The moment news of a lawsuit against Lizzo broke you could practically smell the social media response. Without fail, videos of Tyra Banks screaming “we were all rooting for you” shot to 30,000 likes on Twitter (or “X” if we must), with at least half of the replies claiming they always knew something was off about her. Others quip that they “didn’t see Lizzo being cancelled on their 2023 bingo card”.
And amongst the sea of memes and I-told-you-so’s is something so well-meaning yet just as sinister. Like clockwork, hundreds offload their heartbreak to the masses, devastated that their “fave” is “problematic” in a never ending slew of tweets.
Soon enough, what begins as a lawsuit becomes a trending topic. Memes about the latest “cancelling” and fans battling to prove they have been more shocked than anyone else take up more space than the allegations themselves. People become so busy cradling their own feelings about someone they don’t even know that they seem to have forgotten there are very real and very serious allegations at play.
Lizzo isn’t the only one that has sparked this kind of behaviour, either, and it truly doesn’t take much for people to get going. It could be anything from Johnny Depp suing Amber Heard for defamation, to Ariana Grande becoming embroiled in a cheating scandal with SpongeBob SquarePants (I wish I was joking). It’s all the same gags, all the same pity parties.
Social media has warped far too many minds into thinking they really know these celebrities, and that any upset from finding out they’re not who they say they are matters more than anything else. I’d sooner walk into a thunderstorm in my birthday suit than have to see another tweet accusing Lizzo of “not being a girl’s girl” with a sad face emoji.
This week’s online storm has diluted the allegations that lie at the heart of it, with people who haven’t had so much as a conversation with Lizzo crawling their way to centre stage to say their piece. Celebrities aren’t our friends, and it’s time we started acting like it.
