This month, the self-proclaimed muse and New York it girl Julia Fox walked the runway for Alexander Wang’s first show since 2019. She wore a sheer mesh dress and oversized blazer, but the revealing outfit did not distract some viewers from what they see as a glaring hypocrisy: Wang was accused of sexual assault by multiple people in 2020. Though he denied the allegations at the time, Wang later said he would “set a better example” in the future. Months later, he reportedly apologized to 11 of his accusers in a meeting orchestrated by the attorney Lisa Bloom.
On TikTok, where she has over 1.7 million followers, Fox – who has been outspoken in her support for victims of abuse and domestic violence – responded to criticisms of her support for the designer. “I love cancel culture but we do need to leave room for rehabilitation and for those who put in the work and heal and learn from their mistakes,” she wrote on the app.
It was a defense Fox’s biggest fan account wanted no part of. @JuliaFoxSource, also known as Julia Fox Updates, boasts nearly 39,000 followers, and until this weekend breathlessly posted every update in the star’s life. But her response was enough for one Fox megafan to rethink his entire hobby.
— julia fox fan updates (@juliafoxsource) February 11, 2023
“This is where I draw the line,” @juliafoxsource tweeted. Later, the account retweeted a thread from 2020 sharing stories from Wang’s alleged victims. The final nail in the coffin, so to speak: a photo of a cartoon headstone from Spongebob Squarepants photoshopped to read: “Here lies julia fox fan updates, 2022-2023.”
How did we get here? The word stan – perhaps a combination of stalker and fan – was the title of a 2000 Eminem song that imagined a fictional, violent teen’s obsession with the rapper. In the decades since, it’s become a catchall term for people who base their entire online existence around a specific fandom: Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, Beyoncé’s Bey Hive, Taylor Swift’s Swifties, and Nicki Minaj’s Barbs.
“Stan accounts are like roving reporters in that they comment on the action live and as it happens,” said Issy Aldridge, web and social media manager for That Fangirl Life, a platform that champions female fans. “Much of the online narrative around stars that appears in your Twitter feed comes from these accounts.”
While these kinds of obsessives have existed on the internet since the dawn of message boards, the lockdowns of 2020 were a boon for celebrity followings: an end-of-year NBC retrospective called it “the year of the stans”.
Stans don’t just root for their icons, they fiercely defend them. Anything perceived as a shot against their favorite – a low Pitchfork album score, a mean-spirited joke tweet – will be leapt on. Sometimes it gets unpleasant: they’ve doxxed critics and encouraged journalists to kill themselves. They came after Pete Davidson when he and Ariana Grande split, and attacked Offset during a break with his partner Cardi B. (Cardi tried to dissuade her fans from this behavior. “The whole coming at my baby father bullshit, that doesn’t make me feel any better,” she said.)
Stan culture is regularly branded as “toxic”, a textbook example of how virtual groupthink causes real-life harm. But the power of the pile-on is not always used for evil. During the summer of 2020, many accounts ditched their usual commentary in favor of covering protests against the murder of George Floyd. When a police department asked the public to turn in “footage of illegal protest activity”, K-pop aficionados worked against snitches by overwhelming the submissions site with feel-good clips of BTS performing.
Stans often have an emotional connection to stars and the themes they represent. Lady Gaga has promoted LGBTQ+ causes since her start in 2008, and fans say her music has helped them come out to their parents or deal with ruthless school bullying. Beyoncé’s exuberant performances celebrate the power and the heritage of Black joy, and that artistry is one reason fans paid hundreds of dollars for tickets for her forthcoming tour. Fox, a former dominatrix, speaks openly about her experiences in NYC dungeons and why sex workers deserve respect. Stans see a part of themselves represented in their star’s persona.
But even for a celebrity’s biggest fans, there’s a line that can’t be crossed. Matty Healy, the lead singer of The 1975, appeared on the Adam Friedland podcast last week, where he giggled along to a litany of offensive comments about women, queer people and Chinese, Inuit and Hawaiian people – along with cracking jokes about concentration camps. His fans on Twitter voiced their disgust.
One woman posted a selfie she took with Healy a day before the interview. “Matty healy how can you go about being nice & friendly to my face and then turn around the next day to join your bros and laugh along racist remarks of my identity?” she wrote in a thread.
The podcast controversy was enough to make one account, @dailymattyhealy, quit the game altogether. “I’m taking a break from this acc bc of recent events and my mental health,” the fan tweeted. “Im keeping this acc open in case we actually get an apology from matty (doubt it tbh), but as much as i love the 1975 and the fandom i have to take care of myself too, i hope you understand.”
