How Pop Culture News is Radicalizing You
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People have no gauge on whether or not the thing they believe about a woman is true, or if they just accepted it when somebody told them that they hated her.

Hating women online is not a new phenomenon. For as long as the internet has existed, platforms have been imbued with misogyny. Early internet communities like 4chan and Reddit birthed a slew of men's rights forums and sexist communities. YouTube creators like Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon of Akkad, and others built their platforms on anti-feminist content, smearing women in the media throughout the early 2010s.

This hate towards women on the internet was exacerbated by Gamergate, a large-scale harassment campaign against women in video games and media. Gamergate officially began in 2014, but in the years following, creators affiliated with the movement orchestrated relentless attacks against high-profile women. Trump's election in 2016 was another pivotal moment. It skyrocketed a new class of women-hating pundits to fame. Reactionary political commentators like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder

attacked women who spoke out during Me Too and pushed anti-SJW content. But though misogyny was spreading online, the audience for hate content about women was inherently limited. It was largely confined to reactionary online spaces and right-wing fandoms. Pop culture content, general news, and lifestyle creators weren't exactly diehard feminists, but they mostly stuck to content within their own niches. In recent years, however, all of that has changed. Open up your phone and scroll through any social media feed.

it's hard not to be bombarded with an endless stream of content attacking women. Videos and memes slandering high-profile women like Blake Lively, Meghan Markle, or Amber Heard have become inescapable thanks to the rise of what's being called the misogyny slop ecosystem.

The misogyny slop ecosystem is a sprawling network of online content creators and communities that manufacture and boost smear campaigns against women. They target women who speak up for women's rights or have been victims of gender-based crimes like sexual assault, harassment, and abuse. The misogyny slop ecosystem has radically transformed the online landscape and the content that

you see. Today, I'm going to be talking to Ofi Doki, the brilliant cultural commentator and content creator who coined the term. We're going to discuss the origins of misogyny slop, what creators make up this ecosystem, how it became insanely profitable, and how all of it funnels people directly into the far right media machine. Ofi, welcome to Power User. Thank you so much for having me on. Okay, so to start off, how would you define misogyny slop? So I

think there's always been an element of this online, right? But I think for me, the thing that makes it slop is when it has very, very low quality standards for what you're making. Somebody who's making something that I just disagree with and they don't like a woman, that's not always going to be misogyny slop.

But I think it's algorithmically driven at this point now, where we're already primed to dislike, distrust, and disbelieve women, and especially women who have come forward about being victims of something. This is already the idea that is most easy for people to pick up on and think has been what's been in their head all along. It's not introducing something new, it's just reinforcing these existing misogynistic viewpoints.

Before we get into how this ecosystem emerged, I want to go over some of the high-profile women that are often targeted in misogyny slop content. I think the three most prominent women are Blake Lively, Meghan Markle, and Amber Heard. Just to give people a 101, if you're not following what's been going on with Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, these are both actors that starred in a romance movie called It Ends With Us. And a New York Times article came out a few months ago that basically detailed a

a bunch of allegations made by Blake Lively that Justin Baldoni had orchestrated an online smear campaign against her, leveraging bot networks and other things to destroy her reputation after she made a bunch of accusations against him on the set, basically alleging sexual harassment and workplace mistreatment and a bunch of creepy behavior on his part.

Blake claims Justin tried to add, quote, graphic new sex scenes without her prior knowledge or consent and asked for invasive details about what happens when she and Ryan Reynolds are in bed together. He's responded by essentially engaging in this smear campaign, releasing a website, trying to release text messages with her and just going all out against her in the media.

Yeah, it has been very, very successful. And it seems to have started over the course of the summer because she had those complaints on set. But the New York Times article came out at the same time as she filed a complaint with the California Civil Rights Division.

And if you didn't follow the Amber Heard trial from a few years ago, basically Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard for defamation. She had written this article at the height of #MeToo sort of detailing the abuse that she suffered at the hands of Depp, where it was completely anonymized. She didn't use his name, et cetera. But because she was in this high profile relationship, people put two and two together. He sued her for it.

And ultimately, the lawsuit just devolved into this referendum on her and whether she was a lying, horrible, evil woman. Everybody knew how toxic and horrible that relationship was, but it became this sort of blueprint for how to run a smear campaign against a woman online and how to discredit a woman online.

online by leveraging online attention and the content creator ecosystem. And even Amber Heard sees the connections between what she experienced and what Blake Lively has experienced. She gave a statement to NBC News saying that she's seen up close exactly how destructive these campaigns against women can be. And I feel like we see this stuff against celebrity women all the time. Obviously, Meghan Markle is another target. You see time and time again, a celebrity woman comes out with allegations of wrongdoing or claims that she's been

harassed or abused or mistreated in some way. And immediately there is this orchestrated sort of online campaign against her, largely driven by the right wing media and right wing influence networks and the misogyny slop ecosystem that we're about to talk about. I talked about in the intro kind of how there's always been sexist, misogynistic content online, but the emergence of this sort of slop ecosystem is new. When did it start to emerge and what led to the explosion of this type of content?

