, understands no intricacies of online humor, follows only the accounts of people they know in real life—and maybe The New York Times?—and retweets only the most generic content. Most simply, and most often, a local is a non-stan. If you haven’t been around since the early days of One Direction but buy a ticket to a Harry Styles concert just because you like his pants, you’re a local, taking up space that doesn’t belong to you. If you’re confused by fan-made supercuts of Korean pop stars, proliferating in the replies to any viral tweet on any subject, you are a local. Locals have no identity, no allegiances, no personality, no charisma, no passions, no curiosity, and no reason to be on the internet at all. A local joins Twitter to share professional news, which they refer to as “personal news,” and to retweet “inspiring” human interest stories. They love “relatable” content and memes that are long past relevant, and they’re also, it’s implied, kind of lazy. A local is a person who has not been bothered. They haven’t felt moved to do the work of stanning. Maybe it’s more useful to say what a local is not: A local is the opposite of the One Direction fan who started a new Twitter account in 2010—while the band was still just a contender on The X Factor—in order to share “facts” like “the boys blood types” (Liam: AB. Louis: O. Niall: A. Harry and Zayn: B.) and each of their heights, in inches and in centimeters (all are under six feet, and Niall is the shortest, at five foot seven, or 171 centimeters).6 A local would never hang around, waiting for Niall to say that he can’t calculate his rising sign because he doesn’t remember what time he was born, ready to supply the answer (8:04 a.m.).
The corrective force acting in opposition to locals is “Stan Twitter,” a broad term encompassing all of the superfans of anything under the sun. (The word “stan” is taken from an Eminem song about an obsessive fan, but is sometimes also referred to as a portmanteau of “stalker” and “fan.”) Looking at Twitter through the eyes of a local, you can certainly see that stans are there. You can sense their gravitational pull and the way they drag every conversation into their realm of relevance, making every day online about them and their wishes and their feelings on the many injustices of the Billboard charts. Locals roll their eyes at the antics of Stan Twitter, which seems always to be in hysterics and on the edge of a meltdown, as well as bent on dragging everyone else down with them. But they can’t do anything about it.
When Twitter launched in 2006, it was not obvious what it was for. Tweets were initially sort of like Facebook status updates, but what was the point of limiting your thoughts to—at the time—140 characters, and no pictures, when there was already a website that all your friends were on that did not impose those limitations? Why would anyone join a website that served them nothing but contextless, mundane messages from brands and a bunch of people—when they even were people, and not bots—they didn’t even know? What was the point of moving into vacant space?
After the dot-com boom, technologists rallied around the promise of “Web 2.0,” a term coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999. The new web, she wrote, in departing from the static web pages and passive browsing of Web 1.0, would be “understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.”7 In 2004, the tech commentator Tim O’Reilly organized a Web 2.0 conference to help developers and investors nail down the specifics and talk out the business model. To him, the new web would be about “harnessing collective intelligence” through activities like hyperlinking, tagging, and user-generated content. Where software companies used to talk about silent customers, they should now talk about users as “co-developers” of their projects. Logically, they should also engage in “real-time monitoring of user behavior,” to see how their features were being used and when to add new ones.8 Twitter was founded shortly before Facebook was made available to any person over the age of thirteen. Tumblr followed the year after. These applications debuted as blank slates, and the people who came to them filled them with culture. They innovated the language and rhythm and aesthetics and norms of websites that they didn’t fully understand but saw instead as raw material.
As Nancy K. Baym and Jean Burgess document in Twitter: A Biography, the words we associate with Twitter today and use—for better or worse—in regular conversation, like “hashtag” and “don’t @ me,” were not the developers’ own ideas but instead those of early enthusiasts.9 In 2007, users started adding “@” as a shorthand when a post was intended to be read by someone specific, or to directly reference another account. This didn’t really make sense until Twitter made @-replying a real feature a few months later. The hashtag made a similar journey to Twitter from Internet Relay Chat channels and early Web 2.0 sites like Flickr, Last.fm, and Delicious—where they were already in use to catalog conversation topics and make files more searchable. Twitter was initially reluctant to add hashtags to the site—cofounder Biz Stone said hashtags were “for nerds”—but they acquiesced when users pushed for it. The tags were made searchable in 2008, and the company started experimenting with using them to determine “trending topics” in 2009.
