There Are No Girls on the Internet - A trip down Myspace memory lane

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00:00:34.940 I survived nine months in captivity,

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00:01:06.620 Hey, everybody. 1.00

00:01:07.740 I am excited to announce that There Are No Girls on the Internet

00:01:10.220 will be back with a brand new season on May 16th.

00:01:13.600 And, and even more exciting news,

00:01:16.140 There Are No Girls on the Internet is a finalist for a Shorty Award

00:01:18.960 for Best Technology in Science podcast.

00:01:21.540 And y'all, I am so thrilled about it.

00:01:24.500 So, can you do me a huge favor and vote for us to win?

00:01:27.860 Just go to tangoti.com slash vote, or use the link in our show description.

00:01:32.480 It only takes a moment, I promise, and you can vote every day until April 26th.

00:01:37.240 Just go to tangoti.com slash vote.

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00:01:45.360 It would really mean a lot to me.

00:01:46.520 There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unblossed Creative.

00:01:59.180 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:02:04.680 So if you've been listening to There Are No Girls on the Internet for a while,

00:02:07.780 then you probably know that I have been on the Internet for a very long time.

00:02:11.460 And I joined the podcast Main Accounts, the story of MySpace,

00:02:14.840 to talk about the early days of one of my favorite ever social media platforms.

00:02:19.320 You guessed it, MySpace.

00:02:21.040 And why it was such a huge part of my online upbringing and development.

00:02:24.940 And it was really fun to take a nostalgic, sometimes cringey, digital walk down memory lane.

00:02:30.700 So take a listen, and don't forget to vote for us to win a Shorty Award.

00:02:37.500 This is an iHeart original.

00:02:39.780 if the beginning of tila tequila being on my radar as this like you know my space influencer

00:02:48.520 for being a queer woman of color if that was like the promise of the internet the day that i saw 1.00

00:02:55.040 that image of her in my hometown in dc doing a nazi salute at a restaurant with a bunch of alt

00:03:00.120 right dirt bags that was the nail in the coffin and so i feel like that moment for me really

00:03:05.440 crystallized where we started and unfortunately where we wound up. I'm Joanne McNeil and this is

00:03:11.900 Main Accounts, the story of MySpace. Episode three, MySpace Famous.

00:03:22.580 In this episode, we're going to discuss how MySpace, like reality TV, became a vehicle for

00:03:30.200 celebrity. The people who became famous through the platform gave way to the culture of influencers.

00:03:37.820 MySpace felt like a party.

00:03:42.320 I've heard a few people make this comparison when I've talked about the platform with them recently.

00:03:48.940 Julia Angwin said it in the first episode of our series.

00:03:52.960 MySpace was definitely a party atmosphere.

00:03:57.240 And my friend Dorothy Santos said it too.

00:04:00.200 when we were reminiscing about it the other day.

00:04:02.820 So I wasn't really seeing MySpace as a professional platform.

00:04:06.320 I saw it as this kind of digital party that just would, I could pop in any time.

00:04:12.540 Well, what's something people usually want to know about a party before they show up?

00:04:18.600 Who is going to be there?

00:04:20.900 The answer was Tila Tequila.

00:04:26.040 What's up, everybody? It's your girl, Miss Tila, also known as Tila Tequila.

00:04:29.520 Tila was the party. Before MySpace, Tila was a model in Playboy and car shows. In 2003, she appeared on Surviving Nugent, a reality show on VH1 hosted by Ted Nugent on his Texas ranch. 0.99

00:04:47.120 My ranch.

00:04:48.540 I can't handle this.

00:04:49.960 My rules.

00:04:50.760 See you a little lazy. 1.00

00:04:52.480 But it was social media that made Tila famous.

00:04:56.440 The very first MySpace kind of influencer celebrity that I was very, very interested in and like she was on my top eight and it was this person, Tila Tequila.

