Taylor Swift Fans Doxx Critic in Strong Play For ‘Internet’s Worst Fanbase’ Award

I used to think that the internet’s most toxic fandom was probably Steven Universe, whose fans bullied a teenaged artist on Tumblr to attempt suicide for drawing a character from the show “too thin.” Taylor Swift’s fans, or the Swiftboaters, as they like to be called, are really making a play to win that title after doxxing a critic who “only” gave Swift’s new album Folklore an 8/10.

If you don’t know what doxxing means, it’s internet slang for when you reveal someone’s personal information, like their home address or personal phone number.

Here’s the thing; I do some side gigs as a critic, I reviewed a whole season of South Park on this website and when I’m required to give a score, I use a five-point scale. If the site uses a 10 or 100 point scale, I’ll just only use even numbers or multiples of 20 because I don’t think you need to be more granular than that. What does it mean if one episode of a show is an 8.5 and the next episode is an 8.4? No one knows or cares what the difference is. When you think about a five-point scale, an 8/10 is the same as a 4/5 and it’s really good.

So why did Swift’s fans doxx a critic for Pitchfork, a music blog that is very much not for you if your favorite musician is Taylor Swift? According to The Daily Beast they were mad that her Metacritic score could go below 90, which I thought only video game studios cared about.

Despite these fans’ insistence that their concern is the fairness and quality of the reviews Folklorereceives, they really appear fixated on the album’s Metacritic score. Specifically, many lamented the possibility that Folklore could drop below a 90. At the time of writing, the album’s Metascore is an 89.

Oh, wait, can I do a Gamergate joke here? Is it 2014 when that might have still been funny? Okay, here goes. “It’s about ethics in music journalism.”

Nailed it. I’ll take my Pulitzer on the veranda.

The Pitchfork review isn’t even the worst review of the album, Sputnik gave it a 3.2, which is labeled “good.” Because yeah, a 3/5 is a good score, it means something is fine but not really great.

Look, obviously doxxing people is bad, but the truth is there’s nothing wrong with the Swifties. Every fandom has bad actors in it. That thing that you love? A lot of assholes also love that thing, and neither one of you are the “real” fan of whatever it is you like. Probably a YouTube channel where a guy with a barely-animated cartoon avatar talks about World War II. Some of the people watching that YouTube video are really nasty cunts. Probably a lot of them. It doesn’t say anything about the thing those people like or other people who like the same thing.