At that point, hashtags started drawing the attention of the types of people who later became known for caring deeply about directing attention on the internet. For those people, the crucial difference between Twitter and Facebook was that you could post to Twitter from a cell phone. A pre-smartphone cell phone. Any cell phone. You could text your tweets to Twitter. By 2009, Twitter’s user base was young (mostly eighteen to twenty-nine) and female (21 percent of American women online had accounts, compared with 17 percent of men) and Black (26 percent of Black Americans online had accounts, compared with 19 percent of white Americans and 18 percent of Hispanic Americans).10
The young and the online moved to Twitter from other platforms and started to build it out. The staunchly anti-corporate and surrealist energy of “Weird Twitter” steered the site toward a default of absurdism, sustained by the constant retweeting of early accounts like @fart, known for hijacking brand campaigns with inexhaustible trolling; @leyawn, the sweet cartoon-bird man whose first tweet was “SOMEONE PUMP MY STOMACH ITS FULL OF EVIL”; and @dril, the source of such timeless-feeling phrases as “it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that the celebs are at it again.”11 As confused politicians, musicians, and movie stars joined the site to share total nonsense or graphic detail about the mundanities of living in even a very famous body, the idea of celebrity started to mutate. The unreachable were suddenly right here, at times even closer than we would like. “just got home, let out the dogs, within minutes they cornered,attacked and killed an opossum,” Martha Stewart tweeted in 2009. “had to wash little bloody mouths .life on farm.”12 An untold number of brains were wrecked by one of Britney Spears’s early tweets: “Does anyone think global warming is a good thing? I love Lady Gaga. I think she’s a really interesting artist.”13 These disoriented extremely famous people were just like the rest of us: unnerved or moved by the events of our daily existence, deluded into thinking that projecting it outward would somehow be rewarding.
Black Twitter was recognized early as a major cultural force on the platform. “What Were Black People Talking About on Twitter Last Night?” Choire Sicha asked on The Awl in 2009.14 Black Twitter users were, for whatever reason, taking over the site during late-night East Coast hours, driving the course of conversation and the trajectory of memes for hours at a time, impossible to interrupt. The Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo asked several media and network researchers to explain the phenomenon to him and was told that young Black people were using Twitter “differently from everyone else” on the platform. They were creating dense clusters of interaction by following back most of the people who were following them, retweeting each other reciprocally, and replying to each other’s posts quickly and often. “It’s this behavior, intentional or not, that gives Black people—and in particular, Black teenagers—the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter,” he concluded.15
Stan Twitter was molded by these three influences: the emotional valence of Weird Twitter, simultaneously detached and totally out of control; the public-private flattening of Celebrity Twitter, which promised that from now on we would always have access to a behind-the-scenes candor from anyone and everyone; and the tight networking and enthusiastic riffing of Black Twitter, which took the shapelessness of the site and gave it a conversational form. The type of densely connected networks that Manjoo noted—in which people with shared cultural reference points follow each other’s accounts, becoming what’s known now as “mutuals”—is crucial to fandom, which sustains itself by rapidly escalating the visibility of its passions and funneling attention to the celebrities and causes it cares about. The idea that hashtags could be used to elaborate on jokes or to sustain conversation on niche or insider-y topics preceded the rise of fan practices such as streaming parties and stan wars. The first major “update”—or news—accounts dedicated to individual celebrities appeared in 2009 as well. They were there mainly to share chart positions and curate paparazzi photos, but Stan Twitter also began taking shape around the idea that young users did not have to use their real name or real images of themselves in order to participate. In fact, it would make more sense and confer greater authority if they found a sufficiently rare or interesting photo of their “fave” to use instead. Stan Twitter was where Tumblr culture came to make itself known to a broader and busier internet. The most visible demographics were the young women who appeared to make up the majority of the fan bases for artists like Taylor Swift and One Direction, the young women of color who controlled the fan operations for Rihanna and Beyoncé, and the gay men who tweeted on behalf of Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and others. Crossover and cultural exchange between “stan armies” happened predominantly through their warring—the Swifties taught everyone how to craft a narrative around their fave’s persecution, while Nicki Minaj’s Barbz demonstrated how to make memes that were funny enough to get their hero’s personal attention, and Rihanna’s Navy came to exemplify what a prestige operation could look like for Stan Twitter, having figured out its tactics and protocols long before anyone else.
