TikTok boyfriends can't stop thinking about the Roman Empire
"I'm a man, a dad, and an equal shareholder of the household and family. I still think of the Roman Empire daily."
Keep scrolling for the story of the original influencer, who has been mostly forgotten.
JoJo Siwa defends Colleen Ballinger amid cancellation
JoJo Siwa has addressed the manipulation and grooming allegations against Colleen Ballinger.
Appearing on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast, JoJo discussed her ‘friendship’ with Colleen and her thoughts on the allegations against her.
She said they met and became close friends when JoJo was 12 years old.
JoJo explains that she was a fan before becoming a friend of Colleen— something many internet users have criticised the influencer for this year.
Colleen has been accused of exploiting the fan-creator power dynamic, befriending underage fans and sending them inappropriate messages (including Trisha Paytas’ unsolicited nudes).
During the interview, JoJo says the internet has run with a “lie” and “capitalised” off Colleen’s cancellation. She also implied that what creator did was not “real grooming”.
“The internet can take a lie and run so far with it, so far that it’s to the point where you just can’t do anything about it,” she says.
YouTuber Trisha Paytas reacted to JoJo’s comments. She assured her followers that the allegations against Colleen are not based on “lies,” as JoJo suggests.
“I think in this particular case she [JoJo] feels an attachment, she feels a loyalty to Colleen,” Trisha says. “I defended my groomer in the same way… to see JoJo defending her, it makes sense because she’s still in the ‘I idolise her’ [mentality]…. but it’s so disheartening, and I feel very sad for JoJo.”
Read the full story via Centennial World.
TikTok users discover that men think about the Roman Empire every day, apparently?
The latest TikTok trend has women asking the men in their lives how often they think about the Roman Empire. And apparently, it’s more often than we’d think.
The trend started after Rev. Kelsey Lewis Vincent tweeted about a Reel she saw that referenced how often men think about the Roman Empire. She said her husband admitted he thinks about it “every day.”
Her tweet reached nearly 8 million views.
Women brought this question to TikTok, asking the men in their lives how often they think about the Roman Empire and why.
The answers vary from “never” to “two to three times a week” to “every day.”
Dr Alicia Brown from Turning Tides Psychology told The Tab that the reason men might be thinking about the Roman Empire so much is that it represents a time of civilisation and accomplishment led by the ideal “alpha male.”
“One reason why men think about the Roman Empire may be in relation to strength,” she says. “When we think about this period of time, we tend to conjure up an image of a male gladiator, and a lot of men can consider this to be the ultimate alpha male image. This links back to when we were hunter-gatherers and there needed to be a more dominant male to ward off danger. Although we no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society, our brains are still wired to survival.”
Neurologist Dr. Rachel Taylor suggests it could be down to “historical thinking” and “epigenetics” that plays into how men romanticise this time period.
“In my opinion, many become fascinated with this period of history due to the cultural influences and images that abound from there. They play into the imagination and imagery of many people – but in particular men – and the visualisation of power, war and drama.”
Women on TikTok, however, have a different theory.
“I suspect when you’re not carrying the mental load of the family unit, you have a lot of space for the Roman Empire,” says @ifitwerentfunny.
Read the full story via The Tab.
Madison Beer opens up about “complex” relationship with her brother
In a new interview for the infinite scroll podcast, Madison Beer opened up about her relationship with her brother, Ryder, and why she felt it was time to “give him a little song” on her new album.
Madison Beer’s sophomore album, Silence Between Songs, comes out today.
The singer-songwriter, who boasts over 40 million followers on social media, sat down for an interview on the infinite scroll podcast to discuss the inspiration behind her new album.
Madison shared the meaning behind a song titled ‘Ryder’, named after her brother.
“What inspired me to write it was just getting a bit older and being able to have like, these perspectives on our relationship and look at things from his point of view,” she said. “Just being able to be accountable for some of those things.”
Madison said her brother went “through a lot” in their childhood because she started her career so young.
“It’s only been in recent years that I’ve been able to really think about it and be like, I’ve spent a lot of time doing my own work on my mental health and on things that have happened to me and you know, certain experiences that I’ve lived through but it has only been in recent years that I’ve been like well at that same time he was going through a lot as well that I wasn’t even thinking about. And I can admit that now,” Madison said.
Listen to the full interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
She invented being an influencer— and was vilified for it
The first excerpt from Taylor Lorenz’s new book, Extremely Online, chronicles the rise and fall of Julia Allison, one of the internet’s first “influencers”.
Julia Allison was a junior at Georgetown University in 2002 when she launched a dating column for her university newspaper called “Sex on the Hilltop.”
Because of the university’s location, Washington D.C., her column got national coverage and she soon landed bylines in Cosmopolitan and Seventeen.
After graduation, Julia moved to NYC to pursue a career in media. She soon realised that a college column and a few bylines weren’t enough to impress editors. She turned her aspirations into building her own personal brand online, launching a blog in 2005.
Lorenz documents how the media vilified Julia for promoting her blog in the comment section on Gawker, the most “influential site for (and about) online media in New York” at the time.