I really feel like when I first started to notice it was during the Depp vs. Heard defamation trial. That is when I started to be a lot more skeptical of the people I was following on YouTube, because I would watch only specific coverage of theirs of certain things, and then all of a sudden I'm seeing these thumbnails in the sidebar, and I don't even have to watch them to know that they think these horrible and terrible things about Amber Heard.

But I really feel like there was not as profitable of a hate train or a hate bandwagon on a woman until that debt versus her defamation trial. This trial comes at a time when there's a massive shift towards algorithmic feeds. So our entire social media ecosystem is increasingly dominated by algorithms and algorithmically driven content. And we started to see the rise of a lot of creator funds and monetization schemes, which

which I think made this content more profitable on short form platforms outside of YouTube. Like, yes, there was all of these YouTube people feeding it. And I think YouTube is sort of like the hub of it. But a lot of that YouTube content was then spread across Instagram and TikTok and monetized through those creator funds. And I just think back to, I covered that trial and the content around it. And so many people that I talked to, like random meme accounts,

were just reposting YouTuber clips because they could easily monetize it thanks to the creator funds. Yeah, I think that also kind of ties into it being an ecosystem because you have YouTubers who then will have just... They sit there and they watch a TikTok video. And then the TikTok accounts also have YouTube. Like it all...

is very self-sustaining and self-feeding, but not in a good way, in a way that feels like it's just taking over the entire internet. And obviously this ecosystem is huge and sprawling, but it is made up of these very distinct interconnected factions that, as you mentioned, feed on each other and kind of amplify each other. And they each play a pretty crucial role in mainstreaming these smear campaigns and hate campaigns against women.

So I want to break down exactly who these factions are and how each of them contributes to this greater ecosystem. And to do that, I think the first group that we need to dive into is law tubers. These are people who make content specifically about legal matters, and some of them have gone to law school, but it seems like none of them have any real expertise in most of the topics that they cover or real experience. How did law tube emerge as part of the misogyny slop ecosystem?

I do think that a lot of these lawtubers who are now kind of some of the most famous ones that we think of, they really did make their bones covering Depp vs. Heard in 2022 as it was happening. And a lot of them did this either with like these really frequent and terrible uploads, or they would livestream during the trial.

And a lot of these people wouldn't even actually livestream every single day of the trial. A lot of them conveniently were not livestreaming during Amber Heard's sexual assault testimony. A lot of them who made videos later also did not bother reacting to that.

I think what you mentioned is correct. Like a lot of these people did exist pre Amber Heard, but I feel like they were sort of relegated to a small part of YouTube. There wasn't as much attention on the trials that they were covering. I feel like a lot of it was more like niche nerdy kind of law stuff, or maybe they were trying to cover bigger cases, but they weren't really getting traction. These channels exploded.

during Dept vs. Heard. And you started to see them getting mainstream media coverage as well. I know Emily D. Baker was profiled in the LA Times. Suddenly also, I feel like you were seeing these law tubers amplified on mainstream pop culture podcasts too. And these people also fed this ecosystem of TikTokers, right? Yeah, yeah, they absolutely did. And I think that the law tubers have this kind of like...

they let the TikTokers borrow some of their credibility, even though, as you said, I don't know how much relevant experience any of these lawtubers had. My assumption is if you're a really great lawyer, you're still practicing law and not making YouTube videos. I know there's, like, there's lots of money in YouTube videos, there's lots of money in the misogyny slop, but, like, if this is some amazing lawyer...

Why is what you're doing talking to content? Like, why are you making content? Yeah, that's what I always think of, too. Like if I was hiring a lawyer, the last lawyer that I would hire is one making like sloppily edited YouTube clickbait. But I think a lot of these people rely on their credentials. They have law in their name and they sort of cross collaborate with these other people that also, as you mentioned, sort of

of refer to them as these like expert commentators. But they don't all have such clear backgrounds. I mean, I think the most prominent one that I can think of is Emily D. Baker. Emily D. Baker is a law tuber who gained enormous prominence during the Depp versus Her trial. And she has kind of

a shady background in my opinion, right? Yeah, no, I think so too. And a lot of people who watch her, I think either don't know this or they just kind of justify it away. But Emily D. Baker is a former DA from Los Angeles and

People know that about her because it is part of her credentials. People will say, I watched Emily D. Baker, she's a former DA. But they don't mention that she was a Republican then, and she is one now. And not even just in like a vague, never-Trump conservative kind of way, but in a way that leads her to say things like that Trump's 2020 election conspiracy had merit.

and that she wants to flip California red, that she thinks that's possible. And it's not even just that, but she's also victim-blamed Breonna Taylor as well as Megan Thee Stallion. And those are both cases where I would say very plainly that a black woman was unambiguously a victim of violence. So I think people who are saying that her politics don't come through in her content are kind of fooling themselves if she's willing to make that kind of justification.

I think LawTube is full of evil people making evil content, but then they manage to keep the truly evil slips off of people's radar when it happens. Like, Emily D. Baker says, oh, that's why you shouldn't hang around with drug dealers, about Breonna Taylor on a live in her

Okay, Emily, sure.

