Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - How nostalgia accounts are destroying pop culture history

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

This week Taylor Lorenz talks about going independent and launching her new online culture newsletter, User Mag! Later, Taylor is joined by entertainment culture critic Coleman Spilde to explore how nostalgia accounts are rewriting pop culture history. Subscribe to User Mag here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on Power User, how Twitter nostalgia accounts are rewriting pop culture of history. But first, I have some big news to share. That's all coming up right now on Power User. All right, I'm here with my producer, Zach Mack. We're going to talk about some news this week. Yeah. And Taylor, I think you got all the news. Like, you have a big announcement for the week.

So why don't you tell us your news? I do. So this week, I made the decision to quit Legacy Media and launch my own independent news brand on Substack, called User Magazine. It's a newsletter that's covering tech and online culture. I'm going to be publishing a lot of the same type of reporting that I've been doing for big time outlets like the Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, et cetera, but independently now, completely, on substack. It's a newsletter that's going to arrive somewhere between one to three times a week, depending on news. It's going to be a mix of breaking news, long form, short form articles,

deep dives, interviews, recommendations of content, other things that I'm reading, videos that I'm watching, et cetera. A bunch of it's going to be paywalled. So I am charging a monthly or yearly subscription rate in order to try to make this all work. Small fee. Small fee. Small fee for what you get. So yeah, it officially launched this week. I'm going to start publishing my first newsletter next week. All right. Congratulations. Thank you. It's crazy. And I feel so incredibly free and excited and I just hope that people subscribe because it's kind of scary to take a big leap and just hope that people pay for what you do. I feel like any creative person feels this way, but it's like you do something for years and years, then you're like, I hope people pay for this.

Yeah. And I mean, this has been a long time coming for you. You and I have talked about this for years. I specifically remember you and I walking around the reservoir in Los Angeles talking about this a few years ago when you had this big offer from Substack and weighing out whether you should do this or not and the reasons for and against. And you've always felt a little bit handcuffed by legacy media. I know. I was offered that deal and I didn't take it. And I actually didn't take any deal from from subsection. I don't know if there's subsects still offering those deals at this point, but I didn't take any brand deal. I didn't do any sort of funding structure. Like I am doing this 100% on my own. And I am hoping that I can make it work with subscription revenue. I just wanted

complete editorial independence and control. And I feel like once you start taking those types of deals, you maybe lose a little bit of that. So I'm hoping subscribers can get me through. So please, it's seven bucks a month, $70 a year. I'm going to try to make some sort of template to help people expense it. So please subscribe. Please buy a yearly subscription on userbag.com to support me. Zach, I have to pay my rent. I've already subscribed. Yeah. I mean, tell us what what can we expect from user mag. I love the name. I love the branding. Obviously, it's very complimentary to what we have going on in a power user. What can we expect from user mag? It's going to be basically, I mean, it's going to be a mix of news, long form, short form features, interviews, roundups. I'm still deciding

kind of what will be paywalled and what won't be. So I will be doing like some breaking news, but also a lot more like deep dive features, digging into trends, really just covering all the ways the internet is upending culture, business, politics, and our whole world. Just the same stuff that I cover normally. Cool. And do you have a schedule, release schedule? Yeah, I'm going to publish between one and three times a week. I'm still going to figure out by cadence. I didn't want to lock myself into a cadence because the one thing that so many newsletter writers told me is that they regretted telling people early on, like, I'm going to publish on Tuesdays and Thursdays every day and then basically not being able to do that because of news. Like news would break.

and then they would feel like they had to stick to a specific schedule. And also, sometimes there's weeks that I want to publish three or four times probably because there's so much going on. And then sometimes maybe there are weeks that I'd want to take a step back and just do one newsletter, but make it more of a deep dive. So I think it'll kind of remain to be seen the exact cadence. But you will definitely get at least one, if not two or three or even four newsletters for me. I also don't want to like overload people too. I don't know. Ken Clippenstein was saying he sends it almost every day. And that seems like a lot. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I remember specifically on our walk a few years ago, weighing out the options of like going full substack or sticking with legacy media was all of the benefits you get from legacy media in terms of like editors, providing travel expenses and just the apparatus around that. And I'm just sort of curious like what you're going to do now.

