What is ‘SwiftTok’? Inside Taylor Swift’s Rabid TikTok Fanbase

Taylor Swift is as a lot a pressure on TikTok as she is in music. The singer’s model and relevance has solely expanded throughout her almost two-decade lengthy profession, and what units her aside from many different artists (although actually not all) is her uber-devoted fanbase—Swifties. Over the previous few years, Swifties have been cultivating a raucous ecosystem on TikTok, “SwiftTok.” Users dedicate themselves to her music dialogue and, extra generally, conspiracy theories about her.

What is SwiftTok?

Much like BookTok for bookreaders and CleanTok for many who love to scrub (or watch different folks clear), SwiftTok is a neighborhood on TikTok for Swift followers and Swift content material. Participating Swifties might discover themselves rating a few of her songs, reviewing her albums, or displaying off their vinyls. On the floor, SwiftTok appears like a typical neighborhood of impassioned followers, however diving into deeper will reveal a devoted collective that’s hellbent on dissecting each phrase out of the singer’s mouth to achieve perception on her upcoming tasks.

An intensifying “stan culture” has helped bolster the fanbases of common musicians all over the place, there’s a fundamental distinction that separated Taylor Swift (and SwiftTok) from her contemporaries. Other trendy, common musicians don’t seem to make the identical impression on TikTok that Swift does—there’s no EilishTok or TheWeekndTok. Taylor herself will generally reply to trending movies to encourage followers. While among the content material on SwiftTok is typical music fan fodder, among the most prevalent content material is conspiracy theories.

What is a Taylor Swift Easter egg?

Longtime followers of Taylor Swift don’t simply devour her music, movies, and red-carpet appearances—they dissect them with laboratory-grade precision. In a 2019 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Swift defined her love for leaving hidden messages—“Easter eggs,” to borrow a time period from movie—in several types of media to her followers. “I love to communicate through Easter eggs,” she defined. “I think the best messages are cryptic ones.” Swift’s egg-laying actually started along with her 2006 self-titled debut album—within the CD’s lyric booklet, Swift would capitalize completely different letters amongst the lyrics, which might spell out a secret message.

It wasn’t till 2017, although, when Swift started leaning in to visible Easter eggs in her music movies. “I really started doing this in music videos much more during the Reputation album. I wasn’t doing interviews so I still wanted a way to communicate with the fans” she stated. “I think the most Easter egg-y video of my career is ‘Look What You Made Me Do.’ Literally the whole video is just an Easter egg. There’s like thousands of Easter eggs. There are some that people still haven’t found.”

While discussions round Swift’s hints was completely current on social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter all through her profession, Swift’s enhance in posting Easter eggs, particularly at the start of the Lover period in spring 2019, dovetailed with the rise of TikTok in early 2020. As a end result, Swift—whether or not deliberately or not—was in a position to speed up the rabidity of her fanbase into conspiracy theorists intent on perpetuating her model and identify on the brief video app.

Conspiracy theories on SwiftTok usually contain in search of clues to imminent music releases on Swift’s merch or based mostly on her social media posts on a number of platforms. Recent variations of this pattern embody attempting to decode the meaning behind a charm bracelet added to Swift’s merch retailer and the way her upcoming tenth studio album Midnights might resurrect the long-forgotten “Tumblr aesthetic” from the early 2010’s. More intense and arguably invasive theorizing entails the belief that Swift is secretly part of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood—not so subtly codenamed “Gaylor”—and is just pretending to establish as straight.

What is Taylor Swift posting on TikTok?

After Swift introduced the upcoming launch of a brand new album, Midnights, on the 2022 Video Music Awards, SwiftTok instantly started formulating theories on every part from what artists may be featured on the album, to what the songs could be titled, to what style the document would dabble in. Just the crumb of an album title and launch date led to widespread hysteria inside the TikTok area of interest.

While Swift had been posting on her official TikTok account sporadically previous to the reveal of Midnights, the album announcement started Swift’s personal advertising and marketing technique on the platform. While a majority of the album’s specifics have been stored at nighttime, Swift started to disclose the unknown tune titles one after the other, every with a person TikTok posted at midnight each different weekday starting on September 21. These TikToks are part of a sequence that she has titled Midnights Mayhem With Me.

“I know that I have a habit of dropping cryptic clues and Easter eggs when giving you information about new music, and I am not here to deny that, but I am here to defy that,” Swift says in her first Midnights Mayhem With Me TikTok.

What SwiftTok suffers from is a transparent case of affirmation bias. As customers proceed to imagine that every part Swift says and does is an Easter egg, theories on her music will proceed to run rampant. As SwiftTok throws each puzzle piece and thought-out concept on the wall, it’s clear that one thing, finally will stick. That one-in-a-million hunch that proved to be right emboldens SwiftTok to maintain digging additional and additional into the singer’s portfolio of current appearances and social media submit captions to search out another clues that would make them their subsequent “Eureka!” second.

It’s manipulative on Swift’s half and obsessive on SwiftTok’s half, however each events win: Swift is ready to preserve her followers engaged till the subsequent album/single/music video drops, and SwiftTok is ready to have some enjoyable taking part in detective. Swift has basically and ingeniously automated promoting to her loyal fanbase, as a result of they’re primarily promoting for her.