Sure, sure. The next group that's part of this sort of misogyny slop ecosystem is body language experts. And these are people that make the rounds in various channels and live streams and pop culture podcasts. Body language has always been this sort of dubious field that's

basically made up. And we saw these same types of people leveraged by traditional tabloids back in the day. It's just now that instead of speculating on whether, you know, Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt are going to get divorced, these body language experts are using their skills to deduce whether, you know, things like sexual assault happened or other crimes were committed.

Can you tell me a little bit about this group of people? I think body language analysis is always slop, but not necessarily always misogyny slop. Like, I do not think you can glean enough relevant information to actually sit down and make a video about somebody based on their body language and actually be saying anything. A lot of these people, you know, they just don't think about neurodivergent people. They, like, a lot of the times, anytime I'm watching something that's body language, I'm just like, oh,

What if this person is autistic? And that's never considered. A friend of mine pointed out that there's a real through line, it feels like, between a lot of the pickup artistry stuff of a few years ago and modern body language analysis content. It's this idea that a woman is secretly telling you something that you should believe more than what her actual words are saying. And I think that's just really pernicious.

It's so pickup artist adjacent because it's like the secret signals that she's sending you, right? Or like, yeah, she was saying no, right? In the case of certain women's, you know, essay cases. But really her body language was, you know,

saying yes or whatever. And it's often used to also dismiss claims. Like we saw these people come out around the Amber Heard stuff or around the Blake Lively stuff now saying like, oh, you know, I've analyzed this still frame from this interview that she did. And, you know, it shows XYZ secret motivations behind her crusade against this, you know, innocent man.

Yeah, and there's no such thing as a nervous smile. It's always like duper's delight, they call it. And they're like, oh, look, she looked up and to the left, and that means that she's making something up. And none of them were doing that same level of analysis on how...

Johnny Depp was behaving in court. It feels extremely, extremely gendered to me. I think you mentioned, but at least one high profile YouTube body language guy has potentially been accused of abuse by his ex-wife. Like these are not reliable figures in their own right either. Yeah, absolutely. And I can't imagine how terrifying it would be to be the wife of that guy. In general, coming out against somebody who already has a large audience that could be mobilized against you would be terrified. But like,

observe in specific, he has this audience that was primed already to accept whatever most evil reading of a woman's intentions he could come up with. So I really, really just my heart legitimately breaks for his ex-wife because I can't imagine what that would feel like to try to come out against. And these are the same people too pushing conspiracies like Amber Heard was doing cocaine on the stand or, you know, Meghan Markle was secretly

I don't know, doing something else nefarious. Like they're always sort of ascribing an evil intention to women's actions or something nefarious. And like you said, their body language readings sort of never really apply to men. And you don't see those sort of similar readings even done towards men on YouTube. Yeah, I would say even when we have something that comes out where there is a body language analysis happening, you know, I kind of

Right now, everything in my brain just ties back into this Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni thing. But we have people really heavily analyzing Blake Lively's body language in this video of them dancing on the set of It Ends With Us. And they're not analyzing, oh, look how Justin is continuing to push. They're analyzing, look how she giggles. Look how she's fine with it. And it's

I mean, even with me being anti-body language, I feel like I can watch that video and I can see a woman who is visibly uncomfortable. But I feel like the body language that actually is useful to think about is when people are giving you signals that they're uncomfortable and when people are being pushy. And I don't see people analyzing Justin. I only see them analyzing Blake. Yeah, there's this intense focus on the woman.

Next, I want to talk about gossip accounts and tea channels because I feel like when you think of the misogyny slop ecosystem, these people play a major role. These are channels that have built their audience around covering a nonstop stream of celebrity gossip and controversies. They hyper fixate on famous women and they function essentially as the modern day tabloid media. Tabloid

media, by the way, has always been very misogynistic. But these channels go a lot further than even what People magazine or Us Weekly would do. Tell me about what's happening with them and how do they play such a central role in this landscape? Yeah, I would say that these are the people who are making very credulous update slop and they're laundering all of the talking points that were laid out in planning documents like the one that the tag agency put out for Blake Lively that was leaked in her

complaint. They're laundering all those points, but importantly, I do not think that they are important enough to be paid to launder those talking points. I think these are the people who are laundering those talking points once it has trickled down into their news feeds, once they've seen people talking about it on TikTok, and once it's become the commonly accepted opinion. That's what kind of bothers me about these gossip channels, is I'm not

completely against the concept of a gossip channel. I like videos sometimes that are kind of more like easy viewing popcorn stuff. These are videos that use LawTube and body language experts as sources as well. And I feel like they're just hoovering up whatever trending information they can find online. A lot of them are increasingly leveraging AI or relying on AI generated articles that they'll pull up on screen that are just sort of SEO spam.

And they'll just feed into these news cycles and they'll feed into trending terms. And they often use these really inflammatory and exaggerated thumbnails positioning the woman as, you know, screeching or making an angry face or sort of portraying them in some like negative, dramatic way. In like flames in the background, like they're in actual hell. Yes.