00:05:07.920 When I think about like who was the first MySpace big account, it was her. 0.99

00:05:13.120 That's Bridget Todd, host of the podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. 0.90

00:05:18.040 On MySpace way back when, Bridget was one of Tila's hundreds of thousands of fans.

00:05:23.720 One of the notable things about her is that she was openly queer.

00:05:28.420 And, you know, I'm queer and she's a person of color.

00:05:30.940 I'm a person of color.

00:05:32.120 And I remember thinking like, wow, how cool, like this famous person of color, you know, has a platform around the fact that she's queer.

00:05:40.960 Thiela, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, was no heiress like Paris Hilton. 0.95

00:05:47.260 Her parents didn't have a lot of money. 1.00

00:05:49.480 She had to hustle to get her name out in the world. 0.86

00:05:52.680 The internet was part of that hustle.

00:05:55.420 I have an addiction.

00:05:57.040 My therapist, yes, I have a therapist.

00:05:59.040 I do get help.

00:05:59.960 Okay.

00:06:02.540 So my therapist says that I have a highly addictive personality.

00:06:06.620 And, you know, I do.

00:06:09.480 So it's, I'm addicted to the internet.

00:06:13.040 That's why I'm always tweeting.

00:06:13.980 I'm online, I'm trying to get fans.

00:06:15.720 I do this, do that.

00:06:17.240 And I'm addicted to shopping. 0.99

00:06:20.120 I'm addicted to sex. 0.96

00:06:21.400 You know, whatever. 0.93

00:06:24.160 This is how people came to know Tila Tequila.

00:06:28.840 She sent friend requests to hundreds and hundreds of people. 0.68

00:06:34.220 First, she did this on Friendster.

00:06:36.780 And Tila ran into some trouble doing this because Friendster, compared to MySpace, did not feel like a party.

00:06:48.560 Friendster was pretty rigid about rules.

00:06:51.400 In the summer of 2003, Friendster started cracking down on accounts known as fakesters.

00:07:00.740 Accounts that represented anything other than a user's real identity.

00:07:06.560 So you might have seen a Marilyn Monroe fakester.

00:07:10.660 That was a user impersonating Marilyn Monroe on Friendster.

00:07:14.980 Or you might have come across a snowy owl fakester.

00:07:19.000 And people obsessed with birdwatching would have friended that account.

00:07:26.800 The fakesters became sort of like community pages.

00:07:31.420 But Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams hated them.

00:07:35.640 He hired a bunch of moderators to remove them all. 0.98

00:07:42.560 A group of these outlaw fakesters came together

00:07:46.600 and wrote an open letter protesting Friendster's policy. 0.89

00:07:51.640 The ringleader was someone who went by Roy Batty on Friendster.

00:07:56.200 You know, like the Replicate in Blade Runner?

00:07:59.260 The corporate masters at Friendster should be thrilled

00:08:02.540 that they have such a vibrant online community as they now have on their hands.

00:08:08.000 What they forget is that a living community, by definition, has a life of its own.

00:08:14.840 Deleting the photos and or entire accounts of fakesters is going to rudely, terribly

00:08:21.720 backfire against the management of this site, and will ultimately take the entire community,

00:08:27.560 real or parodied, down with it.

00:08:31.260 The rumblings of dissent are already growing, getting louder by the minute.

00:08:35.780 If Friendster wants to see all of the goodwill and excellent word of mouth that is generated,

00:08:40.460 down in scorching, smoking, very public flames. Then they can go right ahead with their little

00:08:47.080 extermination campaign. The internet is a big place and we can easily take our party

00:08:53.060 somewhere else. To a site where we are not only tolerated, but enthusiastically embraced.

00:09:02.040 You know where they took that party.

00:09:06.200 MySpace. 1.00

00:09:08.340 I mean, of course the fakesters went to MySpace.

