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The term ‘fake fan’ has become a common term recently, with fans of artists on Twitter attacking those who they claim to be ‘fake’. It is surprisingly easy to be dubbed a fake fan.
The steps for online hate are easy: 1) Start “liking” (or tweeting about) an artist when one of their songs become popular. 2) You should not be able to name five to 10 of said artist’s songs when under extensive questioning. 3) Finally, continue to tweet about artists until they’re not popular anymore and then noticeably never mention them again. If you do any of these steps, you are asking for bombards of subtweets.
Reading tweets on my timeline like these are extremely difficult, because it’s so hard to not reply in a way I might regret. I’ve seen too many fake fans getting bullied in subtweets, and every time I see someone make a fool out of themselves to feel like a ‘better fan’ makes me realize I don’t want to be rude on twitter to people who happen to like the same artist as I do. Artists probably don’t care which of their millions of Twitter followers know their middle name and where they grew up, as long as they support their music and life choices. It can be hard to not get worked up over fake fans- I know that I’ve been tempted to bash some many times. But if you are a true fan, you’ll learn to only focus on the artist and not the phonies.