They love the flame backgrounds. Yes. Just to name names in this ecosystem so people know who we're talking about. I feel like Drama Alert was sort of like the genesis of a lot of T channels. That channel sort of devolved more into like male focused content and like gaming, although he does hop on a lot of these campaigns. But there's also this guy Sloan Hooks, who I feel like is just so emblematic of the modern like T channel era guy. Can you tell us a little bit about him and

how his channel is sort of emblematic of this style of content. I would say Sloan Hooks is my probably most heavily requested deep dive. When people see the kind of content that I like to make content about, they love to ask me to talk about Sloan. And it is very difficult to even know where to get started because there are probably like seven to 10 Sloan Hooks updates a week.

One of my viewers referred to him as the TMZ of YouTube, and I think that is very apt. Wait, sorry, not to like stand for TMZ.

I don't think he has the standards that TMZ has, though. Say what you will about TMZ, but they have the receipts on things. They don't speculate. Like, if they write an inflammatory article, they have the actual copy of the lawsuit. Like, they do actual reporting. And I don't think Sloan does reporting. Yeah, so I think that's a very fair correction, because TMZ definitely wouldn't be able to get away with hiring a celebrity tarot card reader and then saying that that was the source for their exclusive information on another YouTuber.

I feel like the standards are just like below the ground on some of these tea channels. They just kind of want to be in the conversation. They want to add to the conversation, but they're not doing original reporting. And it's just, it is kind of like the definition of celebrity slop as I think of it. I feel like it's like tabloids, but degraded a million times funneled through some terrible algorithm. And it comes out like, you know, that pink slime, the like McDonald's pink slime that

That was like the meat, I guess, that they used to put in the burgers or the chicken nuggets. That's what I think of when I think of this sort of YouTube content. I think that's also kind of part of why calling it a content farm is so appealing. It's because it has a lot of that factory farm visual aesthetics that you kind of think of in your head.

But I tend to like slop more than I like content mill or content farm because I feel like content farm sort of implies more of a team effort than somebody just sitting and making cookie cutter bad takes for the ad revenue. Like, there is some kind of oversight happening in a content farm and somebody who's making slop is...

typically often just the one man show or they'll make something and then send it to an editor. And that's kind of in contrast to the next group that I want to talk about, which are the deep divers. These are YouTube commentary channels that I think are sort of similar to the tea accounts or the gossip accounts, but they're not exactly drama channels, although they do cover similar topics.

Their videos are longer, they're less directly tied to the news cycle, and they sort of offer a lot of deep analysis. You've probably seen a lot of this stuff in your feed. There's people like Illuminati, there's D'Angelo Wallace, there's also even, I would say at the more responsible end of the scale, Hbomberguy, a YouTuber who did an excellent sort of deep dive into YouTube plagiarism. I wanted to open on a recent example of a writer winning a plagiarism lawsuit and getting their day in court.

But there isn't one. I think some YouTube deep divers, you could think of like the work that CoffeeZilla, a big YouTuber who's done a bunch of crypto investigations,

really do engage in journalism or journalistic action, but most of these deep dive YouTubers do not. How would you explain the role these people play? I would say that these people have more of an air of legitimacy to them than people who are going to be outright called slop or gossip or tea channels. These are people who are kind of presenting an air of neutrality, whether or not that's

true to their audience, they usually will make a big point to the point of it being their branding of being very thorough, even though when you actually come around and watch a video that's on a topic you're already familiar with, you realize that it's

not particularly thorough. I was under the impression after the Hbomberguy video came out that we were ready to have a conversation about the quality of the content that we were watching because I was like, "Oh man, this is great!" Don't be silly! Of course not!

Everybody was talking about Illuminati making this like low quality control content and how it was, you know, a content mill. But then I noticed that when I started to kind of have similar complaints about other creators, if the creator has kind of established themselves enough with this legitimacy in the mind of their audience, their audience gets very defensive of you kind of critiquing the way that they're coming at something.

I think the audience for these deep dive channels truly believes that what they're consuming is journalism. A lot of these channels present a lot of like quote unquote sources on screen, or they'll put up a lot of like receipts on something and they really mimic the style and tone of journalistic content.

content without adhering to journalistic ethics or standards. It's ultimately all kind of opinionated analysis and usually very skewed analysis, especially when we're talking about women. This is why they're part of this misogyny slop ecosystem, because a lot of their deep dives are ultimately just sort of hate videos about women or pushing misogynistic

narratives, but they take on this sort of air of authority. And that makes the audience, yeah, believe what they're saying and trust it inherently to a very insane degree. And these are the same people, by the way, that when pressed by an actual journalist or by somebody more credible or when held accountable for the things that they've said or misinformation that they've pushed will be so quick to claim, oh, but I'm not a real journalist or, well, I'm just a content creator. Like I can't be held to those standards. And it's like,

well, you're the one with the fancy mic and the nice background and the soft lighting, sort of like presenting yourself as an authority. And again, I don't think all deep divers, quote unquote, are inherently misogynistic or bad. Some of these people do do really great work, but I think a significant portion of them does fall into this like misogyny slop ecosystem. How do you know when you're watching a deep diver that's

part of this misogyny slop universe versus someone more reputable. I definitely, and this is not always the perfect system because sometimes people haven't been long enough on YouTube for this to work. But if you scroll back to 2022 and you see what kind of thumbnails they were publishing during Debt Versus Hurt, that will tell you so much. It's the Amber Heard litmus test. Yes.