00:09:13.960 Friendster was so aggressive about kicking out fakesters

00:09:17.340 that it impacted people using their real identities on the platform too. 0.93

00:09:22.620 This happened to Tila Tequila. 1.00

00:09:25.100 She kept getting kicked off Friendster for adding too many friends.

00:09:29.980 Tila knew about MySpace because Tom Anderson had been an offline acquaintance.

00:09:36.040 He sent her a bunch of invites to join MySpace, but she declined.

00:09:40.440 It wasn't cool in Tila's mind.

00:09:42.960 MySpace wasn't a party yet.

00:09:45.300 The site had just launched, and no one was really on MySpace yet,

00:09:49.540 except for eUniverse staff and their immediate friends.

00:09:54.200 Still, it was a hassle dealing with Friendster mods.

00:09:57.840 Each time Tila's account was deleted from Friendster,

00:10:01.120 she'd have to rebuild her list of friends manually,

00:10:04.400 add all of her friends again.

00:10:06.840 And in September 2003,

00:10:09.420 when Tila got kicked off Friendster for the fifth time,

00:10:12.840 she'd had enough.

00:10:14.800 Tila finally took Tom up on his offer.

00:10:19.120 And Tila didn't just sign up for MySpace.

00:10:22.540 She invited everyone she knew on Friendster

00:10:25.960 to join her there.

00:10:27.740 At this point,

00:10:28.880 after months of strategies

00:10:30.560 to evade Friendster mods,

00:10:33.220 she had tens of thousands

00:10:35.000 of friends on Friendster.

00:10:38.160 MySpace exploded

00:10:39.460 with thousands of new users.

00:10:42.240 By 2006,

00:10:44.240 Tila had over a million

00:10:45.860 MySpace friends.

00:10:48.320 It's possible MySpace

00:10:50.260 never would have taken off

00:10:51.840 without Tila.

00:10:53.340 If she had declined

00:10:54.460 Tom's invitation,

00:10:55.960 social media history might have gone another way.

00:10:59.660 And without MySpace,

00:11:01.280 we probably never would have heard about Tila Tequila.

00:11:05.260 Tila was a new kind of star,

00:11:07.220 someone who became famous because of the internet.

00:11:10.740 Sure, on MySpace, you called each other friends,

00:11:13.680 but what Tila and many other internet celebrities

00:11:16.420 were collecting were really just fans.

00:11:20.040 Something about her really represents

00:11:21.440 the sort of duality of all of our internet experiences.

00:11:25.060 And what happened next in Tilo's career feels representative of how social media itself has changed.

00:11:32.780 I think about her all the time.

00:11:34.340 It's just such an interesting case study for what social media and the Internet can do to people.

00:11:40.220 On the one hand, it can be this, like, fabulous way to connect and to, like, see yourself and be seen and build a platform around that.

00:11:47.960 On the other hand, it can be so dark.

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00:12:36.300 That's 844-844-iHeart. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your

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00:13:36.800 See you between the pages.

00:13:37.980 you had these people that kind of became known from myspace and from this particular scene and

00:13:49.400 had a very like definitive aesthetic and and sort of cults around them that's taylor lorenz

00:13:56.360 a technology reporter at the washington post those people today would be just regular influencers

00:14:02.680 what actually is an influencer when we use that word what what are we talking about i think of it

00:14:11.740 as somebody who creates content and sort of monetizes that content through social platforms

00:14:18.820 or builds an audience through social platforms they're almost independent media companies where

00:14:24.020 there are people that have a lot of times developed an audience for around their own personality but

00:14:30.060 It can also be around a certain interest or style or whatever.

00:14:34.000 And then they monetize that online audience.

00:14:36.940 Basically, I guess someone who builds and then monetizes an online audience.

00:14:41.640 Taylor makes an interesting distinction.

00:14:44.160 People figured out how to get famous on MySpace.

00:14:47.540 But it wasn't exactly a business.

00:14:52.120 Not like what you see with internet celebrities on Twitch or YouTube or Instagram these days.

