1. Introduction
[1.1] On Sunday, October 7, 2018, Taylor Swift posted the following on Instagram: a picture of herself with her endorsement of two Democratic candidates for US Congress along with a general call to her followers to educate themselves on the issues and candidates and to register to vote at Vote.org (figure 1). Ripples from her post could be felt within hours: the candidates thanked her, the president of the United States rebuked her, and tens of thousands of people registered to vote. By Tuesday, October 9, dozens of national and international media outlets had reported that Swift's call to action may have resulted in 65,000 new voter registrations (McDermott 2018). In Swift's home state of Tennessee, about half of the new voter registrations from the month of October happened immediately following her post (Kornhaber 2018).
[1.2] Though celebrities channeling their fame through their social media platforms to promote causes is nothing new, Swift's actions and their highly visible results garnered an extraordinary amount of attention. The October 7 post marked Swift's first explicit political call to arms and was widely regarded as a departure from her well-documented silence on politics (Haas 2018). The post itself also seemed to be a departure from her glossy, fun social media presence as a pop star. Industry watchers generally consider Swift's use of social media as savvy, effective, and thoughtfully deployed by Swift herself (Kornhaber 2018). In this essay, I argue that the October 7 post and her other political posts follow the same fan engagement strategies as her more overtly promotional posts and, in doing so, capitalize on fan labor in ways that reveal a complex, if unsurprising, power dynamic inherent in celebrity/fan social media relations.
Figure 1. Screencap of Taylor Swift's October 7, 2018 Instagram post (https://www.instagram.com/p/BopoXpYnCes/).
2. Celebrities, social media, and fan engagement
[2.1] Celebrities using social media to connect with fans and the larger public has been well studied despite any relative newness of specific social media platforms (Marshall and Redmond 2016). Celebrities use social media to promote themselves and their work, but they also use it to share personal moments, likes and dislikes, and to promote causes (Stever and Lawson 2013). Further, the range of topics in a celebrity's social media posts is itself a body of work that offers fans an experience beyond the celebrity's particular product (i.e., movies, songs, albums, videos) (Stever and Lawson 2013; Morris 2014). For example, the majority of Swift's social media posts are clearly promotional of her music, but she also includes selfies with friends and her cats and informally made videos of herself talking about her new music.
[2.2] Marwick and boyd (2011) have described celebrities' social media behaviors as important performative work for the celebrity. Celebrities craft their social media posts to offer glimpses into the "backstage" of their professional lives, which establishes their authenticity as real people and facilitates a sense of intimacy with their fans (Marwick and boyd 2011). Importantly, these backstage glimpses are still work that celebrities engage in to maintain their status as celebrities. In short, even the most personal selfies or appeals for action are work for the celebrity.
[2.3] Fans also engage in work to consume the experience offered by celebrities via their social media platforms (Morris 2014). Though few scholars would describe scrolling through Twitter or Instagram as hard work, fans do spend their time and energy engaging, albeit one-sidedly, with celebrities on social media platforms. Although scrolling is a relatively passive way to engage with celebrities, Swift's use of social media encourages fans to do more by offering rewards for their work. On Twitter, Swift asks her fans to use a designated hashtag when they tweet themselves fulfilling one of her other requests. For example, fans use the hashtag #taylurking when they tweet pictures of themselves with her latest album. Ironically, "taylurking" is a portmanteau of her name and "lurking," which is the most passive way to engage with someone online. Swift then rewards a small number of fans by recognizing their efforts through retweeting their tweets. While the fan is rewarded, their work coproduces free publicity for Swift (note 1). Swift's hashtags trend upward in popularity, and Twitter is flooded with images of happy fans posing with her new album.
[2.4] Celebrities using social media to engage with fans provides an illusion of fan empowerment (Marshall and Redmond 2016). Celebrities do require fan engagement in order to operate a successful social media presence, much like celebrities require fans in order to maintain their celebrity status. This would appear to give fans a huge amount of power to determine the fate of celebrities or of their various requests delivered through social media. Swift's posts ask fans to watch, listen, click, retweet, use a hashtag, or buy. Even though Swift is but one person, she sets the parameters for fan engagement and, as such, benefits most from the engagement. Even when fans use the technological features of a social media platform to try to harness their collective power—for example, by reclaiming or subverting hashtags—their efforts benefit the celebrities who they continue to publicize (Ingram-Waters and Balderas 2018).
3. Promoting music, promoting causes
[3.1] Taken as a whole, Swift's social media posts on Instagram and Twitter offer fans an interactive experience of her celebrity persona, though the level of interactivity varies from lurking to liking, retweeting, or using hashtags. Regardless of the what the fan does, their online presence is counted, so even the most passive lurker is included in the millions of views a particular post of hers may collect. When Swift posts anything on social media, she effectively coproduces her celebrity status with her fans.