I think it's important to look at their thumbnails and look at the people that they're focusing on. Is it all women? Are women portrayed differently? I mean, I look at somebody like Jay Aubrey, who's a YouTuber who does actually, I think, quite excellent deep dives on different right-wing figures, Charlie Kirk, Hannah Needleman, the trad wife influencer, things like that. But they're not inherently misogynistic. And he sort of holds men and women to the same standards. And he focuses on

the far right and really critiques power and critiques the way that a lot of these figures uphold really dangerous systems. I think those deep divers, again, are totally legitimate and often doing very good work. The irresponsible deep divers that I see are ones that just feed into whatever is the popular discourse of the day. I was thinking recently of the drama around cuties. Netflix released this

movie called Cuties that was actually this sort of feminist film about these young girls coming of age directed by a woman of color. But the marketing that they used for it had, you know, girls in little dance outfits. Nothing that you wouldn't see on Toddlers and Tiaras. But of course, this became this like huge right-wing freakout. You had all of these right-wing people just

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Jake Doolittle is a YouTuber who has made a lot of what I would call both just regular slop and also misogyny slop. And he recently made a video where he felt like it was his place to talk about the OnlyFans model who slept with 100 men in a day.

the content of that video was so strange to watch because it felt like he had just enough credibility that his audience would still view him as progressive, even though he was literally saying things like, this is just going to damage her in the long run, and wow, it's really sad that she says she doesn't see sex as sacred. And that was so confusing to me to watch it and know that, like,

This is somebody whose audience does kind of think of him as a male feminist, and just because he said at the very end of his video, "And I do understand sex work is real work," now it's okay to him that he made a video just talking badly about a sex worker for like 45 minutes, and that he's making probably thousands of dollars on AdSense from that because he knew it was a catchy enough topic for people to click on.

So speaking of journalism and journalistic content, I would say another sort of faction of this misogyny slop ecosystem is actually traditional journalists that have now postured themselves as YouTube journalists. These are usually entertainment journalists who use interview clips or celebrity red carpet moments that they've had to basically spin up a social media following for clout. I hesitate to even call these people journalists, but really they're just getting a lot of

celebrity PR info fed directly to them, and they'll just repeat those narratives on screen. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the people who have some kind of background in actually having engaged with celebrities in real life, I think those are going to be the people who are more likely to actually be on some kind of PR payroll than the slop or the gossip creators. I think a lot of the other people are, you know, following the algorithm, following the popular opinion. I mean, I think

the way it usually works is that they get information from celebrity comms teams or they use their sources from, you know, their days in journalism. And they just kind of use that to like regurgitate and weigh in on moments of the day. Or, you know, a lot of these people have done tons of press junkets. They've done tons of celebrity interviews. And so they just go back into the archives and pull up an out of context clip when someone's trending and be like, look at what this reveals and then proceed to make like 40 more videos on that topic. Yeah.

Okay, we have just two more factions of the misogyny slop ecosystem to go through. So let's move on to the true crime universe. True crime content has exploded in recent years. According to YouTube, between the years 2015 and 2019, channels dedicated to true crime content were among the fastest growing on the platform. And so...

60% of views for true crime content on YouTube were from female viewers. The true crime universe has long centered on female victims of violence, and at first it doesn't really seem related to the rest of the misogyny slop universe. But I want to talk about how this endless stream of content about women being victimized ultimately helps kind of undercut actual claims of abuse and wrongdoing by high profile women. Yeah, I think that's

there's a lot of overlap between LawTube and True Crime. I think it's not always exactly the same people doing both, even though it sometimes is. In a lot of these categories, I'm thinking very gender-neutrally. I'm thinking of both men and women doing this, but I think

specifically of the kind of true crime creator who will sit there and do their makeup and tell you these really horrifying murder details, and they're gonna use all of these little adsense-protecting cutesy euphemisms, they're gonna say things like "great" and they're not gonna feel any cognitive dissonance about what they're doing or about stopping to be like "and this is my contour that I use." And I think that's bad.

There are a lot of issues with true crime, and I think there are issues that you can come at that are not misogynistic in a way that is necessarily sloppy, but that is misogynistic just in terms of not being fully thought out. So I think true crime just leads to a lot of that cognitive dissonance. Yeah, and I do think that these people are interconnected to the rest of the misogyny slop ecosystem. I mean, like you said, they're very adjacent to LawTube. They're very often...

adjacent to T channels or they come up and recommended if you engage with T channels. And a lot of true crime creators are right wing in the sense that they produce basically propaganda, pro police content to an extreme degree. They sell like personal security systems and they engage a lot in that sort of like law enforcement world.

And we've seen a lot of these true crime people hop on and start to commentate on these big celebrity cases or suddenly talk about Meghan Markle, you know, how she's not really the victim of stalking and harassment because a real victim of stalking and harassment would be X, Y, Z. She has to find a way to top everyone in her victim narrative.

