Parasocial Relationships Are Getting Out Of Hand
After a celebrity incident has real-life consequences, some people are wondering if people are falling further away from reality and the looming threat of Artificial Intelligence isn’t helping clear these concerns.
After the release of her song “Hiss,” Megan Thee Stallion was trending over every social media app as people were questioning who the song was aimed toward. The 29-year-old rapper from Houston, Texas released the song on Jan. 26 and in it, she makes remarks or “disses” toward unnamed individuals. Although the well-known rapper has not released any information regarding the unnamed individuals she refers to in the song, many people began to make their own assumptions based on Megan’s past with several rappers and their fanbases.
One of those assumptions led to the proclaimed “Queen of Rap,” Nicki Minaj to respond. Many fans speculated that a line in Megan’s “Hiss,” referred directly to the 41-year-old rapper regarding her family.
The line reads, “ These h**s don’t be mad at Megan / these h**s mad at Megan’s law.”
The line is in reference to the federal law, Megan’s Law enacted in 1996 Penal Code § 290 46, that mandates the California Department of Justice to notify the public about registered sex offenders. The federal law also authorizes local law enforcement to notify the public about registered sex offenders that pose a risk to public safety. The law originated from the brutal killing of 7-year-old Megan Kanka at the hands of a child molester who moved across the street from the Kanka’s home. Every state in the United States has some variation of Megan’s law.
Many assumed that the line was a diss to Nicki Minaj who is currently married to Kenneth “Kenny” Petty, a convicted sex offender who failed to register in California as a sex offender after moving to the state in 2019. Petty was sentenced to three-years probation, a year of house arrest, and was ordered to pay a fine of $55,000 in July 2022. Many also thought the line was a diss to Nicki Minaj’s brother, Jelani Miraj, who was convicted of predatory sexual assault and child endangerment in November 2017 for sexually-assaulting an 11-year-old girl. Miraj was ultimately sentenced to 25 years in prison for the crime.
Nicki Minaj went live on Instagram following the release of the song and began making jokes about Megan Thee Stallion, insulting the Houston rapper by telling her to “get up on her good foot,” referring to an incident where Megan had been shot in the foot by fellow musician Tory Lanez in December 2020, which as of August 2023, Lanez was convicted of doing. Minaj would later release a song titled “Big Foot” which was speculated to be a diss toward Megan Thee Stallion and alleging the rapper slept with people for music beats and faked being shot.
The entire situation, mostly occurring through the social media app “X,” got worse when some alleged “Barbs,” the name of Minaj’s fan base, resorted to making threats and doxing users that made negative content about Minaj. One TikTok user, @belatown, had posted a video insulting the New York rapper’s character and alleged past actions including her plastic surgery and active participation in defending both her husband and brother’s criminal actions. In less than 48 hours, the user reported that his family had received threats, his personal information and his family’s information was leaked, and that people claiming to be “Barbs” were threatening to visit his home. Many others also came out claiming that their private information was being leaked and even threatened to take legal action if the doxing continued.
Doxxing, according to the International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, is the intentional revelation of a person’s private information online without their consent, often with malicious intent. The term “doxxing” comes from “dropping documents” which refers to the release of documented information and has been around since the 1990s. Doxxing has yet to have any clear, federal guidelines, but in some states, doxxing can carry a fine and the potential for a year in prison. Victims can also make a report the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in their Cyber Crime unit.
The fanbase has become so associated with doxxing that many users make jokes about it.
The behavior exhibited by some fans of Nicki Minaj leads into a bigger conversation about Parasocial Relationships, their impact, and how, in the past few years, it seems that a lot of the negative behaviors attributed to parasocial relationships are bleeding into reality.
The study of parasocial relationships isn’t new, with many social and developmental psychologists studying the effects of social media on people’s mental and physical development the longer they participate in social media.