For some fans, all of this was serious work from the beginning, even though their labor often put them at odds with the platform that was hosting them. The people who are the best at driving engagement and attracting attention are also the people who can lose their accounts in an instant for uploading a few too many seconds of a video they don’t own; to stay in business, they have to act like they’re in business. (They also tend to lose their accounts over repeated infractions of other rules—such as those against tweeting death threats at people.) The French Rihanna fan who started @TeamofRihanna in July 2011 referred to the account as “professional” when asked about it by Paper magazine.16 The first major Beyoncé fan account, @BeyonceWeb, was created in August 2010 and developed a reputation for reliable, accurate news—a decade later, it has more than three hundred forty thousand followers, as well as the honor of being one of only ten accounts that Beyoncé herself follows on Twitter. The second, @BeyLegion, had been sitting on a Twitter handle since 2009 but grew its audience first on Tumblr. The mysterious Bey Legion leader moved to Twitter full time in May 2012 and was later interviewed about this successful cross-platform migration by the marketing blog Brandwatch. “What started out as a Tumblr page is now a global team operating multi-channel marketing across Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram channels,” the interviewer wrote.17
Twitter itself was abundantly aware of the business opportunity of stans. In 2010, tech journalists circulated a claim sourced to one unknown Twitter employee that 3 percent of the company’s servers were employed solely to host activity related to Justin Bieber. “Imagine racks of servers dedicated to delivering [Bieber’s] every word to 5.1 million users,” the Daily Beast reporter Brian Ries wrote. “They exist.”18 As a claim, this does not even make sense, but Twitter wisely declined to publicly refute it. In 2011, the year Twitter introduced the ability to attach photos to tweets, Beyoncé announced her first pregnancy at the MTV Video Music Awards. Twitter’s public relations team was quick to highlight how the reaction played out on the site—she’d generated 8,868 tweets per second in the moments after she threw open her blazer, rubbed her belly, and winked at the camera.19 In 2012, Lady Gaga became the first person to hit 20 million followers—a milestone her online marketing company, ThinkTank Digital, had been anticipating for two years.20 Her fans, who identify as “Little Monsters” under her care, often referred to her in those days as the “queen of Twitter,” a title that she was also awarded by Forbes after she surpassed Britney Spears to become the most popular woman on the platform.21 (In celebration, she recorded an inaugural address, in which she thanked her followers for making her Twitter royalty, waved a glowing blue wand, and vowed to “tweet and tweet again.”)22
By the time I joined Twitter, as a college sophomore in 2012, the battle lines had been drawn: A person could be a Justin Bieber fan or a person could be a One Direction fan, or a person could be both—but if that were the case, they’d better cleave their personality in two and pick one half to keep off the internet. Hardly a day went by without the two fandoms jostling to get a spot among the trending hashtags, a goal even more tangibly possible and immediately achievable than the also important goals of winning chart domination and the highest ticket sales and the most appropriate recognition from award shows and the coolest photo shoots from the best magazines. The number one spot on Billboard’s Social 50 chart, which incorporated “buzz” from every major social media platform, toggled between Bieber and One Direction nearly every week. The rivalry was vicious and exhilarating, like college football except interesting. During a particularly noteworthy 2014 showdown between the two fandoms over a social media–based “Biggest Fans” honor at the MTV Europe Music Awards, each side went so far as to create fake versions of the hashtags used to vote—tweaking a letter in their opponent’s tag or adding an emoji, in hopes of pushing this version into the Trending Topics bar and confusing fans on the other side, hopefully sabotaging millions of votes.23 “Gonna tell my kids this was world war 3,” one Bieber fan tweeted five years later, with a screenshot of the leaderboard.24
This was also the year that Billboard introduced an annual competition called Fan Army Face-Off—a summertime online-only event in which stan factions were celebrated primarily for their ability to execute the pulling of levers, over and over and over. There were enough armies to fill up an entire March Madness–style bracket: Lovatics (Demi Lovato) and Selenators (Selena Gomez) and the Little Monsters and the Rihanna Navy and the Directioners in an arbitrarily drawn Eastern Conference, versus Arianators (Ariana Grande) and the Gould Diggers (Ellie Goulding) and the Beyhive and the Beliebers and the Barbz in the Western. The results were ridiculous and transparently warped by powerful fan armies voting for whomever their most obvious rival was paired up with in each round—unless there’s another explanation for the Directioners losing to the Panheads (Skillet stans) in round one, or the Beliebers losing to the Victims (the Killers fans). The final champions were the VIPs, fans of the K-pop group BIGBANG, followed in second place by the Echelon, apparently the name for the fandom of Jared Leto’s rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars.25
Whatever else you might say about it, 20 million votes were cast in the objectively meaningless contest that year. This, it was clear, was what Twitter was for.