I know. I'm hoping that I can do that on subscription revenue. And I think that's what remains to be seen. I need. people to pay, to support that type of reporting. I mean, I think what people don't realize when they hear about these newsletters, especially from journalists, is that reporting costs money. It costs a lot of money to subscribe to research materials, to pay, like you said, pay to fly somewhere, to try to interview someone, follow someone, be on the ground somewhere. It really is time consuming. Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest expenses is just time, right? Like, real reporting takes time and when you are reporting something out, you don't really have much time to do other things. So like you sort of have to get paid. So yeah, I would say time is one of the biggest

expenses. It's also just like doing original reporting is so much more costly than like blogging. Like everybody can just go on the internet and see what's trending and blog a take. And I'm definitely going to be doing some of that. Looking into real news, I'm really trying to go a little bit deeper, trying to do that original stuff like spending time to travel and visit some new content house or weird community or cover breaking news. Like those are the stories that I want to do. Taylor, I know that for a long time, as long as I've known you, you felt a little bit handcuffed by legacy media and the things you can do and say.

And I'm wondering how that's going to differ now. Yeah. Well, I'm completely free now. But, I mean, one thing I want to do is a lot more multimedia stuff. I think once I switched from being a social media person, which I did for most of my career within these media organizations to writing, I just became a writer. And so anything I did in terms of video or multimedia stuff, even this podcast, I had to do completely on top of a full-time, very demanding regular job. And I want all of it to be a lot more integrated. Like, I want my

newsletter to be integrated with the podcast, like the stuff that we cover on this podcast. I want to go deeper on the newsletter. Like, I want everything to just work together a lot more. Same thing with my YouTube channel. Like, I'm doing this deep dive on, you know, the moral panic around kids and technology for my YouTube channel and really going deep on Jonathan Haid. I want to be able to do that. And I want to tell these stories in sort of cohesive ways in lots of different formats. I also want to be able to speak my mind. I think that's been the hardest thing to deal with in legacy media. And I wrote about this in my announcement post and the About section on my user mag page. But there's this complete bullshit farce in legacy media that everyone sort of like

holds up that if you work at one of these places, you have to be, quote, unquote, neutral. Now, what they consider neutral is not actually neutral. It's a very specific point of view. And we see this time and time again. You see these clips go viral, right, of some CBS reporter or some, you know, person that's asking these contentious questions clearly in a leading way, because everyone has a perspective and an opinion. And my stories and my editorial judgment is completely shaped by my perspectives. I'd rather be open and upfront about those perspectives and my views on things, then try to hide it. Like, for instance, my coverage of the Kids Online Safety Act, right? I think the Kids Online Safety Act is a horrible, horrible, dangerous piece of legislation.

Right. This is the first time I've been able to say that. And I'd rather say that. And if people disagree with me, I want to hear why. I think that actually makes my reporting stronger. And maybe I'm wrong on something. I want to hear that, you know? But you can't do that in Legacy Media. You have to, like, write these stories where the subtext is there, but you can't be overt about where you're coming from. And I think that really actually erodes trust in media. I think it's a huge problem. Yeah. I mean, I think for a long time, it's been a little bit of an awkward fit for you, right? You're making, you're making this podcast separately. You're making videos separately. But now, like, the podcast, the videos, the writing, it can all kind of come together and be in the same place

managed, like, as one cohesive brand. Yeah. And I want to be seen as much as a content creator as a journalist. Like, I've always been sort of doing both and it's been this tension and it's been hard to navigate these bureaucratic corporate legacy media places that don't always love, you know, that I have like half a million on TikTok or whatever, you know. And so I'm just excited to just completely be able to say and do and cover whatever I find interesting. Well, I'm excited to be kind of a part of it. But yes, go subscribe to user mag. And if you're wondering why my voice is gone, it's because I was screaming my head off at the WMBA semifinals last night. That's why I sound like this.

Did they win? Did the Liberty win? Liberty won, baby, up two-oh. Okay. All right. Well, maybe you can be the special NBA, W-NBA correspondent. Happy to talk about it. There's a lot of interesting things going on. There is a lot going on on NBA Twitter.

Yes. Maybe now with who, was it Sham's who retired? No, uh, Wojsh. Woj. All right. Well, now that we've got no more Woj bombs, there's space. I know. Taylor, this might be a new space for you.

