New Statesman

Subscribe
from just £1 per issue
New Statesman Podcast
Getty
Show Hide image
Internet
24 July 2017

What happened when Kendall Jenner superfans turned against their idol

Two years. 147,000 followers. One Pepsi advert. And 14 reasons why. 

“We were getting tired of waiting for her to apologise.”

On 2 July, an online fan club dedicated to the model and TV personality Kendall Jenner made an announcement. Kendall Updates (@knjdaily on Twitter and @knj.daily on Instagram) was a two-year-old Kendall Jenner fan account, devoted to recording the minutiae of the celebrity’s daily life. Here are four photos of Kendall leaving a club. Did you see she appeared on Carly Walters’ Instagram story? Check out this video of her favourite baby powder.

But this update wasn’t like the rest.

“Why we decided to unstan: a thread” was a Twitter thread of 14 reasons why Kendall Jenner’s biggest fans didn’t want to be her fans any more. Five women from across the world ran the account, devoting hours of their lives and often staying up all night in order to be the best Kendall “stan” account. Stans (a reference to an Eminem song, as well as a portmanteau of “stalker” and “fan”) are people who are extremely devoted to certain celebrities; the word is also a verb, so that fans can “stan” a star. By 2 July, Kendall Updates had accumulated 147,000 stan followers across Instagram and Twitter.

“It wasn’t just like we woke up and we were like ‘let’s unstan’,” says Louisa*, the original founder of Kendall Updates. “We were expecting her to apologise but she never did”.

The unstanning Twitter thread went on to accumulate more than 15,000 retweets and 31,000 likes. The reasons why ranged from a Vine in which Jenner appeared to fetishise black men, the fact she once wore a confederate flag T-shirt, and various instances of cultural appropriation. Then, of course, there was that Pepsi advert.

“She just acted like nothing never happened with the Pepsi thing,” says Louisa, “that was when we were really disappointed.” After the advert debuted on 5 April, Louisa sent Jenner a message through Twitter’s direct messaging service. For around a year, the model had sent messages back and forth with the account, after following them in February 2016 and thanking them for their work.

“We tried to understand her and we sent her a DM and we didn’t say we wanted her to apologise, but we told her that we knew that it was wrong,” explains Louisa. Jenner never replied. “I think she thought people would forget about it because her family is used to scandals and everything and they just stay mute and nothing happens.” Before unstanning on 2 July, Louisa sent Jenner another DM, lying that she would update the account less because she was busy with work and not because she had come to dislike the star. Jenner allegedly replied wishing Louisa well.

Kendall Updates started in 2015, when Louisa and four internet friends decided to create an account about their idol. The group encompasses 21-year-old Louisa, a 23-year-old from Costa Rica, a 21-year-old from Chile, another 21-year-old from the United States, and a 16-year-old from Italy. “When we started we wanted to be like the best,” explains Louisa – whose name has been changed as she fears backlash from Jenner fans. “We were always posting everything… everything she was doing daily. It took a lot of time.”

Now, Kendall Updates is dormant. “Yes, we still get a lot of hate because of [the thread],” Louisa laughs nervously. “They’re all saying that we wanted attention which is not true because we already had Kendall’s attention for years.

“I noticed she has a lot of fans that are all up her ass – I’m sorry – they’re all up her ass because they want her to notice them and that’s just stupid. I mean if you’re a real fan you want your fave to prosper and to be someone that it's worth stanning for and she was just not that person anymore.”

When we discuss online fandoms, much of the rhetoric falls back on a cliché of rabid stans who would do anything for their idol, regardless of their misdemeanours. Louisa – and the other women behind Kendall Updates – proved to many that fandom has its limits. The last straw that prompted the unstanning was when Jenner and her sister Kylie released “disrespectful” T-shirts featuring their faces imposed over those of Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur.

Louisa hopes that other stans will be able to follow her example when their favourite stars make poor decisions. “I think people on stan Twitter see their faves as a god or something, because even when they’re doing something wrong they want to defend them and that’s just not right,” she says. “Celebrities are people and you shouldn’t act like they can do no wrong…you need to call them out because if you agree with what they’re doing then you’re just as bad.”

After the unstanning thread, Jenner herself unfollowed Kendall Updates and blocked the account, going on to like a subtweet that Louisa believes was about her and her friends. “If ur talking shit I’m just gonna block you, I don't need negativity in my life sorrryyyyy❤ and a LOVELY BIG HEART AND KISS TO THE REAL ONES,” read the tweet from Lauren Jauregui, a singer, after Kendall Updates posted their thread.

Jenner now frequently likes tweets from other accounts that stan her. At the time of writing, her last two liked tweets are a video of herself from a fan account with 10,000 followers, and a gif of herself from an account with more than 96,000. Despite Louisa’s actions, there will be no shortage of Kendall stans on Twitter.

“We didn’t want to keep the account if we were posting about someone that just does not represent us and that was it,” says Louisa. “We were just tired of staying mute. I felt like I was stanning Kendall for absolutely nothing because she was doing nothing that represents me, nothing.”

Though Louisa is unsure if Jenner will change or apologise for her behaviour, she hopes the account’s actions will send a message.

“I think we need to speak out because people are where they are because they have supporters…so if they see that the public do not agree with what they're doing maybe they will change.

“If they don’t change,” she says firmly, “then they’re just shitty.” 

* Names have been changed

Amelia Tait is a technology and digital culture writer at the New Statesman.

More

Related articles

Photo: Getty
Show Hide image
Science & Tech
18 July 2017

How Labour activists are already building a digital strategy to win the next election

Momentum volunteers are developing, coding and designing online tools to get Jeremy Corbyn elected.