00:14:58.360 my space was pretty like embedded in sort of the music industry not quite the way tiktok is now but

00:15:05.520 you know music was a strong culture of my space and so you had a lot of people growing audiences

00:15:11.140 on the platform and using that to get a record deal you know or sell out shows or promote

00:15:15.960 themselves and then you kind of had these more like individual figures that i think seem like

00:15:22.900 kind of like party type of people.

00:15:25.740 And then you, of course, had celebrities using it as well,

00:15:28.900 like, you know, Katy Perry, again,

00:15:32.260 because it was sort of like music adjacent.

00:15:34.900 And Jeffree Star started in music.

00:15:37.480 Jeffree Star, like Tila Tequila,

00:15:40.960 was another larger-than-life MySpace superstar.

00:15:45.500 He had an iconic look,

00:15:47.260 Mac makeup, hot pink hair,

00:15:49.660 A look that you could instantly identify in a thumbnail profile picture.

00:15:55.900 He got famous for creating drama and feuding with other MySpace celebrities.

00:16:01.740 But to be honest, Jeffree Star's deal, I don't get it.

00:16:06.560 Hello?

00:16:07.840 Hey God, it's Jeffree Star. 1.00

00:16:10.400 Yeah, well if anyone fucks with me, they're gonna die. 0.99

00:16:14.700 Okay, love you too, bye. 0.99

00:16:16.220 Why does someone follow a person like Jeffree Star? Like what do the users who follow the page

00:16:23.960 of a celebrity on MySpace get from that interaction? Well, a lot of it was like aspiration

00:16:30.960 around kind of like emo culture or like aesthetics. It was like people with a certain

00:16:37.300 aesthetic and you would follow these people because they were like a lot of modern day

00:16:41.800 influencers or content creators, they were kind of aspirational figures for that era where they

00:16:48.260 were kind of leading this cool party girl lifestyle, or they had like, you know, awesome

00:16:52.820 tattoos and makeup and this aesthetic that people really gravitated to. On MySpace, people could

00:17:00.140 advertise themselves. Users would post comments like, thanks for the ad, when someone added them

00:17:07.980 as friends. The visibility was, in a way, its own reward. Jeffree Star could get gigs for his band

00:17:16.960 through Myspace. Tila Tequila found modeling and acting opportunities through it. But this happened

00:17:24.160 informally. And mind you, most people on Myspace were not trying to be Tila or Jeffree.

00:17:31.120 Myspace was never really, like, pushing you to, like, become a creator. You mostly just, like,

00:17:36.820 looked at other people's pages. The stakes were so low for the average user and nothing on the

00:17:42.860 internet feels that way now. And if you did become famous on MySpace, it wasn't entirely clear what

00:17:49.840 that would even bring you. I never had a strategy because there was no such thing as being an

00:17:55.520 influencer back then. So like I literally was just posting my life and I guess people enjoyed it. So

00:18:01.940 then I kind of built a following. That's Hannah Beth. She wasn't an influencer, but she was

00:18:08.920 definitely MySpace famous. I never had like a plan where I was like, oh yeah, like I'm going to do

00:18:13.880 this. And like, that's how I'm going to get followers. I literally just did it because I was

00:18:16.440 having fun. And then a following grew from that. And people seem to enjoy to watch me and my friends

00:18:22.920 kind of live our lives. Hannah Beth was in high school in Southern California, where she ran in 0.99

00:18:29.460 similar circles with Jeffree Star. They were in each other's top eight. Hannah Beth had an

00:18:35.300 offbeat fashion sense, which came through in the pictures she posted to MySpace.

00:18:40.880 When I first started on MySpace when I was probably around 15 or so, I was very into

00:18:46.100 kind of like a vintage punk look. I was listening to a lot of late 70s punk bands.

00:18:52.520 I cut my hair really short. And I just like, it was kind of like a vintage punk goth look

00:18:58.220 that I was going with,

00:18:59.340 but I'd wear all these wild vintage clothing,

00:19:01.860 like a vintage wedding dress or something crazy.