Breaking news has always been your specialty. UserMag will not be pivoting into sports yet. Well, can I start a column? I have to make money to pay myself. Once I can pay my rent, then we'll talk contributors. Okay, sounds good. Okay, well, on that note, we're going to take a break, and when we come back,

we're going to talk about pop culture nostalgia accounts and how they're spreading misinformation all over the web. All right. On August 23rd, a pop culture nostalgia account called Sleeping on Gems posted that exactly 24 years ago, Britney Spears made her debut with Baby One More, time. The post got tens of thousands of views, but here's the thing. Britney Spears' actual debut of that song was October 23rd, 1998. And the album, which was also titled Baby One More Time,

was released January 12, 1999. None of these dates are even close to August 3rd. So what happened here? Well, there's a growing market of pop culture nostalgia accounts on Twitter that are falsifying their post for a payout, giving rise to massive amounts of misinformation and rewriting pop culture history. Coleman's field is an entertainment critic and culture writer. He wrote a piece for Slate called Why Those Big Pop Culture Accounts are lying to you about Beyonce, Britney Spears, and more. Coleman, welcome to Power User.

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. So you wrote this great story for Slate about these accounts that you called nostalgia dealers and kind of how they promote misinformation about pop culture. To get things started, can you? you tell me a little bit about who nostalgia dealers are online and how these accounts work? The nostalgia dealers, as I sort of referred to them, are any offshoots of, let's say, really large accounts that you see in your feed all the time, like Pop Crave or PopBase,

these accounts that have become really prolific and really followed and sort of like new sources of their own. And we've seen accounts that have become offshoots of those that also have verified badges. So you've got pop tings and purple bass, and then it has sort of watered itself down into these nostalgia accounts, which also are verified accounts, that post old music videos and old award show acceptance features and quote-unquote iconic moments from celebrities and artists of the past. And those are what I would refer to as the main offenders here, if you will. Yeah, I feel like since Elon took over Twitter, my entire feed is these accounts. And they're all like these really long threads where it's like, yeah, like 50 iconic pop culture moments. It's so funny too because it's like

the weird thing about Twitter now is that every time you get back onto it, it reloads you onto the 4U page, which then automatically resets itself. And so whatever algorithm that you have developed for yourself and your search habits, it's pulling up these things and thinking that you want to see them, but it's like, I don't actually know that I care so much that however many years ago, this was the day that Christina Aguilera released dirty. I will say, I love the ones that post the old music videos. I do fall victim for that a lot of myself, so I will say. Well, so you wrote about how these accounts are increasingly warping pop culture history

by spreading misinformation. I actually never even considered that some of these things might not be true, so I can't even imagine the amount of misinformation I've been drinking down, But when did you start to notice this? And tell me a little bit about what's going on. Yeah. Well, that's sort of the funny thing about these accounts is that they operate so low-key and under the radar that you don't necessarily understand that what you're consuming might not be the whole truth or it might be sort of just left of center from the truth. I happen to notice this one day at the beginning of August when I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw this one account called Sleeping on Gems posting about how 14 years ago or some, some random number it was the day that Lady Gaga and Beyonce released the telephone video. And as an ardent Gaga fan in my teenage years, I immediately kind of just had a red flag off my mind. I was

like, that's not true. That was released in March. And so it kind of followed a similar pattern of things that I've seen lately with these Nisdolto accounts and pop culture accounts of posting things that sort of seem like they might be true, but no one really wants to fact-check them to to get the dates right or wants to make sure that it's completely accurate. And so I had gone to their feed to check out the rest of what they were posting. And it was the same sort of thing. It's, you know, this person released this video or this song, how many years ago? And it's, and all of them were pretty much untrue. Why don't they just actually choose correct anniversaries for things? Like, is that just too much work? That's the funny thing is I think that a lot of

the development of these accounts is they've realized that they're able to make, you know, not necessarily a sizable paycheck, but a decent size payout for the amount of work that it takes to find a clip that's already embedded into the site, copy and paste that link, and post a very erroneous number of years ago that the music video might have come out. Yeah, I also feel like them, this is just my theory, them almost making up different anniversaries probably allows them to sort of like capitalize on the attention in a way that they couldn't, if it was the actual anniversary, because other people would be talking about it? Yeah, definitely. If people are talking about it and it's more proliferated

in your feed, then it's going to get lost under the water of all these other accounts talking about the actual anniversary. And I think that it's just easier for these accounts to maybe look up, say, how many years ago was 2001? And then we can just throw the general date up there. And it makes it seemed like that was the day that the song came out 23 years ago or something like that. But it's more like the song came out 23 years ago sometime in that year, it was months and months away from the actual date that you're seeing the tweet that they posted. So you mentioned, you know, that these accounts can make money. And I want to talk about the business incentives and kind of why Twitter is just becoming a factory for this type of content.