One Direction’s Take Me Home tour started in February 2013 and grossed $114 million, with six sold-out shows at London’s O2 Arena as its centerpiece. Though it came out just before the end of the year, the band’s third album, Midnight Memories, sold 4 million copies and became the bestselling album of 2013 worldwide. In a year-end post on the company blog, Twitter announced that three out of five of the most retweeted posts of the year were from members of One Direction. The posts they referred to were uniformly boring: Niall Horan celebrating his own birthday, with his signature punctuation artistry, writing “Yesss! I’m 20! Wohooo! No more teens!” Zayn Malik sharing a photo of Harry Styles sleeping, captioned “Harry wake up!!:D.” The third was Malik’s announcement that he was engaged to Perrie Edwards, a member of the British girl group Little Mix.26 But the point of Twitter was for fans and faves to be in near constant contact—these little intimacies were what made it all feel real.
For One Direction fans, Twitter was easy to turn into a constantly refreshing scrapbook, and it was easy to start viewing the band’s commercial success as a result of this labor. In 2014, Twitter allowed users to add GIFs to their tweets for the first time—One Direction’s Where We Are tour was documented that way, almost second by second, by fans who uploaded from cities all over the world. Bringing in more than $290 million, it was the highest-grossing tour of the year, as well as the highest-grossing tour by a vocal group ever. When the band’s next album, Four, came out that November, they broke their own record to become the first band in American chart history to have its first four albums debut at number one.
Social media researchers were obviously interested in the network of co-conspirators that made One Direction the most visible ongoing conversation on Twitter. These people lived everywhere, but they congregated in group chats to coordinate and strategize, and they never failed in their efforts. In 2016, Nicole Kelsey Santero, a graduate student at the University of Nevada, conducted a forensic analysis of a collection of One Direction–related hashtags that had been number one worldwide trends on Twitter the year before, including #HarryBeCareful, which referred to a rumor about an assassination plot against Harry Styles. (“Guys please rt this and make the boys security aware because we need to keep our sunshine safe,” one tweet read.) The paper identified Twitter accounts that served as “hubs,” defining them as “a small number of influential users” who were highly connected and motivated to spread these hashtags. The hubs were mostly personal fan accounts and moderately sized “update” accounts—based not just in the United Kingdom and the United States but in Portugal, Brazil, Greece, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Armenia, Lebanon, Mexico, Italy, the Philippines, and elsewhere. One particularly influential Zayn Malik fan account with over one hundred forty thousand followers and one Harry Styles fan account with about forty-five thousand were even traced to China, where Twitter is blocked.27
Critics of social media often point out that Twitter’s functionality and engagement-juicing business model rewards dramatics and over-the-top rhetoric—suggesting that the platform is its cause. But it’s also the emotional stakes of Stan Twitter that set the tone. Scrolling through my timeline at any given moment, theatrics are being pushed to ever more elaborate heights. “If taylor swift murders me DO NOT PROSECUTE HER!!!” one fan writes.28 Another shares a photo of Harry Styles, captioning it “he’s so sexy break my back like a glow stick daddy.”29
The structure of stan networks is what makes them feel so unavoidable on Twitter—their slang is everywhere, their trends are filling up the sidebar, their wrath is coming down on anyone who makes so much as an offhanded comment about a pop singer whose latest single was not their best. This is how the mannerisms of Stan Twitter became the mannerisms of the whole site—through mutuals creating, as they did, thousands of denser, smaller networks knit together. Stan Twitter, of course, pushed the internet at large to use the word “stan,” and sometimes to swap it with the self-deprecating equivalent “trash,” and to parrot phrases like “we stan a legend” and “HER MIND,” and to refer to people as “oomf,” meaning “one of my followers,” or an “IRL,” meaning someone who also exists in one’s offline life. A song has become a “bop” or a “banger.” A good guy is now a “king,” and a bad guy is now “over.”
