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Speaker 1: No Girls on the Internet. We'll be back with a
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Speaker 1: as a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget
Speaker 1: Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 1: So if you've been listening to their No I was
Speaker 1: on the Internet for a while, then you probably know
Speaker 1: that I have been on the Internet for a very
Speaker 1: long time and I joined the podcast. Main accounts the
Speaker 1: story of MySpace to talk about the early days of
Speaker 1: one of my favorite ever social media platforms. You guessed it,
Speaker 1: MySpace and Wyatt was such a huge part of my
Speaker 1: online upbringing and development, and it was really fun to
Speaker 1: take a nostalgic, sometimes cringey, digital walk down memory lane.
Speaker 1: So take a listen and don't forget to vote for
Speaker 1: us to win a Shorty Award Originals.
Speaker 2: This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 1: If the beginning of Tila Tequila being on my radar
Speaker 1: as this, like, you know, MySpace influencer for being a
Speaker 1: queer woman of color, if that was like the promise
Speaker 1: of the Internet. The day that I saw that image
Speaker 1: of her in my hometown in DC doing a Nazi
Speaker 1: salute at a restaurant with a bunch of al right dirtbags,
Speaker 1: that was the nail in the coffin. And so I
Speaker 1: feel like that moment for me really crystallized where we
Speaker 1: started and unfortunately where we wound up.
Speaker 2: I'm Joanne McNeil and this his main accounts the story
Speaker 2: of MySpace, Episode three, MySpace Famous. In this episode, we're
Speaker 2: going to discuss how MySpace, like reality TV, became a
Speaker 2: vehicle for celebrity. The people who became famous through the
Speaker 2: platform gave way to the culture of influencers. MySpace felt
Speaker 2: like a party. I've heard a few people make this
Speaker 2: comparison when I've talked about the platform with them. Recently.
Speaker 2: Julia Angwin said it in the first episode of our series.
Speaker 3: Was definitely a party atmosphere, and my friend Dorothy Santos
Speaker 3: said it too when we were reminiscing about it the
Speaker 3: other day.
Speaker 4: So I wasn't really seeing MySpace as a professional platform
Speaker 4: as this kind of digital party that just would I
Speaker 4: could pop in anytime.
Speaker 2: Well, what's something people usually want to know about a
Speaker 2: party before they show up? Who is going to be there?
Speaker 2: The answer was Tila Tequila.
Speaker 1: Was that rare bids you go?
Speaker 5: Miss Tila also known as Cio Tequila.
Speaker 2: Tila was the party before MySpace. Tila was a model
Speaker 2: in Playboy and car shows. In two thousand and three,
Speaker 2: she appeared on Surviving Nugent, a reality show on BH
Speaker 2: one hosted by Ted Nugent on his Texas ranch.
Speaker 1: Lare I can't handle?
Speaker 2: But it was social media that made Tila famous.
Speaker 1: The very first MySpace kind of influencer celebrity that I
Speaker 1: was very, very interested in and like she was on
Speaker 1: my top eight and it was this person, Tila Tequila.
Speaker 1: When I think about like, who was the first MySpace
Speaker 1: big account, it was her.
Speaker 2: That's Bridget Todd, host of the podcast There Are No
Speaker 2: Girls on the Internet on my Space way back when,
Speaker 2: Bridget was one of Tila's hundreds of thousands of fans.
Speaker 1: One of the notable things about her is that she
Speaker 1: was openly queer. And you know, I'm queer and she's
Speaker 1: a person of color. I'm a person of color, and
Speaker 1: I remember thinking like, wow, how cool, Like this famous
Speaker 1: person of color, you know, has a platform around the
Speaker 1: fact that she's queer.
Speaker 2: Tila, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, was no heiress like
Speaker 2: Paris Hilton. Her parents didn't have a lot of money.
Speaker 2: She had to hustle to get her name out in
Speaker 2: the world. The Internet was part of that hustle.
Speaker 6: I have an addiction, yes, okay, So my theramist is
Speaker 6: that I have a highly addictive personality, and you know
Speaker 6: I do.
Speaker 5: So it's I'm addicts internet. So I'm always sweating them
Speaker 5: online trying to fans. I do this, do that, And
Speaker 5: I'm addicted to shopping.
Speaker 7: I'm addicted to sex.