“Commenting relentlessly on someone’s post to try to get attention for yourself is commonplace now, but it was galling back then. Gawker staff writers promptly chastised her for ‘gratuitous self-promotion’,” Lorenz writes.
In 2006, Gawker ran an article about Julia, accusing her of attention-seeking. The article went viral and the hate comments rolled in. Julia spent three days crying and begging editors to take it down. Then, she responded on her own blog.
“On her blog, she posted a photo of herself, derriere to the camera, sporting her condom-covered dress. ‘Dearest Gawker,’ she captioned it. ‘Kiss my ass,’ Lorenz says.
Julia joined Tumblr when it first launched in 2007 and was posting up to 10 times a day. Lorenz explores how Julia became a staple in the NYC tech scene throughout the late aughts. Though bloggers were a mainstay by that time, Julia’s desire to build a personal brand that could extend beyond her niche internet fame was unique.
Her strategy worked. She graced the cover of magazines, pitched and landed massive sponsorship deals (for the time) and in 2008, was profiled by The New York Times. She raised money from investors to launch a company, Non Society, that would function like an early version of the collab houses we know today. She was asked to speak at business conferences around the world and was cast in a Bravo reality show in 2010.
Despite all this, Lorenz notes that “nearly every article documenting Allison’s rise contained a disturbing level of misogynistic language and tropes.”
“Looking back, it’s astonishing that Allison kept going. People set up entire websites dedicated to smearing her. Some stalked her family members. Prominent journalists and commentators mocked her on national television and in the pages of major media outlets. Radar magazine named her the third-most-hated person on the internet, right above someone who tossed a puppy off a cliff in a YouTube video,” Lorenz writes.
By 2012, Julia decided that she couldn’t handle any more online assaults. She scrubbed the internet of her content and has since lived a quieter life offline.
“It had been about 10 years of my life, and I was exhausted,” she told Lorenz. “I felt beaten down, I felt completely disillusioned, and I wanted a different reality. More than anything, I wanted to be off the internet. I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’ll make money, but I can’t make it this way anymore.’ And I never looked back.”
Julia was ahead of her time. And though her work helped shape the creator economy as we know it today, her legacy is mostly forgotten.
Read the full excerpt via Rolling Stone.
How Barstool built an empire by swiping sports highlights
An investigation by Robert Silverman for The Daily Beast uncovered more than 40 Twitter accounts set up to content-swipe for Barstool Sports.
Four years after Barstool was first exposed for stealing a comedian’s video via an anonymous Twitter account set up by the media company, a new report found that this wasn’t a one-off instance.
According to Silverman, Barstool has built a video-laundering scheme using more than 40 sockpuppet Twitter accounts.
The company posts sports highlights, comedy clips, or skits on these anonymous accounts. Barstool can then retweet these clips to their legit accounts, garnering the same engagement, or embed these clips into their articles without risking copyright infringement.
“This network has laundered incalculable amounts of copyright-protected sports and entertainment videos and reaped billions of views over at least the last four years. For example: One anonymous account’s ripped video of The Weeknd’s Super Bowl LV performance racked up 36 million views for Barstool in less than 24 hours,” Silverman writes.
The purpose of this scheme is to prevent the legit Barstool accounts from accumulating Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) strikes.
“The law requires websites to remove allegedly stolen digital material while the matter is under dispute. On Twitter, an account found in violation of the law will receive a “strike.” With enough strikes, Twitter will suspend or ban an account,” explains Silverman.
Silverman details how The Daily Beast uncovered the entire racket, following a trail that was unintentionally exposed by longtime Barstool personality Dan “Big Cat” Katz two years ago during the filming of ‘The Barstool Sports Advisors.’
During the show, Katz and Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool, played a few seconds of MC Hammer’s ‘U Can’t Touch This’. Katz can be heard saying, “We’re going to have to put this on a burner now,” as playing the song on air could violate copyright laws.
An account called @ChuckTamato randomly posted that exact clip to Twitter one hour before the episode even aired. Barstool reposted @ChuckTamato’s clip to their legit account.
“Thanks to Twitter’s easy-to-use video-sharing function, @BSSAdvisers then uploaded and embedded what appeared to be a @ChuckTamato-created video, added text, and sent it out to their then-80,000-plus followers. The main Barstool Sports Twitter account, which had 2.6 million followers at the time, shared the same clip 10 minutes later, as did Portnoy,” Silverman reveals. “Now Barstool’s worries about copyright infringement had been eliminated—at face value, anyway.”
Though stealing content on Twitter is not a new phenomenon, industry insiders told Silverman that no reputable media brand would ever think of stealing from the sports teams they cover and sometimes even partner with.
Read the full investigation via The Daily Beast.
The History of Kardashian-Jenner PR Relationships
This week’s infinite scroll podcast explores some of the best and worst Kardashian-Jenner PR relationships over the years— like Kourtney & Justin Bieber, Kim & Shengo, Rob & Chyna, Kendall & Bad Bunny, and of course, Kylie & Timothée Chalamet. We first cover what a PR relationship is, why celebrities might choose to enter into one, and then dive into the Kardashian-Jenners' history of PR relationships, including some relationships that were thought to be PR... but turned out to be more.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.