Gay stans popularized the light diss “your fave could never,” as well as the unfortunate compliment “skinny legend” and the tongue-in-cheek practice of making ultra-violent demands of the things we love—“step on my neck,” “run me over with your car,” “break my back,” “punch me in the face.” Black Twitter introduced shorthand like “she snapped,” to signify praise, then “she doesn’t have the range,” a casual put-down that blew up in 2016 and warranted explainers in GQ and New York magazine, to indicate cool dismissal. Black fans with a drag culture background introduced “wig” as an expression of enthusiastic surprise, and Black women popularized “tea” as a synonym for gossip. This language was appropriated by young stans, then more crudely by brands and white professional adults, before its adoption as the speech of Twitter at large. By 2020, the official Target account was retweeting BTS album sales numbers and adding, “We have no choice but to stan.”30
In 2018, a Lady Gaga stan convinced a bunch of other fans to make sock-puppet Twitter accounts and pretend to be middle-age women. “Radio hosts hate homosexuals and stan twitters, it’s a fact,” they wrote. “Make an account with a soccer mom selfie avatar.”31 This is charming because the only intention was to complete successful radio requests for Gaga’s new single, but it’s also a little bit chilling, because it demonstrates online fandom’s allegiance to manipulation.
Stans have little regard for rules or terms of service. They manipulate the timeline in good fun, generally, and they sometimes do it with dubious methods that are traditions of darker online spaces. Their prodigious talent for amplification is not always paired with an interest in the truth, which can often backfire, and they’ve learned this the hard way. The notorious cesspool 4chan used fans’ talents for escalation against them quite often in the early years of Stan Twitter, seemingly just to make a point about who really held the power to bend reality online. In January 2013, for example, posters on 4chan’s “random” board conspired to prank Justin Bieber fans by circulating images on Twitter that would appear to show other fans slitting their wrists, paired with the hashtag #CuttingForBieber.32 “You stop using drugs and we’ll stop cutting,” one fake fan account tweeted alongside a graphic image. “You make this world meaningless and we’ve lost hope.” The hoax was debunked by media outlets, but not before it succeeded in setting off thousands of confused responses and trending on Twitter. The following year, 4chan came for the One Direction fandom by promoting the hashtag #SkinFor1D.33 The idea was that One Direction fans could be duped into tweeting pictures of themselves naked if it were even suggested that this would in some way benefit the band. Trolls made more fake fan accounts, stole photos of naked teenage girls, and tweeted them until they started a trend. The hashtag was used one hundred ten thousand times in forty-eight hours, and though it didn’t result in a whole lot of nude sharing, it did derail the fandom for two full days.
Years later, Stan Twitter has a seedy reputation due to its own history of aggressive trolling, inspired in part by tactics that were once used against it. If there’s one thing that Stan Twitter is known for above all else, it’s that when it turns against you, it turns bitterly. Once, alone in New Mexico after a breakup, drunk in an Airbnb on a Wednesday night, I tweeted a bland joke about an old Taylor Swift music video. “There’s a reason you’re drunk and alone,” a stan spat back within seconds, though they didn’t follow me and I hadn’t tagged Swift in the tweet. I love Taylor Swift! I wanted to plead, but I knew it would do no good, so I simply went to bed. That kind of exchange is the most delicate of brushes with the bad side of Stan Twitter—like being blown a kiss, even. It was nothing.
