What is Your Source?

Alternative title: Why is everyone so damn stupid now?

Often, it feels as though I’m screaming into an abyss. When did people become so dumb? Perhaps this isn’t a new phenomenon. I have witnessed this pattern of behavior evolve, and said evolution was happening long before I was even born… but it certainly feels disheartening to witness, particularly this past year. Things aren’t going that well, culturally speaking, in 2025!

There’s a specific corner of the internet that I’m here to discuss… a significant corner, at that. Hundreds of thousands of people. Some upload YouTube videos that reach millions of views. They don’t necessarily reach what I’d consider to be “The General Public,” though, nor do they necessarily hold any major cultural impact, but still, they… exist. Every few months, this coalition gathers together to pick an enemy. There doesn’t have to be any basis, they just decide one day. Historically, though, it tends to be those that are either perceived as “woke” or their platform goes directly against some form of dated Conservative ideology that this circle wants to promote.

Not only do these people decide to dogpile on some random public figure, but they decide to go an extra mile. They weaponize social media to create smear campaigns that will inevitably spread to corners of the internet that isn’t exclusive their own. The victims of these smear campaigns are almost always women, women of color often receiving the extra vitriol, and if a man does get chosen to become their enemy of the month, the men are often non-white. Generally speaking, heterosexual liberal white male celebrities just do not get the same vitriol from these alt-right pages… unless you count, like… Stephen Colbert? And I’m not saying that I wish these men got more of the Conservative hate train… because truly, I just wish everyone was normal… but how is this track record fair?!

Of course, media run hate campaigns are far from a new thing. For as long as there was pop culture, there were smear campaigns; before then, there was always gossip! Politically speaking, though, there have been blacklisting efforts throughout the history of Hollywood especially. Famously the Red Scare of the 1950s that infiltrated the entertainment industry, creating the original Hollywood Blacklist. Now… that was done by actual important people. Executives, studios, the powerful forces that make the decisions on who to hire and who to shut out. They had the authority to essentially derail the careers of anybody they decide, isolating those they didn’t want to work with. What we’re here to discuss now, is not quite that. These are LOSERS.

I don’t mean to imply these social media born hate trains have no real-world consequences. There are actors who’ve used their social media platform to call for an end to the genocide of the Palestinian people, who then faced industry consequences as a result. That’s just not what I’m discussing today, though it is quite important for me to emphasize how insanely concerning that is. Saying “Free Palestine” shouldn’t become the basis of an entire article in Variety with the expressed purpose to smear their image.

What I am here to discuss today, though… There’s been an evolution of the media landscape. As a result, the way in which the general public engages with the concept of celebrity has shifted. This is mostly because, well, the very way people receive their news has gone from filtered through a newspaper, a magazine, a TV screen to now: predominantly social media. Their phones.

In a sense, this is an improvement! Social media, although a major force in all aspects of our culture, doesn’t necessarily carry the same ramifications as a full-on blacklisting effort or the insanely toxic tabloid culture of the early 2000s. There are, however, completely different issues with allowing social media to become an all-encompassing force to our culture… a lot, actually, but one that particularly concerns us today.

The long and short being, nobody checks their sources. I know, this has been said… many times. It has gotten really bad, especially with how A.I is just everywhere on the internet nowadays. I always think it’s all quite obvious when something is fabricated, but I’ve gathered many people just take everything they see at face value. This inevitably leads us into a constant spread of misinformation. Now, misinformation has been a problem since the start of journalism, don’t get me wrong. Gossip magazines have always existed. Open the history books, dictatorships are literally built on propaganda, spreading misinformation to literally everybody. But, now… social media is the perfect platform to twist narratives and make millions of people believe what you want them to believe, knowing they won’t do the required research to effectively educate themselves.

This was an issue before TikTok, I honestly doubt there was ever a time on social media where misinformation wasn’t bound to spread. Because, at its core, what is social media? A platform built on people engaging with one another… freely speaking… with no substantial filter. You have access to millions of people’s thoughts at your fingertips. Doesn’t it kind of seem inevitable that it’ll only be a matter of time before it becomes a weapon for propaganda?

Around 2020 is when I realized how dangerous TikTok could become for my generation. I had seen the generations before me become brain-rotted by Facebook, but seeing it happen again in real time, this time reaching younger and younger people.... let me tell you what the problem is. There is no quality filter. You can report people, call people out in the comments and replies, but ultimately, once a video is published, it takes on a life of its own - ESPECIALLY on a platform designed like TikTok is. Now that A.I is scarily accessible to anybody with an internet connection, TikTok sees over 1 billion video views per day… much of that people will take at face value with no further thinking. Now, for the most part, I don’t think this is always a problem, but in 2020 a brand of video became very popular, which is just… sharing information. Educating young people. This could’ve been a very good thing! But was very quickly taken advantage of, and the statements became less and less true. The problem? Nobody cares about actually checking sources. They hear something, they assume nobody lies on the internet, they spread that information elsewhere. Just like our elders did with Facebook.

I swear I am almost getting to my actual point.

Brie Larson was announced to be playing Captain Marvel in July of 2016. She was a very accomplished actress with an Oscar to her name by this point, but the casting ended up causing a fair bit of backlash once people started getting really upset at her… for… oh… being a feminist? And believing we should be promoting diversity in film criticism… Right. I don’t mean to say Brie Larson became the first victim of what I’ll affectionately label Incel-Core YouTube, but she did become their biggest enemy for what became years. Since I’m giving a timeline, around this time is when Amber Heard divorced Johnny Depp and accused him of domestic violence, which was immediately met with baseless disbelief. Incel YouTube would garner millions of views using either Brie or Amber’s face and saying all types of vile nonsense. Women starring in “boy” movies, refusing to be treated as property, which threatens their masculinity… incels will always incel, you know? Of course, hating a woman for being a woman is not a new concept. The second a woman becomes “overexposed,” they become expendable to pop culture.