Speaker 1: You know whatever.
Speaker 2: This is how people came to know Tila Tequila. She
Speaker 2: sent friend requests to hundreds and hundreds of people. First
Speaker 2: she did this on Friendster, and Tila ran into some
Speaker 2: trouble doing this because Friendster, compared to MySpace, did not
Speaker 2: feel like a party. Friendster was pretty rigid about rules.
Speaker 2: In the summer of two thousand and three, Friendster started
Speaker 2: cracking down on accounts known as fakester's accounts that represented
Speaker 2: anything other than a user's real identity. So you might
Speaker 2: have seen Marilyn Monroe fakester that was a user impersonating
Speaker 2: Marilyn Monroe on Friendster, or you might have come across
Speaker 2: a snowy owl fakester and people obsessed with bird watching
Speaker 2: would have friended that account. The fakesters became sort of
Speaker 2: like community pages, but Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams hated them.
Speaker 2: He hired a bunch of moderators to remove them all.
Speaker 2: A group of these outlaw fakesters came together and wrote
Speaker 2: an open letter protesting Friendster's policy. The ringleader was someone
Speaker 2: who went by Roy Batti on Friendster, you know, like
Speaker 2: the Replicant and blade Runner.
Speaker 7: The corporate masters at Friendster should be thrilled that they
Speaker 7: have such a vibrant online community as they now have
Speaker 7: on their hands. What they forget is that a living community,
Speaker 7: by definition, has a life of its own.
Speaker 8: Deleting the photos in or entire accounts of fakesters is
Speaker 8: going to rudely, terribly backfire against the management of this
Speaker 8: site and will ultimately take the entire community, real or parodied,
Speaker 8: down with it.
Speaker 7: The rumblings of descent are already grown, getting louder by
Speaker 7: the minute. If Friendster wants to see all of the
Speaker 7: goodwill and excellent word of mouth that is generated go
Speaker 7: down and scorching, smoking very public flames, then they can
Speaker 7: go right ahead with their little extermination campaign. The Internet
Speaker 7: is a big place, and we can easily take our
Speaker 7: party somewhere else, to a site where we are not
Speaker 7: only tolerated, but enthusiastically embraced.
Speaker 2: You know where they took that party. I mean, of course,
Speaker 2: the fakesters went to MySpace. Friendster was so aggressive about
Speaker 2: kicking out faxters that it impacted people using their real
Speaker 2: identities on the platform too. This happened to Tila Tequila.
Speaker 2: She kept getting kicked off Friendster for adding too many friends.
Speaker 2: Tila knew about MySpace because Tom Anderson had been an
Speaker 2: offline acquaintance. He sent her a bunch of invites to
Speaker 2: join MySpace, but she declined. It wasn't cool. In Tila's mind.
Speaker 2: MySpace wasn't a party yet. The site had just launched,
Speaker 2: and no one was really on MySpace yet except for
Speaker 2: Euniverse staff and their immediate friends. Still, it was a
Speaker 2: hassle dealing with Friendster mods. Each time Tela's account was
Speaker 2: deleted from Friendster, she'd have to rebuild her list of
Speaker 2: friends manually add all of her friends again. And in
Speaker 2: September two thousand and three, when Tila got kicked off
Speaker 2: Friendster for the fifth time, she'd had enough. Tila finally
Speaker 2: took Tom up on his offer, and Tila didn't just
Speaker 2: sign up for MySpace, she invited everyone she knew on
Speaker 2: Friendster to join her there. At this point, after months
Speaker 2: of strategies to evade friends to mods, she had tens
Speaker 2: of thousands of friends on friends der MySpace exploded with
Speaker 2: thousands of new users. By two thousand and six, Tila
Speaker 2: had over a million MySpace friends. It's possible MySpace never
Speaker 2: would have taken off without Tila if she had declined
Speaker 2: Tom's invitation social media history might have gone another way,
Speaker 2: and without MySpace, we probably never would have heard about
Speaker 2: Tila Tequila. Tila was a new kind of st are,
Speaker 2: someone who became famous because of the Internet. Sure, on
Speaker 2: MySpace you called each other friends, but what Tila and
Speaker 2: many other Internet celebrities were collecting were really just fans.
Speaker 1: Something about her really represents the sort of duality of
Speaker 1: all of our Internet experiences, and.
