What do Swifties and I have in common? Lust for revenge

About 20-odd years ago, a local arsehole decided to put an ad in our local paper. He wrote a classified, advertising the services of a “masseuse”, adding my early teen daughter’s mobile number.

When she got the first call, she was shocked. It didn’t take me more than half an hour to realise who’d done it. I was not my best self that afternoon nor was the boy after I’d done with him. I felt sorry for his parents.

Taylor Swift fans and I have more than a love of TayTay in common. Credit: AP

I was reminded of that episode this week when news of Taylor Swift being deepfaked in pornographic material did the rounds. Life was simpler 25 years ago. It was not possible for fakery to go viral (unless you count Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper). There was no need to get courts involved. The fury of a suburban mother was enough to make it go away.

But Swift’s fans and I have more than a love of Taytay in common. We wanted revenge. And we weren’t willing to wait to serve it cold. That faked video of Swift is not exactly revenge porn, but it is image-based abuse. We’ve got laws for that here but it still happens. Poor losers who can’t get what they want will always look to avenge their lack of success. That’s a given. When all else fails, ask yourself this: what would Swifties do?

This. First, they called it out. When those explicit images began appearing, they started organising. Swifties flooded X with real images of Swift, tagged with “Protect Taylor Swift”. That drowned out the deepfakes, an iteration of which had already been viewed 45 million times.

Then the Biden White House called in with its take. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the spread of those images was very alarming. She called for legislation and regulation. Which was supposed to happen years ago. Imagine if we actually had social media companies refusing to spread misinformation.

“Too often we know that lax enforcement disproportionately impacts women, and they also impact girls,” she said. “We’re going to continue to do what we can from here.”

Finally, X limited searches for Swift.

So let’s return to the Swifties, who always get their man. Tweeting as @Zvbear, the account holder bragged he would never be found: “I don’t care how powerful Swifties are they’ll never find me … I’m like the Joker I use fake numbers and addresses for everything I do ... As long as my account is still active I can never lose.”

Wait, there’s more. “Bro what have I done … They might pass new laws because of my Taylor Swift post,” @Zvbear posted. “If Netflix did a documentary about AI pics they’d put me in it as a villain. It’s never been so over.”

Next minute, meet the fellow, discover where he lives (Toronto, Canada), his age (27), his exact location (in his mum’s basement … made this bit up. Sorry). He Swiftly locked his account.

While I’m pretty sure Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Joe Biden have better things to do, protecting Taylor Swift’s safety would be right up there. She’s an American national treasure, a billionaire and now she’s on her way to the Super Bowl.

Wouldn’t it be glorious if politicians got this exercised about women’s safety on the reg? Still, the Swifties fixed it and we should follow their lead. Dox the buggers. OK now, doxxing – the revelation of identifying details for public consumption – isn’t really the right thing to do. But for @Zvbear and others like him, I can make an exception.

The exception is doxxing in the public interest, grappling with the power dynamics that occur when you get non-consensual disclosure of personal information, even if it’s fake personal information. Academic Briony Anderson’s entire PhD is on doxxing. She says it’s clear that there is a difference between doxxing which has the intention to harass, intimidate, blackmail or doxxing to defeat dickheads.

“The faked images of Taylor Swift were a simulation of personal and sensitive information motivated by misogyny. It was about ‘taking her down a peg’. We can expressly call that out,” Anderson says.

The bigger problem is that it’s exceptionally difficult to get justice, says University of Melbourne criminologist Bianca Fileborn. It’s hard to identify exactly who is responsible for particular actions and there are networks of actors around the globe, she says, and there are different legal jurisdictions with different responses.

It turns out that once again we have to turn to digilantism, digital tools that enact a different type of justice. Naming and shaming. Now that’s real payback.

Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.

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