Talk to me a little bit about how the business model for Twitter has changed in recent years under, Elon and how it's facilitating the rise of these types of accounts. It seems so recent that, you know, Twitter has become X and implemented all of these different policies and lets, you know, users get paid for the amount of engagement that they have on these posts. But by allowing all these things and by sort of making this blue check, this ideal thing that was once an indicator of someone who is giving you information that you could trust, it has now become a very twisted thing because it's anyone. can have it as long as they're able to pay the monthly price for X premium. So these accounts are now

able to sign up for X premium and drive engagement through the posts that they're making and get a payout from probably between $100, $350 a month, depending on how much engagement they're able to farm from these posts that they're putting out. Yeah. And I want to talk about the content a little bit more and the effects of it. Because I feel like, obviously, when we think of fake news and misinformation, most of us think of, like, political things or serious stuff. But fake pop culture news is exploding online. Now it seems like a lot of people are just ready to believe this stuff. I mean, you mentioned this one tweet by this account at The Pop Things from January 2023, where they posted The House where the music video for Miley Cyrus's Flowers was recorded was previously

used by Liam Hemsworth to cheat on Miley with more than 14 women while they were married. I believe that this is completely made up, but this tweet got tens of millions of views. And I think I might have believed it. Can you talk a little bit about why these things are so easy to believe? And do you know how they're coming up with these pop culture narratives? The funny thing about these accounts and that tweet in particular is that it reflects how insidious these things are. and that they are just maybe believable enough that someone could very easily scroll past

one of these pieces of completely unsourced information, see that it's coming from an account with a blue check on it, and just believe it, and then take it out into their everyday life, or remember it for the next time that they hear that song, or they're having a conversation about that song with a friend at a bar, and they say, oh, my God, did you know that this was the case with the video? And the funny thing about that tweet in particular is that it is believable because the meaning of flowers as a song is about Miley's independence and her freedom from that marriage. And also, you know, it was released a day before Liam Hensworth's birthday.

So that kind of gives a little bit of extra credibility to these just slightly or more egregiously faked tweets that you might see. There was another tweet that was about the same video that said that she was wearing the suit jacket that he wore to one of the Avengers premieres where he'd mouthed her to behave on the red carpet. And that was also entirely untrue to. It was like she was wearing like a brand new St. Laurent suit and he was wearing some other designer. And people were just able to easily conflate the two because they look similar enough that people would believe it. And also, I mean, this comes a lot of the time from Stan accounts and fan accounts that want their favorite idol to do so well that they're willing to send in information and drops and ideas to these pop culture accounts that might not weed out the truth from inaccuracies. So, behemily. Yeah, I want to talk about that relationship between Stan accounts because I feel like they often, if the rumor is positive,

amplify this type of content across platforms. Like it gets syndicated all over Instagram, all over TikTok, it's repeated. And we know also that celebrity PR teams often plant rumors or try to smear other people. I mean, I remember when the Amber Heard trial was going on. There was so much crazy stuff happening behind the scenes of these lawyers from certain sides, really depth side, sort of try to seed information with like content creators on the internet. Is there any evidence that sort of like the celebrity PR machine is playing a role in this stuff. Like are they trying to gin up attention for her album or are they fighting back against any of these rumors related to their clients? That's funny because sometimes you'll see these rumors start to come out and then you find

out that the celebrities are immediately entering into some sort of litigation or these rumors to get them taken down or get them corrected. But then other times, it seems almost as if it's conveniently timed and believable enough that maybe a celebrity's team or their label might be sending something in. It's funny when I actually spoke with the person who runs the Pop Ting's account who goes by Mo. And he told me that along with fan accounts and stand accounts sending in information tips, he also said that he's gotten information from labels and rumors from labels to post. So it could be coming, it could be like a call that's coming from inside the house. That's so crazy. I mean, I was shocked that he wanted to talk to me at all. I was glad that he