Speaker 2: What happened next in Tila's career feels representative of how
Speaker 2: social media itself has changed.
Speaker 1: I think about her all the time. It's just such
Speaker 1: an interesting case study for what social media and the
Speaker 1: Internet can do to people. On the one hand, it
Speaker 1: can be this like fabulous way to connect and to
Speaker 1: like see yourself and be seen and build a platform
Speaker 1: around that. On the other hand, it can be so dark.
Speaker 3: You had these people that kind of became known from
Speaker 3: MySpace and from this particular scene and had a very
Speaker 3: definitive esthetic and sort of cults around them.
Speaker 2: That's Taylor the Runs, a technology reporter at the Washington Post.
Speaker 2: Those people today would be just regular influencers. What actually
Speaker 2: is an influencer? When we use that word, what are
Speaker 2: we talking about?
Speaker 3: I think if it as somebody who creates content and
Speaker 3: sort of monetizes that content through social platforms or builds
Speaker 3: an audience through social platforms. They're almost independent media companies
Speaker 3: where there are people that have a lot of times
Speaker 3: developed an audience for around their own personality, but it
Speaker 3: can also be around a certain interest or style or whatever,
Speaker 3: and then they monetize that online audience. Basically, I guess
Speaker 3: someone who builds and then monetizes an online audience.
Speaker 2: Taylor makes an interesting distinction. People figured out how to
Speaker 2: get famous on MySpace, but it wasn't exactly a business,
Speaker 2: not like what you see with internet celebrities on Twitch
Speaker 2: or YouTube or Instagram these days.
Speaker 3: My Space was pretty like embedded in sort of the
Speaker 3: music industry, not quite the way TikTok is now, but
Speaker 3: you know, music was a strong culture of MySpace, and
Speaker 3: so you had a lot of people growing audiences on
Speaker 3: the platform and using that to get a record deal,
Speaker 3: you know, or sell out shows or promote themselves. And
Speaker 3: then you kind of had these more like individual figures
Speaker 3: that I think seemed like kind of like party type
Speaker 3: of people. And then you of course had celebrities using
Speaker 3: it as well, like you know, Katie Perry again because
Speaker 3: it was sort of like music adjacent, and Jeffrey Star
Speaker 3: started in music.
Speaker 2: Jeffree Star, like Tila Tequila, was another larger than life
Speaker 2: MySpace superstar. He had an iconic look, mac makeup, hot
Speaker 2: pink hair, a look that you could instantly identify in
Speaker 2: a thumbnail profile picture. He got famous for creating drama
Speaker 2: and feuding with other MySpace celebrities. But to be honest,
Speaker 2: Jeffree Star's deal, I don't get it.
Speaker 1: Hello, Hey God, it's Jeffree Star.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, if been in flux with me, they kind of die, okay, love.
Speaker 7: You to your bike.
Speaker 2: Why does someone follow a person like Jeffree Star, Like,
Speaker 2: what do the users who follow the page of a
Speaker 2: celebrity on MySpace get from that interaction?
Speaker 3: Well, a lot of it was like aspiration around kind
Speaker 3: of like emo culture or like esthetics. It was like
Speaker 3: people with a certain aesthetic, and you would follow these
Speaker 3: people because they were like a lot of modern day
Speaker 3: influencers or content creators. They were kind of aspirational figures
Speaker 3: for that era where they were kind of leading this
Speaker 3: cool party girl lifestyle or they had like, you know,
Speaker 3: awesome tattoos and makeup and this.
Speaker 2: Aesthetic that people really gravitated to. On MySpace, people could
Speaker 2: advertise themselves. Users would post comments like thanks for the
Speaker 2: ad when someone added them as friends. The visibility was,
Speaker 2: in a way its own reward. Jeffree Starr could get
Speaker 2: gigs for his band through MySpace. Tila Tequila found modeling
Speaker 2: and acting opportunities through it, but this happened informally, and
Speaker 2: mind you, most people on MySpace were not trying to
Speaker 2: be Tila or Jeffrey.
Speaker 3: My Space was never really like pushing you to like
Speaker 3: become a creator. You mostly just like looked at other
Speaker 3: people's pages. The stakes were so low for the average user,
Speaker 3: and nothing on the internet feels that way now.