Part way through Momentum’s launch of its digital hub, participants join in with a “Clivestream” – a Google Hangout with the Labour MP Clive Lewis – projected on to a wall, calling in from a field at Tolpuddle Festival.

The stunt is intended to fuse the future of socialism with its deep historical roots. The festival is held annually to remember the 19th century Tolpuddle Martyrs, early trade union activists whose harsh treatment sparked massive protests. “[Tolpuddle] is often seen as a turning-point in the rights of working people,” says Lewis, before the call is briefly gate-crashed by an animal rights campaigner approaching from behind in a “Spanish Civil War Ale” T-shirt.

“In terms of what you guys are doing, you’re basically on the cutting-edge of 21st century socialism,” Lewis continues. “And its ability to be able to connect through to hundreds and thousands and millions of people. You’ve seen in the last election, how powerful the technology [is] and the growing impact it’s having on our democracy.”

The symbolism of the video link is not lost on those present.

“I think it’s really significant to have an MP livestream in from Tolpuddle, which is obviously a traditional left-wing event to commemorate the Tolpuddle Martyrs, livestreaming into an East London hackathon done by Momentum,” says Joe Todd, Momentum’s press and communications officer.

At the launch, a young and diverse group of around 60 volunteer coders, developers, and designers, meet at Newspeak House in Shoreditch – a “community space for political technologists”. Most are Londoners, but some have come from as far afield as Yorkshire, and even Paris. Momentum hopes to replicate this at regular events in different cities across the UK, as it aims to develop the technological tools to help Labour win the next election.

Although this officially isn’t until 2022, Momentum doesn’t want to be taken by surprise again if a general election is called early. The group built its carpool site to help activists know where to canvass, called My Nearest Marginal, in about a week when the last election was called. “No one slept, basically, for the whole of the campaign,” recalls Todd. "We went on an absolute bare-bones budget.”

***

By planning a long-term digital strategy, Momentum hopes to improve on Labour’s 2017 election performance. Its social media team is developing tools to analyse the success of videos and posts among each demographic (one in three people on Facebook viewed its videos during the campaign), in order to expand its reach further.

The team is also building its own online payments system – it had been using PayPal, which charges a fixed fee, meaning “losing about a quarter of our donations to the one per cent”, according to digital officer and former Bernie Sanders staff member Erika Uyterhoeven. 

She is not the only former Sanders campaign worker interested in Corbynism. Supporters of the two left-wing politicians built a fruitful relationship during the election campaign, with activists coming over from the US to help train canvassers. Ben Packer, who helped code during the campaign, says: “I’m just trying to help people steal our stuff… Even though the issues are somewhat country specific, they’re analogous – you want a better National Health Service, we want some national health service; the tech is the same.”

He’s currently trying to build an app for Momentum that allows anyone to create an event, which will then appear to other members in the area.

Much of the technology being developed is used for internal Labour Party votes as well as external election campaigning – the phone bank app, for example.

Momentum members are currently being canvassed to vote in potentially crucial conference committee elections. Yet activists at the digital hub launch said such internal party organising won’t lead to deselection attempts.

Todd dismissed recent stories about a “deselection list” of MPs floated on a local Momentum branch’s Facebook group, saying it was “patently not a deselection plot”, and the story “really lowers journalistic standards”.

***

Momentum’s membership is up to 27,500, from 5,000 before the leadership challenge to Corbyn last year. Add in Labour’s polling lead – the most recent YouGov survey put it eight points ahead of the Tories – and “momentum” is a feeling as well as a name.

The group thinks it has the Tories on the run, and finds the idea of the Conservatives copying its strategy laughable. “If you don’t have the political programme or the vision that mobilises people and makes them enthusiastic and passionate, the technology’s useless. So the Tories can steal it all they want,” says Todd.

However, he sees no prospect of this happening any time soon. Looking at Theresa May’s potential successors, he says: “Their most inspired choice seems to be David Davis, which is a real indictment of the party” (perhaps Davis could make “Momentum’s most inspired choice” his leadership election slogan).

The activists recognise criticisms as well. While the enthusiasm and expertise represented by the digital hub may well attract more young people, it seems less apparent that it would win over older working-class voters in the Midlands and North.

“There was a swing against Labour in some places, and I don’t think the strategy should be to replace those seats with seats in the South, it needs to be a coalition,” Todd acknowledges. Yet he argues that “Momentum’s a lot more than what you see today”, referring to members across the country who are “embedded in all sorts of communities”.

How closely this central structure of Momentum is linked with its members across the country is up for debate, especially after controversial constitutional changes earlier this year. Rida Vaquas – who wasn’t at the event but is a member of Momentum’s governing National Coordinating Group – argues: “There is very little way, if any, that local branches can co-ordinate Momentum’s national activity in line with their own work, as local branches are no longer represented in Momentum’s democratic structures.”

When asked whether they do a good job co-ordinating national social media activity with local branches, Harry from the social media team admits: “Not really, that’s something we need to work on”. Ruth Berry, digital officer, sees the Hub as a promising way for “communicating with our membership across the country”, as “local groups can now use this digital hub to feed into us what their problems are, and how they can be best fixed”.

In a recent article, Tony Blair panned the electoral offerings put forward by both sides in June – particularly as far as Brexit strategies were concerned – calling them “two competing visions of the 1960s”.

Still, the campaign being built at Momentum’s digital hub appears as innovative as it was electorally useful at the election. However, Berry is adamant that Momentum has no cause to be complacent now: “We haven’t won a general election yet, so our work isn’t done.”

Thomas Zagoria is a Danson Scholar studying History and Politics at St Anne's College Oxford. 

Rudy Schulkind is a Danson scholar who recently graduated in philosophy and politics from St Anne's College Oxford.

More

Related articles