00:19:04.280 Hundreds of thousands of people visited her page

00:19:07.480 just to look at her.

00:19:09.920 And then it kind of went from that to like,

00:19:12.340 as I was getting older and kind of finding who I was,

00:19:15.340 the whole kind of like scene kid thing was starting.

00:19:18.260 And I had made friends with a few other girls

00:19:20.620 that were also kind of like MySpace people.

00:19:23.560 And I guess we started the whole kind of scene girl

00:19:27.240 look or vibe. And then that was just, that took off. I mean, I like, like look at the photos now

00:19:34.540 and like, I feel like it looks ridiculous, but like back then, like, I don't know, we thought

00:19:38.700 we looked like so cool. MySpace became a huge part of Hannah Beth's daily life. She even traveled

00:19:45.180 across the country to meet friends she met on MySpace. I think I was like 15 or 16. I met this

00:19:51.700 girl who lives in Minnesota and like she had messaged me because I always wore like these like

00:19:57.920 glue and extensions because that was a big thing back then which was horrible for your hair and

00:20:03.420 she was like yeah look I'd love it if you did my extensions and I was like yeah for sure so my dad

00:20:08.660 like got me a ticket to Minnesota we got to meet this random girl I ended up staying with her for

00:20:13.280 like a week or like maybe two weeks even and I made all of these friends in Minnesota I like met

00:20:18.600 someone else that I knew from Myspace and it was like such a fun and awesome time. I feel like

00:20:22.920 Myspace could kind of bring you together like that. Like I feel like now there's maybe like

00:20:26.880 more danger going on on the internet but back then maybe because it was so new but I'm sure

00:20:31.460 there was danger there as well. I don't know everyone was kind of like in this scene and

00:20:35.440 everyone kind of knew everyone or there was just some kind of like you felt more safe just meeting

00:20:40.200 up with random people. Part of what drew her to connect to people online even travel across the

00:20:46.020 country to meet people was that her offline life could be rough. On MySpace, Hannah Bath was

00:20:55.140 glamorous, a scene queen. At her high school, people made fun of her for dressing the way she 0.99

00:21:02.220 did. At that time in my life, I was like getting bullied really bad. I was dealing with like

00:21:08.440 self-harm and I was just like very depressed and all of that. And I was very open about all of my

00:21:15.140 struggles through like my blogging and my writing. So the people I was connecting with knew like the

00:21:20.440 real me. And I feel like that's why I was so drawn to it. I just started like posting like things I

00:21:25.960 liked and then people like, like that as well. And I love being able to like express my fashion

00:21:30.460 through MySpace because I feel like I got bullied a lot for like how I looked in my style. And then

00:21:36.060 on MySpace, people like loved how I look, looked up to me and like loved my style. So it was like

00:21:41.740 a whole different thing for me because I was like, I'm such a loser at school. And then when I'm like

00:21:47.280 online, I was becoming this like MySpace girl. I don't know. It was just, it was a trip.

00:21:53.820 With the attention she garnered from MySpace, Hannah Beth built a career. First as a blogger

00:22:00.260 with BuzzNet and later working in fashion, including a spot on the reality TV show House

00:22:06.000 of DVF, a competition to become a brand ambassador for Diane von Furstenberg. Hannah Beth won.

00:22:13.300 Hannah Beth was never Kardashian-style famous, but people paid attention to her in a way that

00:22:19.300 didn't really happen to ordinary people before the internet. There were blogs dedicated to

00:22:24.500 MySpace stars, and these people were kind of covered in other internet

00:22:29.160 like sub-communities and forums, places like Sticky Drama.

00:22:35.040 But for other MySpace celebrities, the internet was a double-edged sword.

00:22:40.240 They faced harassment online, where they built their fate.

