Sometimes the celebrities I follow on Twitter get people telling them to shut up about politics and stick to entertainment.
This is something I find difficult to understand.
I do see why someone might not want incompatible political opinions turning up in their Twitter feed. But what I don't understand is why you'd want to keep following someone once you know that they hold these incompatible opinions.
When someone has incompatible politics (by which I don't mean simply that I don't agree with them, but rather that I see their position as outright harmful and/or cruel) I'm not able to respect them enough to be a fan of them. I cease to be interested in their day-to-day life and thoughts, and most likely in their work as well. Even if for some reason I do maintain interest in their work (for example, perhaps if one member of an ensemble cast for a major fandom has incompatible politics) I no longer have any desire to hear from them as an individual, just to see the finished work.
It would be interesting to study this on a broader level. Are there any patterns of the political opinions or affiliation of people who want to continue following politically-incompatible celebrities but not hear about their politics, as compared with people who lose interest in politically-incompatible celebrities, as compared with people who can cheerfully continue following a celebrity without regard for their incompatible politics.
They could also study whether there are patterns in real-life relationships as opposed to celebrity-fan relationships, but I find the celebrity-fan relationship particularly interesting because it's unidirectional. If a parent holds political opinions you consider harmful, there's an element of "How can you bring a child into the world and then work politically to make the world a worse place?" But the celebrity has no loyalty or attachment to the individual fan and the fan adores the celebrity, so it's an interesting and unique dynamic.
2 comments:
I don't have any access to data about celebrities, but (shameless plug alert) I did devise a tool for correlating people's political attitudes to those of others.
Since the answers are public domain, it would be super interesting if real politicians could be made to do that under their real names!
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