And the leaning on racism is used as a silver bullet. The second the race card is flashed, everyone has to back off and validate the feelings of the supposed victim of the racism. And it seems like a lot of the way that these true crime creators talk about women is they'll sort of only deify them or speak positively about them if they are dead. If they are the victims, they're actually like the dead victims.

then they'll sort of lionize them. But any woman that's alive that's making assault claims or that's talking about crimes that have been committed against her, they'll just cast a lot of doubt on. Yeah. Princess Weeks, a YouTuber who I really, really admire, she made a video during like the height of the Amber Heard smear campaign. And one of the points that was made in that video was like,

About a woman, people think if she can breathe, she can lie. And I think about that all the time. I think that's so relevant to the true crime conversation. The final part of the sort of misogyny slop ecosystem, and I hesitate to even put them fully in, they're sort of like at the edge, on the corner, but they're definitely part of it, is the react mechanism.

guys on YouTube. These are basically male commentators that react to breaking news, events, big stories. They'll dip their toes into covering a lot of these misogynistic hate campaigns against high profile women, usually pretty poorly. They cover these smear campaigns not because they're inherently interested in the dynamics of the cases or the attacks against the women, but it's because they'll pretty much hop on anything that's trending and offer their uninformed take.

Can I just say one thing about Trump? Because somebody brought it up to me yesterday. They're like, you know, everyone's why you got to hand it to Trump because he is the funniest guy, right? Because somebody asked him about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. And he goes, they seem like a lovely couple. Yeah.

That's the best line for that situation there is, right? Honestly, that's the only guy I've heard who has, like, what I think is the correct viewpoint, that they're both probably awful. Yeah. I was just, like, guessing here. That's pretty...

Obvious to me, but I hear you. These men, and especially a lot of the leftist men, they dehumanize these female victims in cases because they're rich or privileged. And many of these men actually traffic in their own brand of misogyny. Yeah, I think there is a lot of that impulse to distill things with

You know, people use the phrase white women tears a lot to refer to Blake Lively and Amber Heard. And white women tears was never just a white woman crying. And especially not like, you know, in Amber Heard's case, it was a white woman crying over being sexually assaulted. And we haven't even seen Blake Lively cry. So I don't understand why they keep saying white women tears about Blake Lively.

Having just enough progressive talking points in what you say for your audience to assume that you are being progressive about the same things they're being progressive about, you know that it sounds like you're still right if you're talking badly about a woman, but you say white first.

You know that that sounds like you're not being a misogynist. There's that meme. It's like leftist men saying the most misogynistic stuff alive, but putting the word white in front of women and thinking it's okay. Especially a lot of these leftist podcasters, commentators online, they have leftist politics when it comes to labor specifically, and they're usually pretty good on economic issues, but

but they're atrocious on anything to do with women. And they very quickly feed into misogynistic stereotypes. They often have audiences of a lot of young men, actually. And so they're not really offering thoughtful commentary. And they dehumanize a lot of these rich, wealthy women. Again, we can critique Blake Lively for having her wedding on a plantation or whatever. That does not mean that she deserves to be sexually assaulted or harassed at the

workplace. I think what's so insidious about all of this is that this entire misogyny slop ecosystem, as we've been talking about, reads as inherently apolitical or even progressive and liberal. But what this whole group of creators and these communities that feed them are doing is ultimately feeding people into the right wing media machine.

And right-wing creators have been able to really exploit this and hack the algorithms to effectively hop on these hate campaigns against women and do a lot of audience capture. So I want to talk about how this slop is inherently right-wing and how covering this stuff in this specific way, this anti-women way, is inherently right-wing. Because I think a lot of people, they're like, well, I'm not right-wing, right? I'm a good liberal. I saw literally a woman affiliated with Betches, a theoretically like liberal

liberal media company also participating in these hate campaigns, right? These people don't think of themselves as inherently conservative, but this slop is conservative click

Yeah, I think so, too. I think there is, you know, I mean, I don't think that Blake Lively is lying, but I think even if Blake Lively was lying, deciding to devote your time to talking about how a woman with claims of sexual harassment is lying is not an apolitical thing.

You are still deciding what you are elevating, what you are focusing on, what conversations you're saying are actually worth worrying about. And so I think, you know, it is, it feels so conservative for your opinion to be this woman is lying because yeah, suppression of victims, especially of in Blake Lively's case, somebody who's coming forward about a labor issue, about sexual harassment at a labor issue is

That's a Republican talking point. And I just think we need to be really clear that that's what these misogyny slap content creators are doing. They are aligning themselves with the Megyn Kelly's, the Candace Owens, etc., because it is very clear where those people stand on these high profile campaigns against women.

Yeah, I completely agree. I think with Megyn Kelly in specific, you know, Justin Baldoni's lawyer, Brian Friedman, he essentially started his whole press tour against Blake Lively on the Megyn Kelly show. And far be it from me to say that Megyn Kelly wouldn't just do misogyny campaigns on her show without any personal connection, but I do think it's very relevant that this lawyer also represented Megyn Kelly.

Yeah. And you also have right wing media companies like the Daily Wire that spent tens of thousands of dollars boosting anti Amber Heard content across their networks. And even in the female talent that's recently left the Daily Wire, you have Brett Cooper, who's the sort of conservative it girl that just recently launched out on her own on YouTube, the second

episode of her brand new YouTube show, all she talks about is Blake Lively. It's an entire Blake Lively smear episode, basically. Of course, that episode attracted an enormous amount of attention. It was getting recommended alongside a lot of this tea channel content. You subscribe to her channel, and what are you getting two episodes later? A video saying that it's time to abolish the Department of Education. That's like the most on its face that I think it's been yet. That is, that's wild.

