Many trans people were amused over the weekend when X owner Elon Musk suggested to author J.K. Rowling that she tweet about something other than trans people. “While I heartily agree with your points regarding sex/gender, may I suggest also interesting and positive content about other things?” Musk tweeted at Rowling on Saturday, prompting a massive swarm of virulent anti-trans responses.
Rowling isn’t the first person to turn their entire online presence into a factory for spreading their favorite vein of bigotry.
The confrontation, while humorous, highlights a common problem with online hate movements in the social media age. Rowling isn’t the first person to turn their entire online presence into a factory for spreading their favorite vein of bigotry. An even more egregious case is Irish writer Graham Linehan, who, after his outrageously provocative and hateful writings about trans people, now complains that his “gender critical activism” has cost him his family and career.
His ex-brother-in-law called him out, his wife divorced him, and his career opportunities have dried up. But Linehan, who wrote increasingly unhinged screeds on his Substack, brought those consequences on himself. (He turned to Substack after he was banned from Twitter for violating the company’s hateful conduct policy. His account was restored after Musk took over the social media platform.)
Because trans people are all Linehan seemingly thinks about and because he surrounds himself with people who are similarly obsessed with trans issues, instead of taking responsibility like an adult and acknowledging that he alienated those closest to him, he instead claims that trans people canceled him.
While no statistics are available on the total number of people who have ended up devoting nearly their entire social media timelines to posting about trans people or some other minority group, Rowling and Linehan are two of the high-profile people who have.
They are responsible for the things they post, clearly. However, it’s also true that modern social media algorithms encourage users to specialize with their content, which means that there are built-in incentives to post and talk about only one big thing. As countless influencers, YouTubers and streamers can attest, if they release content about topics, games or issues beyond what they’re known for, those posts typically won’t get the same engagement.
I’ve even run into this myself. I am most known for writing about trans issues, so much so that my Twitter username is @transscribe, literally “trans scribe.” When I tweet or write about trans issues, I generally get more engagement than if I comment or write about other things, like sharing my cancel culture podcast, or tweet about gaming or politics.
But social media incentives alone don’t explain the obsession with trans people that Musk called out in Rowling or the obsession that Linehan has consistently displayed. He was a fairly well-regarded comedy writer until he became the de facto chief weirdo of the anti-trans movement. Given his original content, he would have been incentivized to keep posting jokes and updates about his shows, but now no one follows him for those things.
Similarly, think of the incentives Rowling, who has sold at least half a billion Harry Potter books, would have had to just sit back and tweet about her various Harry Potter creative projects or her many book ideas. There’s little doubt that the vast majority of her 14.1 million followers are probably expecting that from her account.
Instead, she has become so obsessed with antagonizing trans people that even Musk, who agrees with her on trans issues, thinks her posts are a little much. It goes to show you how easy it is to fall into the extremist rabbit hole on today’s internet. If these types of obsessive social media accounts were limited to trans issues or to just a handful of celebrity accounts, it wouldn’t necessarily be that big an issue, but hundreds of people have fallen into this same behavior.
Think of the incentives Rowling would have had to just sit back and tweet about her various Harry Potter creative projects.
It’s a problem with how we engage with modern social media and online content. We can now easily access information at any time online, which can be great for people who live relatively isolated lives. But with that freedom comes the ability to consume content that reinforces your own preconceived ideas about, say, trans people, and you don’t have to engage with counterinfo that challenges your biases.
You can also surround yourself solely with people who agree with your point of view, which encourages the group to further radicalize with increasingly inflammatory content. There are built-in incentives to post increasingly extreme content for engagement. Whereas once you would find engagement with arguments over trans issues, at some point your followers have already seen those arguments, so you need to move into more extreme content. It also creates a dangerous feedback loop, in which there’s no check on your base impulses or biases.
If talented and rich people such as Rowling and Linehan can become so obsessed, think of how vulnerable other people who have less talent and fame are. It’s a sad indictment of our online social media-driven culture. It encourages us to radicalize for clout and attention and not see the humanity of those being targeted. It could happen to almost anyone. Not just loners in the basement, but even the most well-to-do person in their castle.