There Are No Girls on the Internet - Nicki Minaj, WTF are you doing？

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00:00:50.080 I survived nine months in captivity,

00:00:53.240 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

00:00:58.760 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.

00:01:02.380 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

00:01:09.920 These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

00:01:13.740 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:21.360 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

00:01:26.400 Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride

00:01:32.380 and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting

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00:01:51.860 Hey, y'all. Just a quick heads up. This episode contains mentions of rape.

00:01:56.400 There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

00:02:08.280 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:02:14.100 So we spent the last year having conversations about the harm that myths and disinformation can cause in our communities.

00:02:20.320 And I always like to keep those conversations really centered around institutions.

00:02:24.180 because, as we know, the spread of false claims online is systemic.

00:02:28.780 It isn't usually about one person.

00:02:31.140 It's usually about a system that empowers that person to spread dangerous lies and amplify them.

00:02:36.840 But sometimes one person really does need to be called out.

00:02:41.760 Can you guess who it is?

00:02:43.240 Let's talk about Nicki Minaj.

00:02:45.320 So here's what's going on. 0.87

00:02:46.760 This week, fans asked Nicki Minaj why she wasn't going to the Met Gala.

00:02:51.040 And she tweeted that she wasn't going because the Met Gala required vaccinations from COVID.

00:02:55.520 She tweeted,

00:02:56.540 If I get vaccinated, it won't be for the Met.

00:02:59.120 It'll be once I feel I've done enough research.

00:03:01.360 I'm working on that now.

00:03:02.880 In the meantime, my loves, be safe.

00:03:04.920 Wear the mask with two strings that grip your head and face.

00:03:07.760 Now, when folks on Twitter started pushing back, she tweeted,

00:03:10.320 My cousin in Trinidad won't get the vaccine because his friend got it and became impotent. 0.93

00:03:15.500 His testicles became swollen.

00:03:16.860 His friend was weeks away from getting married, and now the girl called off the wedding. 0.85

00:03:21.500 So just pray on it and make sure that you're comfortable with your decision, not bullied.

00:03:25.820 This is when all hell broke loose.

00:03:28.680 Trinidad's health minister even had to step in and say that this is not true and that

00:03:32.440 there were no reports of impotence or swollen testicles after having had the COVID-19 vaccine.

00:03:37.960 It isn't even a known side effect.

00:03:39.780 And his response really reveals a big part about why disinformation is actually so dangerous.

00:03:44.880 At a time when COVID is impacting this community hard, their health minister had to take time from his research and work to respond to completely untrue claims that Nicki Minaj irresponsibly spread to her over 20 million followers.

00:03:58.760 Here's what he had to say in a press conference.

00:04:01.020 There has been no such reported either side effect or adverse event.

00:04:06.760 It wasted our time yesterday trying to track down because we take all these claims seriously.

00:04:13.880 Now, he's articulating one of the real costs of misinformation.

00:04:17.940 It takes up so much oxygen in the room.

00:04:20.540 It means that time spent that should be focusing on real threats that exist during a global pandemic has to be wasted and diverted to debunking lies and false claims.

00:04:30.400 Dr. Fauci even weighed in, saying, I'm not blaming her for anything, but she should be thinking twice about propagating information that really has no basis except as a one-off anecdote.

00:04:39.740 And that's not what science is all about.

00:04:41.780 So basically, as pretty much everybody learned in middle school,

00:04:44.760 if somebody tells you a story that starts with, 0.99

00:04:46.880 my cousin's friend, whatever you're about to hear is probably bullshit. 0.96

00:04:52.240 Nikki later went to Instagram to say that she was locked out of her Twitter account, 0.98

00:04:55.580 implying that it was because she was just asking questions about the vaccine.

00:04:59.760 But let's be real, she was not just asking questions.

00:05:03.280 And really pay attention to how expertly she obscured what she actually did on Twitter.

00:05:07.400 And it makes it seem like the powers that be are trying to silence her

00:05:11.040 for just asking innocent questions about the vaccine

00:05:13.820 when that's not what she was doing at all.

00:05:16.080 She was repeating a false claim 1.00

00:05:17.760 about the vaccine leading to swollen testicles 0.66

00:05:19.780 and impotence to 20 million people.

00:05:22.600 Repeating false claims and just asking questions

00:05:24.740 are two completely different things.

00:05:27.040 So we know that there are two big groups

00:05:28.800 who are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine

00:05:30.640 but haven't yet gotten it.

00:05:32.200 You've got your diehard anti-vaxxers

00:05:34.240 who are pretty much unlikely to ever be vaccinated

00:05:36.460 no matter what.