When the presale for Taylor Swift’s tour turned into a battle royale for fans locked out of Ticketmaster’s system, frazzled Swifties voiced their disappointment. Ticketmaster and Swift quickly apologized, with the singer calling the process “excruciating”. Ticketmaster ended up testifying in Congress in a hearing about consolidation in the ticketing industry.
Erica Campbell, a features editor at the music website NME, said: “The power of fans can no longer be understated when it’s impacting US legislation … These fans really do have the power to determine how people are seen and treated in a way they historically have not.” A recent Jezebel headline put it this way: “Stan accounts have unionized.”
Historically, fan girls have been viewed as childish – often by male critics, who dismiss female desire as embarrassing or unserious. But a recent crop of books, such as Hannah Ewens’ Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture and Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, challenge this assumption.
“Fans have begun to actively display the positives of fandom participation, whether that’s through creativity, the fan-to-industry pipeline, or inspiring wide-society social change,” Aldridge said.
All signs point to Fox’s fandom surviving Wang-gate, but Noah, the 19-year-old Norwegian high school student behind the tweets, said shuttering the page was an easy choice. “From the moment that I shared [how] she defended Wang, I knew that I couldn’t support her,” he said. “I’m frustrated and disappointed because I had such high expectations after her very vocal support for Amber Heard. I don’t want to be responsible for spreading her every move.”
He got some support from Keke Palmer Updates, another stan account, which voiced its disapproval at the Nope star being cast in the forthcoming David O Russell film Super Toys. The director is known for being combative on set and was accused of sexual assault by his 19-year-old niece in 2011. So Alex Evans, a 19-year-old English film studies major who runs the account, went all in on the tough love.
“I question why she would even work with him,” the account tweeted. “He is known to be a man who is violently abusive to his lead actresses so idk why she has put herself in this position.” Evans, who lives in Northern Ireland, will continue to run the Keke Palmer account. But she will not post any tidbits about Super Toys.
Evans created her account because she saw plenty of fan pages dedicated to white celebrities and wondered why a Black star like Palmer didn’t receive the same level of online adulation. “She’s starred in No 1 movies at the box office, had hit songs, and been on TV, and yet I didn’t see the same volume of stan account updates as her white counterparts or co-stars who had done significantly less work,” Evans said.
Both Evans’ and Fox’s pages have interacted with their respective stars, even if it was just through a quick DM exchange (which Fox started with Noah) or a few likes and retweets (as Palmer gave Evans). And, in a corporate acknowledgment of the power of stan groups, Amazon Music and KeyTV hired Evans to promote Palmer.
Brands have noticed how stans can drive culture. “Artists’ teams and labels have for the first time begun to realize that fans are more than just a commodity to market toward,” Aldridge said. “They can be real drivers in how a campaign platforms, and we’ve recently seen artists like Niall Horan engage with this community to create conversations around upcoming releases.”
For Noah, working on the Fox account was a grueling, endless news cycle of crop tops and leather pants. He would check her Instagram first thing in the day, looking through her stories and tagged posts. Then he’d Google her name for the latest articles, sift through Getty Image event photography, and browse hashtags on TikTok and Twitter.
Not every stan will challenge their idol. During his defamation trial with Amber Heard, Johnny Depp’s army of Twitter and TikTok fans abused Heard and defended Depp. According to the Los Angeles Times, a report found that 627 Twitter accounts were dedicated to negatively tweeting about Heard and her supporters.
Kanye West, now known as Ye, may have hemorrhaged endorsement deals after making antisemitic remarks last year, but some of his most loyal followers were not deterred. The anonymous admin of @KanyeWestLover911, who had close to a million followers on TikTok before being banned, stayed with the singer until the bitter end. As they told Rolling Stone, “I understand why people feel sad and disappointed about what he said because the Holocaust was something very horrible, [but] my goal of my page is to ultimately spread happiness and love. And I can see and understand the pain a lot of Ye fans have been feeling.”
Will Fox’s fan account rebrand? Some of Noah’s followers have said they hope for some sort of pivot, but for now he plans to leave it up as an archive of Fox’s dizzying ascent from it girl to major star. It’s a rise he will miss covering. “There is literally nothing I’d rather be doing now than sitting in history class, hiding my phone under the desk, and tweeting pictures of Julia Fox.”