00:22:45.280 People would set up blogs about MySpace stars,

00:22:48.780 and they would sort of speculate on different things.

00:22:50.920 They would try and find information on these people.

00:22:53.720 And a lot of the comment section would be other fans, and they would kind of all...

00:22:58.140 Sometimes it was really positive.

00:22:59.880 And then obviously some of it turned extremely dark

00:23:02.420 where you had kind of the worst of internet comment culture

00:23:06.380 attacking these people.

00:23:08.600 And they had stalkers and, you know, harassment and safety problems.

00:23:14.300 Unlike movie stars, the MySpace famous

00:23:17.180 probably didn't have the money to hire bodyguards.

00:23:20.980 They didn't have representation, agents, managers

00:23:24.380 invested in their career longevity.

00:23:27.460 and it all came at the cost of privacy.

00:23:30.820 All of that stuff was so niche and so misunderstood at the time.

00:23:35.900 Like, now we have this concept of online safety.

00:23:38.940 There wasn't that in the 2000s.

00:23:41.080 So, you know, these, a lot of women were kind of, like, building audiences,

00:23:46.620 getting micro fame, and had this, like, dedicated group of people on the internet

00:23:53.000 that was obsessed with them.

00:23:55.080 but there wasn't like there weren't really like guardrails around any of it they were almost like

00:24:01.260 too accessible to their fandoms like now there's this like you think of influencers as celebrities

00:24:07.740 so you you kind of almost respect them a little bit more whereas back then I think MySpace stars

00:24:13.660 felt almost like too much like like they were too kind of on the level of normal people almost and

00:24:21.880 And so, like, average people just felt entitled to be horrible to them.

00:24:27.980 The visibility that users like Tila Tequila could attain on MySpace was like a hyper-popularity.

00:24:35.920 Think the most popular kid at high school times a thousand.

00:24:42.480 And in some ways, it could be more invasive than a traditional celebrity experience.

00:24:47.660 because myspace like every social network was designed for looking at others surveilling others

00:24:56.440 people clicked on other people's profiles and assessed them from a distance

00:25:01.480 and there was no blueprint for it like there was no understanding of of online fame at that point

00:25:09.800 so people like people i think had less boundaries and then also um you know the mid-2000s was kind

00:25:16.920 of like peak uh reality fame and and kind of like this really toxic um type of celebrity like that

00:25:25.980 was like that whole britney paris lindsey era where it was like this culture of excess 1.00

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00:26:25.000 When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived,

00:26:31.880 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

00:26:37.380 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.

00:26:40.980 I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, 0.96

00:26:46.420 shut up, don't say anything.

00:26:49.180 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. 0.98

00:26:53.580 I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.

00:26:58.060 I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.

00:27:05.140 They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

00:27:09.580 But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

00:27:13.020 They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

00:27:16.660 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:27:26.280 No other form of entertainment defines the arts like reality television.

00:27:36.120 Survivor and Big Brother both debuted in 2000.

00:27:40.520 And shows like The Bachelor, The Osbournes, and American Idol arrived shortly after.

00:27:47.540 These programs could be made cheaply.

00:27:50.140 New software had just made it easier to edit down large quantities of video footage.

00:27:56.160 Producers didn't have to hire professional actors or screenwriters.

00:28:00.000 It's no coincidence that the reality TV boom

00:28:04.820 Happened while the Screen Actors Guild

00:28:07.580 And later the Writers Guild

00:28:09.460 Were negotiating streaming royalties

00:28:12.360 With reality TV

00:28:14.420 Celebrities projected the illusion of living ordinary lives

00:28:18.620 While ordinary people projected the illusion of celebrity

00:28:23.320 It was a lot like the immediacy and intimacy

00:28:27.720 that early online celebrities like Tila Tequila

00:28:30.760 offered their friends on MySpace.

00:28:33.560 Tom Anderson even said in an interview once,

00:28:36.700 he thought of MySpace as the reality TV of the internet.