Speaker 2: And if you did become famous on MySpace, it wasn't
Speaker 2: entirely clear what that would even bring you.
Speaker 4: I never had a strategy because there was no such
Speaker 4: thing as being an influencer back then, so like I
Speaker 4: literally was just posting my life and I guess people
Speaker 4: enjoyed it, so then I kind of built a following.
Speaker 2: That's Hannahbath. She wasn't an influencer, but she was definitely
Speaker 2: MySpace famous.
Speaker 4: I never had like a plan where I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: like I'm going to do this, and like that's how
Speaker 4: I followers. I literally just did it because I was
Speaker 4: having fun, and then a following grew from that, and
Speaker 4: people seem to enjoy to watch me and my friends
Speaker 4: kind of live our lives.
Speaker 2: So Hannah Bath was in high school in southern California,
Speaker 2: where she ran in similar circles with jeffree Star. They
Speaker 2: were in each other's Top eight. Hannah Bath had an
Speaker 2: offbeat fashion sense, which came through in the picture she
Speaker 2: posted to MySpace.
Speaker 4: When I first started on MySpace, when I was probably
Speaker 4: like around fifteen or so, I was very into like
Speaker 4: kind of like a vintage like punk look. I was
Speaker 4: listening to a lot of like late seventies punk bands.
Speaker 1: I cut my hair.
Speaker 4: Really short, and I just like it was kind of
Speaker 4: like a vintage punk golf.
Speaker 2: Look that I was going with.
Speaker 4: But I'd wear like all these like wild like vintage clothing,
Speaker 4: like a vintage wedding dress or something crazy.
Speaker 2: Hundreds of thousands of people visited her page just to
Speaker 2: look at her.
Speaker 4: And then it kind of went from that to like,
Speaker 4: as I was getting older and kind of finding like
Speaker 4: who I was, the whole kind of like scene kid
Speaker 4: thing was starting and I had made friends with a
Speaker 4: few other girls that were also kind of like MySpace people,
Speaker 4: and I guess we started the whole kind of scene
Speaker 4: girl look or vibe, and then that was just that
Speaker 4: took off.
Speaker 2: I mean I'd like, like look at the.
Speaker 4: Photos now and like I feel like it looks ridiculous,
Speaker 4: but like back then, like I don't know, we thought
Speaker 4: we looked like so cool.
Speaker 2: MySpace became a huge part of Hanna About's daily life.
Speaker 2: She even traveled across the country to meet friends she
Speaker 2: met on MySpace. I think I was like fifteen or sixteen.
Speaker 4: I'd met this girl who lived in Minnesota, and like
Speaker 4: she had messaged me because I always wore like these
Speaker 4: like gluin extensions because that was a big thing back then,
Speaker 4: which was horrible for your hair, and she was like, yeah, look,
Speaker 4: i'd love it. It's like you did my extensions. And
Speaker 4: I was like, yeah, for sure. So if my dad
Speaker 4: got me a ticket to Minnesota, who lets meet this
Speaker 4: random girl. I ended up staying with her for like
Speaker 4: a week or like maybe two weeks even, and I
Speaker 4: made all of these friends in Minnesota. I met someone
Speaker 4: else that I knew from MySpace, and it was like
Speaker 4: such a fun and awesome time. I feel like MySpace
Speaker 4: could kind of bring you together like that. Like I
Speaker 4: feel like now there's maybe like more danger going on
Speaker 4: on the internet, but back then maybe because it was
Speaker 4: so new, but I'm sure there was danger there as well.
Speaker 4: I don't know, everyone was kind of like in this
Speaker 4: scene and everyone kind of knew everyone, or there was
Speaker 4: just some kind of like you felt more safe just
Speaker 4: meeting up with random people.
Speaker 2: Part of what drew her to connect to people online,
Speaker 2: even traveled across the country to meet people, was that
Speaker 2: her offline life could be rough. On my Space, Hannah
Speaker 2: Bath was glamorous, a scene queen at her high school.
Speaker 2: People made fun of her for dressing the way she did.
Speaker 4: At that time in my life, I was like getting
Speaker 4: bullied really bad. I was dealing with like self harm,
Speaker 4: and I was just like very depressed and all of that.
Speaker 4: And I was very open about all of my struggles
Speaker 4: through like my blogging and my rioting, So the people
Speaker 4: I was connecting with knew like the real me, and
Speaker 4: I feel like that's why I was so drawn to it.
