Doja Cat told her fans to stop using their phones, get jobs, and support their parents when she logged onto Threads in July 2023. The platform had just launched to a great deal of excitement and the kind of chaotic energy that new social spaces tend to attract. She advised them to completely delete their accounts and reconsider everything when they inquired what they should call themselves if not Kittenz. Major fan pages were removed in a matter of days. She lost almost 500,000 Instagram followers in a matter of weeks. The debate changed from whether she had ruined her career to whether she had orchestrated the entire thing after she released Scarlet, which was warmly received by critics.
In some ways, it is incorrect to ask whether the Doja Cat scandal was the result of genuine estrangement or a calculated marketing tactic. The most intriguing interpretation of what transpired is probably both at the same time—a sincere wish to let go of a public persona that she found limiting, articulated through strategies that also happened to provide precisely the kind of publicity that a big album release benefits from. Artists that say they don’t care about attention are usually highly skilled at drawing it.
Doja had spent years cultivating the Kittenz into a devoted, engaged fan group that fills timelines, trends hashtags, and turns social media traffic into streaming numbers. Planet Her achieved platinum status. Songs from Hot Pink become ingrained in the culture. She had become well-known due to the lively, whimsical style that accompanied that achievement. Apparently, it had also made her feel confined. It was not the language of a brand manager to call her commercially successful work “cash-grabs” and declare that she didn’t love her followers because she didn’t know them. It was the vocabulary of someone setting one on fire.
The irony is that conflict is engagement, and parasocial fandom—the type that generates committed fan accounts and lengthy online conversations—thrives on engagement. Everyone blogging about the deactivated fan sites took their position in the argument. In the news cycle, coverage of the half million departing followers took the place of the departing followers. During the incident, Doja’s name appeared in more places than it might have in a traditional promotional rollout. It is tough to tell from the outside whether that was intentional or just fortunate. Maybe Doja is also unsure.
She has publicly stated that she enjoys “going to war with trolls” and considers hostile parasocial dynamics to be really annoying. In pop music, where it is customary to thank fans whenever possible regardless of one’s true feelings, this interpretation—viewing fan entitlement as an adversarial dynamic to be resisted rather than a consumer relationship to be managed—is uncommon. There are artists that criticize their own fan audiences, but they usually do so through carefully crafted comments rather than in-person Threads conversations at two in the morning.
Scarlet entered this situation. Compared to Planet, it was darker, stranger, and harder to get to. Her is exactly the kind of record that would have seemed at odds with the Kittenz style and makes much more sense coming from someone who had just publicly destroyed the identity her fans believed they were familiar with. The result was an artist who entered the Scarlet era with a new audience and a different public identity than the one she’d had a few months earlier, regardless of whether that was the original plan or whether the music and the controversy came to the same place from separate routes.