did because a lot of these accounts that I reached out to to actually get any comment from them or to answer any questions either ghosted me or blocked me or did not respond at all. But he actually reached out and wanted to speak to me and to put his defense out there, so to say. So it was actually nice to hear from him on that too. What would you say to people that are like, okay, this information is ultimately silly, it's harmless. So what if we believe a bunch of fake news about celebrities? I mean, if you go on the Daily Mail, it's basically fan fiction. anyway, you know, written about a bunch of paparazzi photos. So what is the harm? Like,

is this really degrading our information environment that much? Yeah, I think that that is the big question is because we have always been taught to look at pop culture news and hard news as these completely separate verticals. And a lot of times, especially now in the digital age, everything is really overlapping so much more. Pop culture is what we consume after a long day to feel better to take our mind off of things. It's something that we allow into our brains when our brains are the most comfortable and when we're most accepting into information because we're just we're treating it as almost this sort of fluffy thing. But it's the thing that we consume in our everyday lives. It's the music that we listen to on the train. It's the movies that comfort us.

It's these albums that we hold near and dear to us. So if we start to accept misinformation that trickles out alongside these things or about past pop culture, then it starts to slowly alter our view of the past and the present and the future of pop culture as well. I think that's so interesting and kind of disturbing because I feel like pop culture, as you mentioned, it's sort of constantly seen as this like fluffy thing. But pop culture figures can go on to play major roles in politics. I feel like pop culture, just invades every other aspect of culture. And if we start to also just not care about like pop culture history, it seems like that could be a slippery slope too, where we just stop caring so

much about history. I would say a lot of nostalgia accounts that are just sort of pop culture accounts are really adjacent to the history accounts, like Uber facts or history, whatever. And they've always kind of put out misinformation. But it seems to be getting worse, especially under Elon. Yeah, definitely. It's not a short jump from consuming pop culture and then believing misinformation about pop culture. And it's because we hold that so near and dear to us and we let it into our lives in such an intimate way. You know, we consume it in our homes to feel better about our lives and better about the state of the world. It's an insidious thing that can go south really quickly. And like you said, you know, we have pop culture

figures who become politicians, who become, you know, very public speakers who have a lot of influence on this world, especially now when the gap between celebrity and civilian is so much smaller because we're all flopped onto the same digital networks and we all have access to these things all the time. And as a professional critic, I've sort of made it my job and my life to look really closely at these things and to find out exactly why we value them and to find the value in things that people might not think that there's much value in. pop music or, you know, silly rom-coms. And it turns out that, you know, if you start making up rumors about these things, they can take on a new life of their own and alter history.

Is this only happening on Twitter? That is a great question. It has really become prolific on Twitter. I have not seen it nearly as much on platforms like Instagram. It was funny when I was writing the piece. I was looking at all of these nostalgia accounts that are more based on Instagram and I think with a more visual platform, these accounts are more willing to actually put in the work and tailor their posts correctly. It seems like the Y2K accounts on Instagram or the indie sleeves accounts on Instagram or just basic nostalgia accounts, they're the ones who are actually really craving accuracy and wanting to maintain the history as it is and wanting to build their page as sort of like an archive as opposed to a running list of pop culture, a new

news or rumors that just gets buried under itself. And I'm thinking of like the Indy Sleeves account and stuff. Like it seems like they have a real respect too for the time that they're documenting. You know, especially those Y2K accounts as well. Like I've interviewed teens behind them and they say like, I love this time. You know, like I really feel connected to it. Whereas Twitter, it's just all engagement bait. Aside from these, you know, blessed teens on Instagram,

meticulously archiving Y2K and some other nostalgia accounts like that, you know, on that platform. Is there anyone else doing the work of archiving pop culture? I mean, are there any sort of wider efforts to ensure that this history is cataloged correctly? Some, but nothing that is really broad enough to make an impact yet. And it's tricky because we've seen also things, you know, like the way back machine, which works sometimes, but is sometimes a little bit hard to find a way around and then the links will still sometimes be broken. And then you've got the internet archive trying to provide us all these things for free and all of these historical bits of culture and history and media that are being contested in court and in litigation.

And so it seems like there is also this strange fight to not preserve things in the ways that we need to preserve them to have an accurate historical record. Until then, I hope that the Instagram accounts keep going because they're the ones who are really doing the work and doing the research and have become like their own sort of proto experts in every field. All right, Colvin. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. All right, that's the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larcicic and Jalani Carter. Our video editor is Brandon Kiefer. Our executive producer is Zach Mack. Power

User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like this show, give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. And in the meantime, buy a paid subscription to User Magazine.