Speaker 4: I just started like posting like things I liked, and
Speaker 4: then people like like that as well, and I love
Speaker 4: being able to like express my fashion through my Space
Speaker 4: because I feel like I got bullied a lot for
Speaker 4: like how I looked in my style, and then on
Speaker 4: my Space people like loved how I look looked up
Speaker 4: to me and like loved my style. So it was
Speaker 4: like a whole different thing for me because I was like,
Speaker 4: I'm such a loser at school, and then when I'm
Speaker 4: like online, I was becoming this like my Space girl.
Speaker 4: I don't know, it was just it was a trip.
Speaker 2: With the attention she garnered from MySpace, Hannah Beth built
Speaker 2: a career, first as a blogger with Buzznet and later
Speaker 2: working in fashion, including a spot on the reality TV
Speaker 2: show House of DVF a competition to become a brand
Speaker 2: ambassador for Diane von Furstenberg, Hannah Beth won. Hannah Beth
Speaker 2: was never Kardashian style famous, but people paid attention to
Speaker 2: her in a way that didn't really happen to ordinary
Speaker 2: people before the Internet. There are blogs dedicated to MySpace stars,
Speaker 2: and these people were kind of covered in other Internet
Speaker 2: like subcommunities and forums places like Sticky Drama. But for
Speaker 2: other MySpace celebrities, the Internet was a double edged sword.
Speaker 2: They faced harassment online where they built their fate.
Speaker 3: People would set up blogs about MySpace stars and they
Speaker 3: would sort of speculate on different things. They would try
Speaker 3: and find information on these people, and a lot of
Speaker 3: the comment section would be other fans and they would
Speaker 3: kind of all Sometimes it was really positive, and then
Speaker 3: obviously some of it turned extremely dark, where you had
Speaker 3: kind of the worst of internet comment culture attacking these people,
Speaker 3: and they had stalkers and you know, harassment and safety problems.
Speaker 2: Unlike movie stores, the MySpace famous probably didn't have the
Speaker 2: money to hire bodyguards, they didn't have representation agents, managers
Speaker 2: invested in their career longevity, and it all came out
Speaker 2: the cost of privacy.
Speaker 3: All of that stuff was so niche and so misunderstood
Speaker 3: at the time, Like now we have this concept of
Speaker 3: online safety. There wasn't that in the two thousands. So
Speaker 3: you know, these a lot of women were kind of
Speaker 3: like building audiences, getting micro fame and had this like
Speaker 3: dedicated group of people on the Internet that was obsessed
Speaker 3: with them. But there wasn't like there weren't really like
Speaker 3: guardrails around any of it. They were almost like too
Speaker 3: accessible to their fandoms. Like now there's this like you
Speaker 3: think of influencers as celebrities, so you kind of almost
Speaker 3: respect them a little bit more, whereas back then, I
Speaker 3: think my Space stars felt almost like too much, like
Speaker 3: like they were too kind of on the level of
Speaker 3: normal people almost, and so like average people just felt
Speaker 3: entitled to be horrible to them. The visibility that users
Speaker 3: like Tila Tequila could attain on MySpace was like a
Speaker 3: hyper popularity I think, the most popular kid at high
Speaker 3: school times a thousand, and in some ways it could
Speaker 3: be more invasive than a traditional celebrity experience because my Space,
Speaker 3: like every social now work, was designed for looking at others,
Speaker 3: surveilling others. People clicked on other people's profiles and assessed
Speaker 3: them from a distance, and there was no blueprint for it,
Speaker 3: Like there was no understanding of online fame at that point,
Speaker 3: so people I think had less boundaries. And then also,
Speaker 3: you know, the mid two thousands was kind of like
Speaker 3: peak reality fame and kind of like this really toxic
Speaker 3: type of celebrity, Like that was like that whole Britney
Speaker 3: Paris Lindsay era where it was like this culture of excess.
Speaker 2: No other form of entertainment defines the aughts like reality Television.