00:05:37.500 And people who are not necessarily

00:05:39.700 traditionally anti-vax, but maybe have questions or are just hesitant about the vaccine. And that

00:05:44.700 second group is who experts agree that we should be focusing on right now to encourage them to get

00:05:49.240 vaccinated because they're actually movable. So Nikki's tweets are really endangering that second

00:05:54.580 group because they're going to hear her completely untrue, now viral claim based on a one-off

00:05:59.920 anecdote about the vaccine side effects and think, hmm, maybe I shouldn't get this vaccine after all

00:06:04.940 if it's causing swollen balls and impotence.

00:06:07.540 And this is also where I think fan culture

00:06:09.560 can really play a part in propping up

00:06:11.460 and spreading misinformation.

00:06:12.980 Some of y'all may or may not know,

00:06:14.880 Nicki Minaj has a very intense fan base called The Barbs. 0.95

00:06:18.320 And for every Black woman scientist

00:06:20.060 and public health professional

00:06:21.100 who was responding to her COVID-19 tweets,

00:06:23.640 offering to walk her through the vaccine research,

00:06:26.080 and there were actually quite a few,

00:06:27.740 you know, our community really showed up

00:06:29.100 to call this sister in.

00:06:30.580 There were plenty of fans cheering Nicki on,

00:06:33.300 thanking her for, quote,

00:06:34.260 going against the establishment. Her tweets even won Nikki praise from known bad actors and

00:06:39.700 disinformation super spreaders like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. And you know when people like 1.00

00:06:44.940 Candace Owens are on your side, something is up. Like, it's time to rethink. And Nikki, for her

00:06:49.820 part, was really fanning the flames of all this on social media. She tweeted a jokey little poll

00:06:54.880 that asked people to rank which vaccine they liked better and offered to connect late night TV show

00:06:59.760 host, Jimmy Kimmel, with her cousin's friend for the right price. And this is almost why I didn't

00:07:05.400 want to talk about this at all. No, not just because I'm afraid of the barbs, but because

00:07:09.820 it turns into a spectacle. And that initial untrue claim, it's more and more powerful because

00:07:15.380 it just gets more and more engagement. But I actually suspect this is kind of what Nicki wants.

00:07:21.680 Because just a few days before Nicki made these tweets about the COVID vaccine,

00:07:25.740 Nicki Minaj's husband, Kenneth Petty, pled guilty to failure to register as a sex offender

00:07:30.600 after he moved from New York to California as a result of being convicted of first-degree

00:07:35.440 attempted rape in New York in April of 1995.

00:07:38.520 In this case, he pled guilty to the first-degree attempted rape charge and served four years

00:07:42.940 in a New York state prison.

00:07:44.340 His victim said that in 1994, Petty raped her at knife point when they were both 16.

00:07:49.380 Now, last month, his victim sued both Nicki Minaj and her husband, saying that she'd

00:07:54.660 had to move multiple times because both Nikki and her husband have been harassing her, trying to

00:07:59.540 force her to recant her account of the incident. So this actually gets pretty dark. The New York

00:08:04.040 Times has a really in-depth piece about what happened that you can read in the show description,

00:08:07.840 but the allegations in the suit are troubling and really damning, not just for her husband,

00:08:11.660 who was convicted of attempted rape, but also for Nikki, who the victim says offered her half a

00:08:16.520 million dollars if she recanted. She also says that Nikki offered to send a happy birthday video

00:08:21.000 to her teenage daughter, quote, as a bonus.

00:08:24.320 She also accuses Nikki of lying 1.00

00:08:26.180 to her millions of followers about the incident.

00:08:29.040 The whole thing just sounds really awful.

00:08:31.260 So it's pretty interesting that in a week

00:08:33.260 where big news is breaking

00:08:34.780 about Nikki's husband's guilty plea

00:08:36.460 in connection to his rape conviction,

00:08:38.460 that we're all talking about her tweets

00:08:40.100 about COVID misinformation.

00:08:42.000 And that's really the power of misinformation,

00:08:44.720 how it can be weaponized so easily and so effectively.

00:08:47.960 It spreads so quickly and can become so powerful that it's all anyone is talking about.

00:08:54.020 And what we should be talking about is all the people who will be harmed because they were misled by dangerous and irresponsible false claims.

00:09:17.960 of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

00:09:20.120 Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

00:09:22.200 Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

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00:09:47.960 I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive

00:09:57.100 what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. Every

00:10:03.120 week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled,

00:10:08.520 and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

00:10:13.720 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:10:22.100 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

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00:10:39.640 with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.

00:10:44.420 Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.

00:10:46.180 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:10:54.000 Hey, this is Hayes Davenport.

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There Are No Girls on the Internet - September 16, 2021

Nicki Minaj, WTF are you doing？

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