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SvennoJ on 13 May 2024
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Why are social media users blocking celebrities over Israel’s Gaza war?

The growing protest efforts against Israel’s war on Gaza have now spawned a cyberspace movement that has erupted in the past few days, targeting celebrities who are seen as being insensitive towards, or even supportive of, the death and destruction in the Palestinian enclave.

The campaign that took off after the Met Gala on May 6 has earned the names: Blockout 2024, celebrity block list and digitine. The idea is to block famous celebrities on social media networks such as Instagram, X and TikTok.

But what’s it all about, why are parallels to the French Revolution coming up, does blocking a celebrity hurt them, and is the campaign seeing any impact?

The Blockout 2024 is an online movement where social media users are carrying out a digital boycott of famous celebrities ranging from Hollywood actors to social media influencers for their silence on Israel’s war on Gaza, or in some cases, their purported support for the war.

Various TikTok, Instagram and X users have begun circulating lists of celebrities and their businesses to block. The point of the move is to reduce the earnings the celebrities make through ads on social media platforms.

The Blockout movement was set off by this year’s Met Gala, which took place in New York on May 6.

Social media users were upset when images of the lavishly dressed celebrities surfaced online at the annual fundraiser. They pointed out that some of these celebrities had never made online statements or addressed the continuing war on Gaza, where Israel’s relentless bombardment has killed more than 35,000 people, most of them women and children.

On May 7, a video surfaced of TikTok influencer Haley Kalil, lip-syncing the words “let them eat cake”, outside the Met Gala. Kalil has 9.9 million followers on her TikTok account @haleyybaylee.

Those infamous words, often attributed to Marie Antoinette, the queen of France during the French Revolution, have in popular imagination become synonymous with an elite so disconnected with the lives of citizens unable to find even bread that they suggest cake as an alternative.

Kalil’s video stirred anger because of the backdrop of the starvation crisis in Gaza. Insufficient food has been on the rise over the seven months of war. Only two days before the Met Gala, on May 4, Cindy McCain, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said in a news interview that northern Gaza is experiencing “full blown famine”.

Users online have now started calling the Blockout, the “digitine” or the digital guillotine, leaning into the French Revolution reference.



More of this stuff (that goes way over my head) here

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/13/why-are-social-media-users-blocking-celebrities-over-israels-gaza-war

On Saturday, NPR reported that Taylor Swift lost roughly 300,000 followers on TikTok and about 50,000 followers on Instagram over the past week.


I don't have a Twitter account, tweets never expand for me on this site unless someone else posts a tweet on the same page. But it seems to be another avenue to protest. I'm not following anyone so can't participate in cancel culture.