[3.2] On Instagram, fan engagement may be counted by likes and views. As shown in figure 1, her October 7 endorsement post garnered 2.1 million "likes." Following the October 7 post, she made two other overtly political posts. On October 17, she posted a picture of her feet with her toenails painted alternatingly red, white, and blue. With that picture, she wrote, "Something I wish I knew about when I was 18 and voting for the first time: EARLY VOTING. It is so quick and easy to go and cast your vote before November 6" (note 2). She goes on to give information on early voting in Tennessee and directs fans to her Instagram bio for more information on early voting dates in other states. That post got 1.4 million likes. Later that month, on October 30, Swift posted a picture of herself posing next to a large "Phil Bredesen US Senate" poster (note 3). That post had 895,000 likes.
[3.3] For some context, the vast majority of Swift's 334 posts are promotional in some way, with just a small handful featuring her cats, her noncelebrity friends and family, or her taking personal time. Recent posts of Swift posing in outtakes from a new music video have garnered 1.2 to 2.4 million likes, and a recent post of her cat had 1.8 million likes (note 4). A recent video post in which she appears to be filming herself describing different aspects of the songs on her new album has 8.1 million views (note 5). The differences between likes and views reflect the differences in how fans interact with her posts.
[3.4] Only six of Swift's 334 Instagram posts are political, including the original endorsement post and the two other midterm election–timed posts I have described. The three other political posts have addressed the youth gun control movement known as "March for Our Lives"; the "metoo" movement, to which Swift added her own claims of sexual assault; and her most recent activism comprising a letter-writing campaign to US senators and a related petition to bring the "Equality Law," which would guarantee many protections for LGBTQ Americans, for a vote in the US Senate (note 6). All three of these posts have about 1 to 1.2 million likes, bringing them in line with her other posts. It is striking to note that her overtly political Instagram posts result in as much fan engagement as her usual posts. While her Instagram account boasts 120 million followers, it is quite normal for just a few million Instagram users to like any one of her posts. Though the 2.1 million likes are often cited in any reporting on her October 7 endorsement post, it is clear that this number is on a par with most of her other promotional and personal posts.
[3.5] Swift's Twitter activity, generally, is similar to her use of Instagram in that the majority of posts are promotional. Twitter's retweet and hashtag functionalities allow Swift to engage in political activity with her Twitter followers similar to how she uses the previously described #taylurking process. In May 2019, when Swift published an online petition at Change.org to ask the US Senate to vote on the Equality Law, she encouraged her Twitter followers to write to their own senators to make a similar demand. Through retweeting, Swift recognized and rewarded those Twitter users who posted pictures of themselves with their letters to their senators (figure 2). Swift encouraged the use of the #lettertomysenator hashtag, which when used next to her Twitter handle, resulted in publicity for both her activism and herself.
Figure 2. Screencap of Taylor Swift's retweet of @PetermanAubrey, June 1, 2019 (https://twitter.com/PetermanAubrey/status/1134905642412584961).
4. Conclusion
[4.1] The journalistic accounts of Swift's use of social media as a political call to arms have presented Swift as a commander, rallying her legions of young fans to do her bidding. Indeed, the possibility that 65,000 new voters heeded her call lends credence to this perspective. However, a closer look at her social media strategies shows that her political posts follow the same strategies as her promotional and personal posts, all of which contribute to a marketable celebrity persona.
[4.2] Swift uses Instagram to promote her career as a pop star by primarily sharing professionally rendered images of herself alongside details of how to consume her products. Interspersed with these promotional posts are posts with more personal pictures of herself, her friends and family, and her cats. These images also contribute to her professional celebrity persona in that they facilitate the illusion of access to a side of Swift that presumably only those closest to her would have. Because she has deliberately cultivated a fan experience of herself as a pop star and a regular person, her political posts fit right in. She posts a nonprofessional, personal image of herself alongside a personal appeal with links for fans to click. Rather than a departure from her usual Instagram posts, the October 7 endorsement post was part and parcel of her wider strategy for fan engagement. On Twitter, Swift's strategies for promoting political causes even more clearly mimic her strategies for promoting her products as seen from the #taylurking and #lettertomysenator campaigns.
[4.3] Though she's not a commander ordering her troops, Swift's use of social media to promote herself and the occasional political cause reflects the power that celebrities retain in their social media interactions with their fans. Swift's carefully expressed political social media posts have operated as fan engagement in much the same way as her usual posts do. Her strategies for connecting with fans follow her usual range of techniques: she presents herself to fans, asks them for something, and offers them a variety of ways to fulfil her requests. Fans can lurk, like, or engage in more robust ways to earn her recognition. Regardless of the level of their participation, they work with her, or perhaps for her, to coproduce and sustain her celebrity. Whether they buy her music or register to vote, she benefits from their actions.