Speaker 2: Survivor and Big Brother both debuted in two thousand that
Speaker 2: shows like The Bachelor, The Osbourne's and American Idol arrived
Speaker 2: shortly after These programs could be made cheaply. New software
Speaker 2: had just made it easier to edit down large quantities
Speaker 2: of video footage. Producers didn't have to hire professional actors
Speaker 2: or screenwriters. It's no coincidence that the reality TV boom
Speaker 2: happened while the Screen Actors Guild and later the Writer's
Speaker 2: Guild were negotiating streaming royalties. With reality TV, celebrities projected
Speaker 2: the illusion of living ordinary lives, while ordinary people projected
Speaker 2: the illusion of celebrity. It was a lot like the
Speaker 2: immediacy and intimacy that early online celebrities like Tila Tequila
Speaker 2: offered their friends on MySpace. Tom Anderson even said in
Speaker 2: an interview once he thought of my Space as the
Speaker 2: reality TV of the Internet. It felt inevitable then that
Speaker 2: Tila Tequila would leverage her online popularity with a reality
Speaker 2: show of her own. In two thousand and seven, A
Speaker 2: Shot at Love debuted a.
Speaker 7: Tila Tequila began her Quest for Love.
Speaker 5: I'm a bisexual. Oh.
Speaker 2: This season on A Shot at Love, it was the
Speaker 2: first reality dating show featuring a bisexual person.
Speaker 1: She got a reality show on MTV called Shot at
Speaker 1: Love with Tila Tequila, and the conceit was that you know,
Speaker 1: she's a queer girl looking for love and that the
Speaker 1: house was going to be filled with both women and
Speaker 1: men because she's queer. Me and my friends like my
Speaker 1: queer circle of friends when I say that, we watched
Speaker 1: this show religiously, like we had parties, but we thought
Speaker 1: it was so earnest.
Speaker 2: It was one of MTV's biggest releases that year and
Speaker 2: ran for a couple seasons. Tila appeared to be doing
Speaker 2: really well in the late odds. She made music and
Speaker 2: published a book, and she made some savvy business decisions
Speaker 2: to monetize her fame, working with Joe Francis, he of
Speaker 2: the Girls Gone Wild franchise. She set up a website
Speaker 2: called Tela's Hotspot, where she had a blog and webcam
Speaker 2: and basically posted the kind of content she had on MySpace,
Speaker 2: but on a website of her own. Tela even appeared
Speaker 2: to be settling down. In two thousand and nine, she
Speaker 2: was engaged to Casey Johnson, the Johnson and Johnson Heiress,
Speaker 2: but then tragedy struck.
Speaker 4: She was young, beautiful, and an heiress to an empire. Now,
Speaker 4: Casey Johnson's sudden death has many asking how and why.
Speaker 5: At the end of two thousand and nine and the
Speaker 5: beginning of twenty and ten was very hard for me.
Speaker 5: And as you get to know, during those times, I
Speaker 5: made lots of headlines of meltdowns, and you know, that
Speaker 5: was my way of like when you lose someone and
Speaker 5: I didn't know how to cope.
Speaker 2: Casey died of diabetes complications. It was only a month
Speaker 2: after they announced their engagement. Things went down hell from there.
Speaker 2: In twenty twelve, Tala was hospitalized after a drug overdose
Speaker 2: and a brain aneurysm. It had been a suicide attempt.
Speaker 2: In twenty fifteen, Tila prepared to come back and joined
Speaker 2: the cast of Celebrity Big Brother. Then post resurface of
Speaker 2: Tila two years earlier in twenty thirteen, defending Hitler on
Speaker 2: her blog and posing a Nazi regalia. She was kicked
Speaker 2: out of the house because of it. Tila apologized. Tila
Speaker 2: called it a terrible mistake. In a statement posted to
Speaker 2: social media, she mentioned her suicide attempt and said she
Speaker 2: suffered from severe depress and addiction, and her words, I
Speaker 2: felt worthless and unloved as that pain continued to grow,
Speaker 2: causing me to further spiral out of control. And then
Speaker 2: she reiterated that she is absolutely, one hundred percent not
Speaker 2: a Nazi supporter. Tla's apology sounded heartfelt, and maybe it was.
Speaker 2: But two months later, Tila posted a photo of her
Speaker 2: baby daughter with a Hitler mustache, and for Bridget, who
Speaker 2: had followed Tila's career for over a decade by that point,
Speaker 2: it was heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: And I remember watching her trajectory from being this person
Speaker 1: that I loved and really admired as like a clear
Speaker 1: woman of color, watching her go from someone who like
Speaker 1: that was her thing in my mind to the way
Speaker 1: that now she basically was like radicalized on the Internet
Speaker 1: and via the alt right.