00:28:41.460 It felt inevitable then 0.99

00:28:43.380 that Tila Tequila would leverage her online popularity 1.00

00:28:46.540 with a reality show of her own.

00:28:49.600 In 2007, A Shot at Love debuted. 0.79

00:28:52.560 Tila!

00:28:53.460 Tila Tequila began her quest for love.

00:28:56.600 I'm a bisexual.

00:28:57.720 It was the first reality dating show featuring a bisexual person.

00:29:08.300 She got a reality show on MTV called Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. 0.99

00:29:13.560 And the conceit was that, you know, she's a queer girl looking for love and that the house was going to be filled with both women and men because she's queer.

00:29:21.940 Me and my friends, like my queer circle of friends,

00:29:25.140 when I say that we watched this show religiously,

00:29:27.200 like we had parties,

00:29:29.040 like we thought it was so earnest.

00:29:30.680 It was one of MTV's biggest releases that year

00:29:33.880 and ran for a couple seasons.

00:29:36.820 Tila appeared to be doing really well in the late aughts.

00:29:40.600 She made music and published a book.

00:29:43.820 And she made some savvy business decisions 0.92

00:29:46.540 to monetize her fame. 0.95

00:29:48.480 working with joe francis he of the girls gone wild franchise she set up a website called 0.95

00:29:56.800 tila's hotspot where she had a blog and webcam and basically posted the kind of content she had

00:30:03.700 on myspace but on a website of her own tila even appeared to be settling down in 2009 she was

00:30:11.460 engaged to casey johnson the johnson and johnson heiress but then tragedy struck

00:30:17.340 she was young beautiful and an heiress to an empire now Casey Johnson's sudden death has many

00:30:25.320 asking how and why at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 was very hard for me and as

00:30:37.500 you can tell during those times I made lots of headlines of meltdowns and you know that was my

00:30:42.840 a way of like, when you lose someone, and I didn't know how to cope. Casey died of diabetes

00:30:49.020 complications. It was only a month after they announced their engagement. Things went downhill

00:30:54.500 from there. In 2012, Tila was hospitalized after a drug overdose and a brain aneurysm.

00:31:04.000 It had been a suicide attempt. In 2015, Tila prepared a comeback and joined the cast of

00:31:11.280 Celebrity Big Brother, then post-resurface of Tila two years earlier in 2013, defending

00:31:18.820 Hitler on her blog and posing a Nazi regalia, she was kicked out of the house because of

00:31:24.600 it.

00:31:25.520 Tila apologized.

00:31:27.680 Tila called it a terrible mistake in a statement posted to social media.

00:31:33.440 She mentioned her suicide attempt and said she suffered from severe depression and addiction.

00:31:39.460 In her words,

00:31:41.240 I felt worthless and unloved as that pain continued to grow,

00:31:45.200 causing me to further spiral out of control.

00:31:49.000 And then she reiterated that she is

00:31:51.460 absolutely 100% not a Nazi supporter.

00:31:57.680 Tila's apology sounded heartfelt, and maybe it was.

00:32:01.700 But two months later,

00:32:04.300 Tila posted a photo of her baby daughter

00:32:06.560 with a Hitler mustache.

00:32:09.560 And for Bridget, who had followed Tila's career 0.55

00:32:12.880 for over a decade by that point,

00:32:15.480 it was heartbreaking.

00:32:17.520 And I remember watching her trajectory

00:32:21.200 from being this person that I loved

00:32:23.840 and really admired as like a queer woman of color,

00:32:26.720 watching her go from someone who,

00:32:28.780 like that was her thing in my mind

00:32:30.860 to the way that now she basically was like 1.00

00:32:33.480 radicalized on the internet 0.99

00:32:36.080 and via the alt-right.

00:32:37.960 In 2016,

00:32:40.020 Tila was photographed

00:32:40.800 giving a Nazi salute

00:32:42.220 at a conference

00:32:43.140 with white nationalists

00:32:44.500 in Washington, D.C.