Parasocial relationships, as defined by Cynthia A. Hoffner and Bradley J. Bond, are non-reciprocal socio-economic connections with media figures such as celebrities or influencers. The term was introduced by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956. In these types of relationships, the user exerts time, energy and effort into a one-sided relationship that the recipient doesn’t know exists. Often associated with long-term media consumption or overconsumption, parasocial relationships are voluntary and are formed through social attraction. A study conducted by Shupei Yuan and Chen Lou in 2020 found that users that follow a certain character are more likely to form a stronger parasocial relationship with those whom they consider attractive or similar to themselves. As a result, followers have greater interest in promoted products or behaviors.
I was granted the opportunity to talk with Claire Robertson, a final-year Ph.D. student in Social Psychology at New York University. Robertson focuses on intergroup conflict and social identity, mostly political polarization and predominantly in the online sphere.
In an interview with Local, she clarified that parasocial relationships aren’t always harmful, but you can have certain cases that bring up cause for concern, especially in the current circulation of extremist rhetoric on social media.
Q: How do we see parasocial relationships originate?
“So, not to go way back, but people in general, humans, are not the fastest or the strongest animals out there […] and yet, we have kind of claimed almost 100 percent dominion over the world. And that’s really because of our ability to work together as groups. So social relationships for humans are life or death. We would not survive on our own [and] we were able to do [this] because we have really strong, evolved cognitive structures for group living.
So I study group conflict and I also study moral psychology, so how things go through the process of moralization. All of those things help us when it comes to bonding with the people around us. So we have these tendencies to want to have close social relationships and when you think about changes that our environment has gone through, especially given the environment of evolutionary adaptation that we lived in for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. It is only now, within the last 100 or so years that we really have this new way of consuming social information.”
Q: How do parasocial relationships develop?
“The Internet makes that [parasocial relationships] even weirder. It blurs those lines even more. When you think about TV and movies, you could watch the same person have the same character over and over and over again, but you still knew they were playing a character, right? Julie Andrews has played lots of different characters in her life, but when you go online and you have people like influencers and streamers and things like that and celebrities. You feel [that] you really get to know these people as their true selves and not as seeing them in a story or in a narrative that where they’re playing a character.
We have these really strong instincts to connect with people. We want to feel, if we have a conversation, that we walked away with a mutual understanding of the world [and] with a new connection with a social bond, right? And the way that the Internet is structured, it’s really hard sometimes for our brains to remember that this is a one-way interaction [and] that is a totally new consideration that our brains have to have. So when you say, where does this come from? I think it comes from what our brains were “designed” to do. However, I will again, make the caveat because all of this has come with caveats.”
Q: People often defend celebrities online when they are critiqued, how and why do we see these behaviors manifest into our reality?
“So definitely when it comes to politics and again, I’m answering these questions through the lens through which I think of them which does tend to be group identity, I’m sure that other researchers would say that it’s driven by other things, but, for example, Trump, right? He’s a very good example.
He’s somebody I think people have a really strong parasocial relationship with. Or a lot of people do, right? They really believe that he is their friend. He is going to help them specifically. And obviously we know that had a very concrete spillover effect into the offline world with the January 6th insurrection. That was deadly, 4 people died that day. So it is extremely important in terms of who people rally behind. I think the people who do this the best, and you see this all the time, are people who leverage identity, so they are the people who really liking Donald Trump became an identity.
It bonded people together. there are a lot of the people who were at that January 6th insurrection were also QAnon supporters. In terms of examples from my research, their tagline is literally: “Where we go one, we go all.”
A lot of Republicans, a lot of Trump supporters, a lot of QAnon supporters feel really alienated from the current discourse that’s on in mainstream news media.
Hollywood stories that are being told right now, when they created this identity of, we are the the downtrodden, we are the the victims here. That is so strong [that] people will go to crazy lengths to defend those identities once they have them. And there’s a lot of research showing that even extremely minimal identities can cause people to, favor their “in groups.” So just dividing kids into teams, like red and blue team for no other reason, kids will immediately choose to allocate resources to their own team compared to the other team and this only gets worse and worse and worse the more they have to compete for resources.
So, identity is a really strong driver of these things. And I think a lot of other people who also have these big parasocial followings do this as well. Taylor Swift has her Swifties. Lady Gaga has her little monsters. I think a lot of Twitch streamers have names also [and] they have what they’ll call “chat,” which sounds really silly, but that’s a meaningful thing. It puts all those people into one group. It makes them have a singular group identity that you can relate to.