Speaker 2: In twenty sixteen, Tila was photographed giving a Nazi salute
Speaker 2: at a conference with white nationalists in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: If the beginning of Tila Tequila being on my radar
Speaker 1: as this like MySpace influencer for being a queer woman
Speaker 1: of color, if that was like the promise of the Internet.
Speaker 1: The day that I saw that image of her in
Speaker 1: my hometown in DC doing a Nazi salute at a
Speaker 1: restaurant with a bunch of alt right dirt bags. That
Speaker 1: was the nail in the coffin. And so I feel
Speaker 1: like that moment for me really crystallized where we started
Speaker 1: and unfortunately where we wound up. But those early days
Speaker 1: were so full of promise, and then that picture is
Speaker 1: like burned in my mind of because of platforms like MySpace.
Speaker 1: This was a person who allowed me to see part
Speaker 1: of myself that I was still getting comfortable with, and
Speaker 1: then where we wound up was so dark and so
Speaker 1: sad and so heavy.
Speaker 2: For others, Fame on MySpace came as easily as it went.
Speaker 3: You had people like Tila Tequila go on to become
Speaker 3: a reality star because that was the only kind of
Speaker 3: attainable access to quote unquote like mainstream fame in the
Speaker 3: two thousands was like reality shows. But even then, like
Speaker 3: going on a reality show doesn't mean that you yourself
Speaker 3: profit very much. So I think all the people from
Speaker 3: that era kind of fell off and never really were
Speaker 3: able to capture the true value of the brand that
Speaker 3: they built Back then.
Speaker 2: A few MySpace celebrities dropped out of the public eye
Speaker 2: by choice, including Hannahbath.
Speaker 4: I think just like as I got older, I just
Speaker 4: started to enjoy like having like my privacy a bit
Speaker 4: more now, and I just don't love social media like
Speaker 4: how I used to love it. So it's just like
Speaker 4: it's not one of my top priorities.
Speaker 2: But for others who became famous on MySpace, those years
Speaker 2: were less than idyllic. It was a horrible time to
Speaker 2: be famous. Like it was so toxic and so bad.
Speaker 2: Tabloid culture ruled.
Speaker 3: It was really playing out on the inner in small
Speaker 3: scale through blogs, and so I think a lot of
Speaker 3: MySpace stars just kind of like got chewed up by
Speaker 3: that system. And you see them now like into crystal healing,
Speaker 3: or they've totally reinvented themselves, or they're like super offline,
Speaker 3: or you have people like Jeffrey who just leaned one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty percent into it and kind of became
Speaker 3: this like internet villain because he literally thrived in that
Speaker 3: type of toxicity.
Speaker 2: The blowback to visibility online that Taylor describes wasn't only
Speaker 2: impacting people like Tila with hundreds of thousands of friends
Speaker 2: on social media. People with small followings and relatively ordinary
Speaker 2: lives faced harassment and fullying on a social network that
Speaker 2: had quickly become the center of their social life. More
Speaker 2: on this in the next episode of Main Accounts. Thanks
Speaker 2: for listening to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace and
Speaker 2: iHeart original podcast Main Accounts. The Story of MySpace is
Speaker 2: written and hosted by me Joanne McNeil. Editing it's sound
Speaker 2: design by Mike Coscarelli and Mary Do Original music by
Speaker 2: Elise McCoy, Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher, Research and
Speaker 2: fact checking by Austin Thompson, Jocelyn Sears, and Marissa Brown.
Speaker 2: Show logo by Lucy Kintania. Special thanks to Ryan Murdoch
Speaker 2: Grace Views at the head Frasier. Our associate producer is
Speaker 2: Lauren Phillip, our senior producer is Mike Coscarelli, and our
Speaker 2: executive producer is Jason English. If you're enjoying the show,
Speaker 2: leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast
Speaker 2: platform Sadly, my MySpace page is no longer around, but
Speaker 2: you can find me on Twitter at Joe mick. Let
Speaker 2: us hear your MySpace story at check out my book
Speaker 2: Lurking Main Accounts. The Story of my Space is a
Speaker 2: production of iHeart Podcasts.