00:32:46.320 If the beginning

00:32:47.400 of Tila Tequila

00:32:48.580 being on my radar

00:32:49.460 as this, like,

00:32:50.620 MySpace influencer

00:32:51.940 for being a queer woman of color,

00:32:54.100 if that was, like,

00:32:55.680 the promise of the internet,

00:32:57.520 the day that I saw

00:32:58.460 that image of her

00:32:59.260 in my hometown in D.C.

00:33:00.980 doing a Nazi salute

00:33:01.980 at a restaurant

00:33:02.560 with a bunch of

00:33:03.280 alt-right dirtbags,

00:33:04.740 that was the nail

00:33:05.800 in the coffin. And so I feel like that moment for me really crystallized where we started and

00:33:11.160 unfortunately where we wound up. But those early days were so full of promise. And then that

00:33:16.220 picture is like burned in my mind of because of platforms like MySpace, this was the person who

00:33:22.280 allowed me to see part of myself that I was still getting comfortable with. And then where we wound

00:33:27.580 up was so dark and so sad and so heavy. For others, fame on MySpace came as easily as it

00:33:37.460 went. You had people like Tila Tequila go on to become a reality star because that was the only 0.99

00:33:43.440 kind of attainable access to quote unquote like mainstream fame in the 2000s was like reality

00:33:49.640 shows. But even then, like going on a reality show doesn't mean that you yourself profit very much.

00:33:56.660 So I think all the people from that era kind of fell off and never really were able to capture the true value of the brand that they built back then.

00:34:05.140 A few MySpace celebrities dropped out of the public eye by choice, including Hannah Beth.

00:34:12.060 I think just like as I got older, I just started to enjoy like having like my privacy a bit more now.

00:34:17.800 And I just don't love social media like how I used to love it.

00:34:20.820 So it's just like it's not one of my top priorities.

00:34:23.000 is. But for others who became famous on MySpace, those years were less than idyllic. It was a

00:34:30.200 horrible time to be famous. It was so toxic and so bad. Tabloid culture ruled. It was really

00:34:36.600 playing out on the internet in small scale through blogs. And so I think a lot of MySpace stars just

00:34:44.240 kind of got chewed up by that system. And you see them now into crystal healing, or they've

00:34:51.220 totally reinvented themselves or they're like super offline. Or you have people like Jeffrey

00:34:56.060 who just leaned 150% into it and kind of became this like internet villain because he literally

00:35:03.720 thrived in that type of toxicity. The blowback to visibility online that Taylor describes

00:35:10.140 wasn't only impacting people like Tila with hundreds of thousands of friends on social media.

00:35:16.280 People with small followings and relatively ordinary lives faced harassment and bullying on a social network that had quickly become the center of their social life.

00:35:29.860 More on this in the next episode of Main Accounts.

00:35:34.780 Thanks for listening to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace, an iHeart original podcast.

00:35:40.700 main accounts the story of myspace is written and hosted by me joanne mcneil editing and sound

00:35:48.540 design by mike coscarelli and mary do original music by elise mccoy mixing and mastering by josh

00:35:56.480 fisher research and fact checking by austin thompson jocelyn sears and marissa brown show

00:36:03.340 logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Special thanks to Ryan Murdoch, Grace Fuse, and Bahid Frazier.

00:36:10.700 Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip. Our senior producer is Mike Coscarelli. And our

00:36:16.020 executive producer is Jason English. If you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and review

00:36:21.380 on your favorite podcast platform. Sadly, my MySpace page is no longer around, but you can

00:36:27.900 find me on twitter at joe mick let us hear your myspace story and check out my book lurking

00:36:35.200 main accounts the story of myspace is a production of iheart podcasts

00:36:40.960 this is an iheart podcast guaranteed human

There Are No Girls on the Internet - April 18, 2023

A trip down Myspace memory lane

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Transcript