When people are rallying in defense of one person, I think it’s mostly because they are playing on this idea of we are all in this together. Right?
Q: Do you think that, you know, the more people support those opinions of people belonging to a certain collective and rallying behind that collective publicly, the more that feeds into people being more into that group or being more extreme towards that group?
“You’re intuiting exactly what we’re looking at. I’ll give you the preliminary information we have. So Chris Bail, who’s a sociologist, wrote a book called Breaking the Social Media Prism. That’s about how the people who post online are far more extreme than the average user. There’s a lot of research kind of showing that this is true. I just ran a study where we asked people about how strongly they felt about certain political issues, and we found that the people who said that they felt the issue was extremely important were orders of magnitude more likely to say they would post about them than people who were like it’s important, but not very important. It was crazy the effective importance. We found that posting was both linear and quadratic, so it was going up exponentially as importance increased.
The other example I give a lot is in lectures and talks. I asked, raise your hand if you’ve seen a political take on social media in the last week? Okay, how many of you posted your own political takes in the last week online? And it’s one or none, almost 100 percent of the time, and it’s because the people who post are not representative of the general population. They are overwhelmingly the most extreme people, Pew had a statistic that 97 percent of tweets about politics online are posted by just 10% of users. So if you think about the reverse of that, that means that when you go online, almost 100 percent of what you’re seeing is from the top 90 percent of the bell curve and only 3 percent of tweets about politics exist to represent 90 percent of people’s political opinions.”
Wow.
“Right? So you’re seeing this extremely skewed distribution of public opinion, right? And our brains have a hard time taking into account information that is not visible. So when we go online, we’re like, okay, well, I’m wondering what they’re saying about this issue? We may draw the conclusion that everyone is mad about this thing when in fact, it’s 3 percent of people mad about this thing. But that’s really, really hard. Intuiting information that isn’t there is extremely unnatural for people.
And it makes sense. It wasn’t something we really had to do. We had to deal with the threats that were in front of us. My husband and I refer to it sometimes as [the] “big they.” So, we say, oh, “they’re” really upset about this.
So, yes, to answer your question, we’re testing this in the lab right now directly. We’re honing in on that topic, on that idea, but no one’s directly tested it [yet]. The short answer is we do think that having/being exposed only to the most extreme opinions is probably making people think that everyone else is more extreme, and it also may be making people themselves more extreme.”
Q: Do you see or think we will see a push by these radicals/extremists in the social media sphere using artificial intelligence to maybe add to that 10 percent of people who are posting 95, 97 percent of the political content?
“I have two extremely brief kind of thoughts on this, which is 1: I just saw a talk at our big Social Psychology conference and they found […] that AI, when you asked it to please respond like a 25 year old farmer from Illinois or something, was almost synthetic data [and] it was pretty good, but it was slightly more extreme than actual ground truth humans were in their opinions, which makes perfect sense.
When you think about the availability of content online and what AI is trained on, it has the exact same issue we just talked about. If there’s no moderate opinions online, or very few, they’re way less proportionally represented, then AI naturally is going to become slightly more extreme.
The only other thing I’ll say about AI, because I don’t know a ton about it is that it does seem to be a cool tool. I do think some of the hand wringing about AI is a little overblown. But I worry about deep fakes, especially just because our lab does some misinformation research, and it’s really hard to give people counter ideological fact checks and it only gets harder the more entrenched they are in their opinion. So the more realistic fake news might look, the harder it’ll be to right that misconception. So that’s that’s not exactly what you asked, but that’s kind of those are the 2 pieces I feel [that] I can speak to 100%.”
Parasocial relationships might be fine in moderation, who doesn’t love to follow the lives of those so different from our own? But it can venture into dangerous territory when our understanding is distorted by the inability to recognize the true one-way conversation that exists within the Internet. As seen with MAGA, Swifties, and Barbs, spillover from social media can become concerning and, sometimes, deadly. As technology continues to creep into every aspect of our daily lives, it’s important to understand when it becomes too far disconnected from reality.