I don’t want to run through a full litany of the coordinated harassment campaigns that One Direction fans have executed throughout the years. But one memorable and well-documented incident happened in 2013, when they tweeted a baffling number of death threats at GQ magazine—the magazine itself!—after it published a condescending profile of the band and its fandom.34 (The profile really was egregious, and described a typical fan as “a rabid, knicker-wetting banshee.”) One fan’s response read, “I want to fucking mutilate your insides, feed them to my dog and burn your body in my own personal raging hell.”35 (Everyone at the magazine’s insides! And to one dog!) When Beyoncé fans decided that the designer Rachel Roy was Jay-Z’s mistress based on a handful of vague clues, some of them wrote to her sixteen-year-old daughter, informing her that her mother should drink bleach.36 Nicki Minaj fans pointed Minaj in the direction of the Canadian music blogger Wanna Thompson after she tweeted some light criticism of the rapper’s recent work—Minaj wrote to her personally, calling her “ugly.” After she shared screenshots of Minaj’s message, Thompson lost her job and received death threats from fans, some accompanied by images of her young daughter.37
Over the years, stan harassment tactics have only evolved to be weirder and deliberately more unsettling for those on the receiving end. In 2020, when Taylor Swift’s surprise quarantine album Folklore was given an overwhelmingly positive review by Pitchfork’s Jillian Mapes, which contained perhaps two full sentences and one parenthetical of constructive criticism, fans immediately started suggesting that Mapes “sleep with one eye open.”38 They also doxed her by publishing her home address. Then they started tweeting images of Swift—edited to look like a demon, with an upside-down cross on her forehead or black maggots falling out of her mouth—accompanied by what they seemed to think was a hex, translated for indecipherable reasons into Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia. (The text, fed back through Google Translate, read something like, “Anyone who comes after the Queen of Darkness Taylor Swift will die alone and burn forever … You will never be happy and you will never sleep again.”) They also spent days tormenting the Australian experimental musician Katie Dey, who had joked about the misfortune of sharing an album release date with Swift, tweeting “my ass is fatter than taylor’s at least.”39 On Twitter and Instagram, they told her she was a “dumb bitch” and a body shamer and reminded her that she wouldn’t sell as many records as Swift if she lived for two hundred years. They also reminded her of the Queen of Darkness stuff, obviously. “i knew my fat ass would ruin my life someday didnt think itd go down like this tho,” Dey wrote in the midst of the storm.40
When I tweeted that I was working on this book, the response came in two phases. At first it was “congratulations!” from my friends and coworkers and former coworkers. Then, a few weeks later, it was something else: “Maybe One Direction fans should write a book about you instead, titled ‘Why are you this obsessed with us?’” A segment of the fandom that was still irritated by an essay I’d written on the well-known conspiracy theory about Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson years prior had heard about the project and signal-boosted it to each other. The replies came in one after another, until I turned off my notifications and started ordering glasses of wine. “Leave us alone,” and “get a job,” and “you’re creepy,” and “we’re not here to feed this bitch,” and “do better things with your time.” “This needs to be stopped,” and “she’s not up to anything good,” and “you’re pathetic,” and “girl go away,” and so on. One person commented that I was probably just going to screenshot these replies and use them to make the fandom look bad, about which I had to admit they were right, even if they were misunderstanding how much I would rather not be in that position at all.
Fans are unavoidably part of Twitter’s knotty history with abuse and coordinated harm. Stan Twitter has never been motivated to push entire groups of people off the internet, nor has it engaged in the same level of graphic violent threats or dangerous real-world attacks as those driven by explicitly hateful ideologies—which, during the “Gamergate” online harassment epidemic in the mid-2010s, usually took the form of calling SWAT teams to a victim’s home address. But it would be irresponsible to ignore some similarities. In 2018, a team of MIT media researchers performing a postmortem on Gamergate explained how the site had once been turned into an “inescapable GamerGate experience” and described some of the “dark patterns” of Twitter, writing, “When one member sent a message, that message became a signal to [a] highly connected community that had been instructed to echo one another.”41 Stan Twitter harassment campaigns do not approach the level of Gamergate. Yet any kind of harassment at scale relies on some of the same mechanisms—a tightly connected group identifying an enemy and agreeing on an amplification strategy, providing social rewards to members of the group who display the most dedication or creativity, backchanneling to maintain the cohesion of the in-group, which is always outsmarting and out-cooling its hapless victims, all while maintaining a conviction of moral superiority. Twitter provides a platform for some of the worst habits of fandom.