Well, you also have, I mean, Candace Owens too, right? I just wrote about Candace Owens actually launching a new women's media company. And, you know, I talked to Candace about how popular this pop culture style of content is. She said that she's leaning further into covering these trials against women, like the Blake Lively stuff. This is a way for these people to get a lot of attention, right? Like women listen to this stuff and they're like, what?

Well, I don't normally agree with, you know, Candace, but wow, she's really making sense. If clickbait was an amendment, this is it. OK, I just I cannot believe it. And there's so much more going on here. Now we really see the target of everything. I think really the linchpin for her lawsuit, the person that she went after. We have to discuss Isabella Farrow, all that coming up right now on Candace. They'll be like, screw Blake Lively, that entitled issue.

you know what, you know, and then again, subscribe or they start watching her videos and then they're suddenly being fed stuff about how the first lady of France is a secret man. Right. And I think, again, we have not just that the people who are like,

ostensibly progressive are outright linking out to these things. Sometimes the people do know better. Sometimes they don't. Some of them are actually citing Candace Owens, but some of them won't cite Candace Owens, but they'll say Candace Owens is talking points any

way. They're pushing the idea that this is all because Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively had an affair and that this is because Ryan Reynolds is jealous or whatever. And my understanding is that that was her take on that. It was. Yeah, exactly. I think Candace Owens and a lot of these right wing creators, they actually develop a lot of the narratives, the hateful narratives around these women.

And sometimes they get cited directly on the T channels or by the law tubers. But as you said, a lot of times it's just sort of regurgitated right wing talking points that are regurgitated to this normie or progressive or liberal audience. And then they go back and then they encounter some of these clips from right wing creators and they say, wow, you know, that creator is making a lot of sense.

Yeah, yeah. I think they think that they're surprised that they agree with Candace Owens. But what they actually need to be surprised by is that Candace Owens picked out the things that they believe for them. There's been so much talk, too, since the recent election about the manosphere online and how men are radicalized through, you know, watching normie content about like gayness.

MMA or gym or workout content or like fishing content, right? And then they're led down this like right wing rabbit hole. I think that the misogyny slop ecosystem is that for women. I think that it is basically this ecosystem of content that's celebrity news adjacent where maybe you're a woman that loves gossip, entertainment, reality TV, beauty content.

you start to watch some of these tea channels, like you said, a makeup, you know, tutorial that's talking about true crime, and suddenly you're right down this rabbit hole, right? Right. And a lot of people will get kind of frustrated with me when I point this out, because a lot of my content, I do sort of like swing a baseball bat at a hornet's nest and say, this person is telling you that they're a feminist and they're not. And people will get mad at me and they'll say, well, you know, like, why are you saying that? And it's like,

because I'm actually looking at what they're making. I'm actually noticing what they're asking me to believe. And I'm noticing that it is completely contrary to my values. Yeah. And we just need to recognize that entertainment focused content, especially covering these high profile smear campaigns against women, this is audience capture. All they're trying to do, all these right wing people are trying to do, all anybody really covering this stuff 24 seven is trying to do is ride the wave.

And so many of these accounts, too, very quickly pivot to other things as soon as it's done. As soon as this Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni thing is over, you know, they'll pivot to covering the next thing. It's just about getting those clicks and eyeballs and then monetizing them. And I think what's also important about the audience capture is that I think it kind of works both ways. Because like you said, they'll move on to the next thing. But it's not that just any next thing that they move on to will still have that whole audience that they just amassed.

They have to be making the right kind of thing. If they go from being really like anti-woman in a way that their audience loves to taking a woman's side in their next video, they're gonna get eaten up in the comments.

Right, exactly. You have to kind of keep the anti-woman train going, right? Like if there is a woman, you have to be against her because now you've fed into these narratives and you've fed into this anti-woman belief system. And I feel like you're also being made more likely to engage with this kind of content when even if you are...

deciding not to click on it, if it's just coming into your feed over and over again and you've seen eight different channels that you're subscribed to make videos about Blake Lively, if you didn't care about Blake Lively a month ago but you keep seeing her and getting annoyed at not wanting to watch these videos that are all over your homepage, suddenly you are just much more willing to watch a video about how annoying this woman is because you're tired of her all of a sudden.

And they did that to you. I always question when people say a woman is quote unquote annoying, especially a high profile woman or woman in the public eye. I think of this headline that I read recently in the Hollywood Reporter that read, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni marched toward mutually assured destruction. And...