In recent years, TikTok has become a contributing force to spreading hate campaigns, with baseless accusations just becoming a common-place tactic used to get others to hate the celebrities more. In 2019, it was that nobody who worked with Brie Larson enjoyed working with her. There were “body language experts” (never going to be a real thing to me, by the way) who “analyzed” (they did no such thing) the footage of every interview Brie Larson ever had to try and prove her to be… annoying? If you’re a woman, that’s a real serious crime to people. The second Rachel Zegler got cast as Snow White in 2021, up to the second it was released in theaters, the TikTok and YouTube videos were flooded with - not just baseless misinformation about her being widely disliked by her peers - but also about the project as a whole being scrapped. That specific smear campaign is an entire thing in and of itself, and if you know me you know I don’t play about Rachel Zegler… but witnessing the things she has said be twisted in such a cruel and insidious way… I felt as though I lived in an entirely different dimension, I couldn’t believe my eyes sometimes. Much of the same can be said about how Halle Bailey was treated, which has since gotten even more cruel after she separated from DDG.

Now, before I get to my final point - which was originally meant to be the thesis statement of this issue, but we’ve gone through a full train of consciousness instead - I must point out how these social media smear campaigns can weaponize bots. This was (allegedly) a major factor in shifting the public opinion against Amber Heard throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s. This was majorly weaponized against Blake Lively just this past year as well. Utilizing bots (fake accounts whose only purpose is to spread propaganda to any post that mentions a certain public figure by name) can create the baseline to a smear campaign, as people will see these tweets and replies and be influenced a certain direction. No matter how hard people try to deny it, many are bandwagoners. If something seems to be the popular consensus, thousands of people will contribute to that narrative for likes and retweets.

This is what brings me to Pedro Pascal. When it comes to celebrities who are very prominent right now, it’s probably safe to label him as one of the most progressive. He’s vocally critical of the Trump administration, pro-Palestine, and takes any chance to defend the transgender community. If you’re unaware, J.K Rowling is historically very anti-trans. If you watch the new Harry Potter reboot, I do consider you to be showing where you stand politically, because you can’t separate J.K Rowling’s art anymore, because she uses the profits of said art to promote her radically anti-trans agenda. And this is exactly why Pedro Pascal says she’s exhibiting “heinous LOSER behavior.” Never a day in my life have I claimed to be non-biased in my journalism, so let me just say right now, he ate that.

Following this, J.K Rowling’s cult… I mean, fans… were deeply unhappy. They were really hung up on a Big Strong Macho Man (… Pedro Pascal) attacking a poor innocent old woman just because she has a political mind of her own… the horror! This delved into something more, though, and I don’t mean to imply that J.K Rowling used her trillions of dollars to start funding a bot hate campaign against Pedro Pascal… she’d only do that if he, himself, were trans, I’m sure. I will imply SOMEBODY did, and the timing isn’t lost on me. Suddenly, there are tweets with hundreds of thousands of likes, essentially implying Pedro Pascal is a predator because he uses his anxiety (word to Doechii) to get handsy with his female co-stars. People take clips of him in various interviews or take screenshots of the women’s reactions out of context, or at a certain point, post entirely fabricated A.I videos of Pedro Pascal kissing his co-stars, with the sole purpose being to claim that Pedro Pascal is a new Weinstein variant. Mind you! When the same women they claim he’s making feel uncomfortable express joy around him, they twist it to be, “damn, would suck to be her husband!” Right… right.

Many of the Youtube accounts I was referring to earlier have moved on to saying he’s going to be recast because nobody likes him or he single-handedly got the sequels cancelled, he’s difficult, he’s EVERYTHING wrong with the industry because he’s GAY (derogatory) and just this, that, and the other. Again, most of it is just baseless nonsense, but because someone sits in front of a camera (or does voice-over, I don’t watch these types of videos) and confidently makes claims… people will believe everything they hear. Mind you, none of the things they say ever even seem remotely believable. There’s no source, the thumbnail to every video is giving cut and paste using the Snapchat photo editing feature, and there’s not a legitimate journalist in sight. Unless you count, like, FOX News as legitimate journalism… why would you, though?

Now… Pedro Pascal will be fine. I’d be very surprised if his career, which is at quite the high point right now, just starts stagnating. You may see me pointing all of this out as a non-issue, HOWEVER! I am not pointing this out because I believe Pedro Pascal’s career is in danger, I’m pointing out the pattern of this all, because it speaks to our greater cultural landscape.

I’ve left a lot of my claims unsourced here for the expressed reason being… I don’t want to give these weirdos more of a platform than they already have. We all exist on the same internet. If you are online enough, you’ve seen what I’m talking about, and if you’re not… you’re so lucky!

Do I have a conclusion for you? No. I just hope you all engage with the media you consume more critically. These smear campaigns are only remotely successful because people will read anything they see on the internet with the belief that there’s no deception or ulterior motives on display. That’s never true! The most surface level post you see on social media is done through a lens of someone else. Their own perspective directly influences what they’re saying. If you see something posted on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or especially TikTok, and you question its legitimacy… Do your own research! Go straight to the source! Read!!!! Please!!! It is so easy to lie online. Free yourself from believing what others say.

Maybe everyone will decide to be normal in August.