Still, no matter how afraid I sometimes am of the whims of stans, I would never want to be a local. Many or most stans don’t participate in harassment campaigns, and being part of Stan Twitter is much more fun than logging on just to frown at politicians or congratulate acquaintances on their new jobs. When I’m doom-scrolling through a timeline full of terrible news and inane bickering, it’s a treat to come across all-caps excitement or an ultra-niche joke. Or to wake up and find that there is a conversation going on and that I understand it, and that people are excited about something and I am too. This is the type of thing that can buoy a person for an hour or so at a time. In the same way that holidays give shape to formless years, album promotion and single releases give color to the days that line up one after another. There is a reason to stay up late. There is a reason to wake up early. There is something to do at lunch when you feel like you’d like to cry and take a nap. There are people who swear they hacked into an airport security camera, and aren’t you interested to see what they saw, even if you find that totally weird and ultimately quite scary? I like Stan Twitter because it is so peculiar, even as millions of people participate in it and it should have become generic. “This is the 6th Christmas without One Direction,” the anonymous account @1DPsychic tweeted on December 23, 2020.42 Fair enough. “Niall Horan will be the first to go bald,” it shared in January, no explanation.43 “Louis Tomlinson will show us his wisdom teeth removal video,” it promised in March.44 I guess we’ll find out!
In the summer of 2020, when coronavirus infections in the United States had not yet peaked, One Direction fans celebrated the band’s tenth anniversary. I was in Brooklyn, living alone. Like many people, I hadn’t seen my family in months. I had watched eleven seasons of The Real Housewives of New York in just under six weeks. I was in a new relationship, which had been robbed of the fun of meeting in bars or casually suggesting attendance at a friend of a friend’s birthday party. We’d watched Contagion on our fourth date, sitting on my bed, speculating about what a respiratory virus could do to each of us. Like everyone I knew, I felt like I was living in the worst sensory deprivation tank of all time—completely deprived of human interaction, yet still constantly bombarded by news alerts. But the day of the One Direction anniversary, I started scrolling through Twitter and the world came back to me. There were memes I’d forgotten about and concert clips I’d never seen. It was all fresh—the first new thing in months, or the only special occasion of the year. I riled myself up easily, went out to the store—double-masked—in the pouring rain and bought ingredients for a birthday cake, as well as big cheap candles. I slid around my apartment making Martha Stewart’s chocolate buttercream, and watched music videos on a laptop balanced on the edge of the sink. I felt like life indoors was enough again. I poured cake mix into a pie dish. I yelped when I scrolled past a screenshot of an old tweet: “help so my cousin got upset after reading a fan fiction where harry styles dies and now she’s been peeling potatoes for 3 hours.”45 The text was accompanied by two photos of a teenage girl sitting on a couch, glaring at a potato, which she is peeling into a metal bowl. I clicked into another tab, clicked back, looked at it again, and laughed again. It was so perfect. The best short story I had ever read. Other people on the timeline were celebrating it too; they were in awe of its concision and hilarity, the way it felt like something that had happened to them personally. It had all happened to us, personally, and it was still happening.
This is the best of what Stan Twitter can do. It provides interludes in which it’s possible to feel that there is such a thing as “community” on a website used by nearly 200 million people, or online anywhere. I love when girls tweet to see if anyone else is in the Los Angeles airport, flying home from the Harry Styles concert, feeling depressed that it’s all over. (I am!) I love when it’s Thanksgiving weekend and someone logs on to say that they put the new One Direction CD on in Mom’s car, and as they did so they realized that there must be thousands of new One Direction CDs playing in thousands of moms’ cars all over the world. (My mom’s car!) I feel grateful every time.
The morning after the tenth anniversary, I pulled up Twitter to start work, as usual, and felt the site diminished. Here we were, still grown-ups, still under orders to stay home and scroll. Here we were, nothing to do but our jobs. Nothing to look forward to except the 6:30 glass of wine that marks the end of the workday; nothing to search for except more advice on how to avoid contracting a disease. I read a tweet from a Harry Styles fan: “Yesterday was like a breath of fresh air after literally one of the worst years of everyone’s life.”46 She didn’t really need to explain what this day was like. It was terrible. With a stale cake in my refrigerator, I was bored again, and so tired—exhausted by 10:00 a.m. But for a moment, I was glad to know that even in my hyperspecific misery, I would never be alone.