People were quote tweeting this and they were like, yes, shut up. This whole thing, she's so annoying. Why does she keep this going? Nevermind that Justin Baldoni is literally the one that's keeping this going. He is the one that is drip, drip, dripping more information out to the press. He's the one that set up an entire website dedicated to like leaking information about Blake to prove his case. But I think people see these nonstop thumbnails of Blake. They see this nonstop coverage of her. And people like to think that women are

annoying. They're like, God, I'm sick of her. I don't care about her. Why do I suddenly have to see so much content about her? And they blame her as if she's the one that keeps...

things going. Absolutely, because when I saw that she was asking for a gag order on Justin Baldoni's lawyer, the thing I kept seeing was people saying, wow, she's being so hypocritical. And it's like, no, she just said the one thing. She has had her article in the New York Times, and people are saying that that is somehow suspicious of her, that she came out once and that she doesn't want to keep doing it. But if she kept doing it, they would say, hey, why

why isn't she shutting up? Because they're already saying that about her just having her one thing come out and then her lawyer respond during all of these, like you said, the drip, drip, drip, where Brian Friedman is having his Fox News press tour. Obviously, we're talking for the purpose of this episode against these high-profile campaigns against celebrity women like the Meghan Markles, the, you know, the...

Amber Heard's, the Blake Lively's. But I feel like I deal with this all the time too as journalists. Like female journalists obviously are subject to these same sorts of dynamics and campaigns. But I had somebody on Twitter recently talking about how like, God, Taylor's such a narcissistic, you know, B, whatever. She sucks and she can't help it. She's always putting herself in her stories. She's such a narcissist. She puts herself in her stories. Mind you, I have never once put myself in my stories. Like I was always,

physically assaulted and a man was arrested for assaulting me while I was covering Charlottesville, you can go back and read my story, read my reporting from Charlottesville. You would never know that. I've never even mentioned the word I in my stories. But there's this narrative of like, God, she won't shut up about herself. And it's like, no, Tucker Carlson won't shut up about me. All of these right wing weirdos won't shut up about me. I'm not even talking about myself, right? But it's like,

It's people kind of like hearing a woman's name over and over again and assuming she's the attention whore. She's the one that wants it. Why can't she stay out of the press and just shut up, right? Yeah, I think there's also like there are like studies about how a woman can talk like 30% as much as men in a room and then the men will perceive that women were talking twice as much as everybody else.

I think that that's just a known thing, though, that like people have no gauge on whether or not the thing they believe about a woman is true or based on anything, or if they just accepted it when somebody told them that they hated her. I think it's so hard because we're all sort of conditioned to hate women or dislike them or find them annoying, right? Like there is this inherent misogyny to our culture.

that it's really hard to combat. And I see content creators such as yourself and others, especially on Twitter, try to fact check these narratives in real time or try to make YouTube videos and TikToks and Instagram Reels, like correcting some of this content and they're just shouted down. And especially that style of content, it doesn't perform well in the algorithm. You're not gonna be able to monetize it for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's sort of this labor of love, but it gets suppressed

And meanwhile, anti-feminist content is repackaged endlessly and monetized across platforms. It all feels like such a losing battle sometimes. Yeah, I sometimes say that when I make a video kind of like taking up for a woman during a redemption campaign against her abusive ex or whatever, I say that I am shoveling during a snowstorm.

Like, I know that I'm not actually going to change what the overwhelming dominant narrative is, but I do know that in the middle of the Depp versus Heard defamation trial in 2022, I watched videos by Princess Weeks and by Leija Miller where they took the stance of supporting and defending Amber Heard in the middle of everything, at the time when that was, like,

such a controversial opinion to be making. - In reality, everyone still thinks women are lying all the time and they never stopped for a second. - But I am feeling some kind of way about the way that Heard is being inhumanely attacked

every day on a global scale. And there are so many people who I noticed were positively covering Amber at that time. You were one of them, Kat Tenbarge was one of them, Michael Hobbs was one of them, and those are people who I have, like, such permanent goodwill towards just in, like, the rest of anything else that I see that they've done, because I'm like, "Oh, I trust that we were concerned about the same things when it was very obvious that this was a thing to be concerned about."

So I think even though there is, like, we are fighting against the algorithm, but also I do think that there are enough creators who have amassed audiences that care about that, that, like, it's almost a matter of linking together and, like, sending people to videos that you know are good and trying to encourage people not to just watch whatever comes across the algorithm.

I just, I hope that more people, especially people that consider themselves liberals or progressives or just not super right-wing anti-women can stop and think about why am I consuming this content? And that's not to say that you have to like stand these rich celebrity women or love them or support them. You can absolutely critique them for all of the other evil shit that they've done while recognizing that there is this misogyny slop ecosystem that preys on your attention, that it

The goal is to basically do audience capture for the right and be smarter about your own media consumption and be smarter about feeding into these narratives and hopping on the train. That's how mainstream this stuff becomes. And you need people, like you said, to just take a beat and be like, wait a minute.

Let's not go down this road because this is a really dark road. And ultimately it leads to people like Holocaust deniers, extreme right-wing people. That's who ends up with the audience growth at the end of the... And we understand that with men. We understand how MMA content or other sort of like bro comedian podcasters, we understand that pipeline. But

This is the pipeline for women. And I feel like it's just not being talked about. I do think that like the misogyny gossip slop like that is that is exactly it's it's it's the lady version of the alt-right pipeline. Well, thank you for the work that you've done to get people out of it.

Thank you. Such a fan. Please, everyone, subscribe to Ofidoki on YouTube. I'll put the link down in the description. And Ofi, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome. All right. That's it for the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.co for all the best tech and online culture news three to four times a week.

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