Can Music Fans Ever Leave Britney Alone?

The second speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 panel is Ed Katrak Spencer, whose focus is on the clickbait conspiracism surrounding Britney Spears. There is a continuous refuelling of speculative Spears discourse: music-related online controversy is a continuous rhythm rather than singular event, and online conspiracism is itself becoming a quasi-musical vibe.

Even after the end of Spears’s 13-year conservatorship, several prominent social media users refused to let go of the #FreeBritney conspiracy theory; there are even theories that the real Spears has been replaced by a body double or by AI. But Spears has always been described as not-quite-human, with denigrations of leaked unprocessed voice recordings and other attacks about her supposed musical or personal deficiencies. Perhaps even Spears fandom has always already been slightly toxic.

In this sense, her fans now play the role of conservator even as her legal conservatorship has ended; she – or her image – is controlled by her fans, and her failure to conform to a classic industry formula of overcoming hardship through subsequent musical success is held against her and feeds new conspiracy theories.

But is this a kind of clickbait conspiracism; are these Spears fans engaging in a self-interested conspiracism that drives their own social media metrics, or in a ludicrous participatory conspiracy culture? Is their conspiracism a critique of the music industry that has gone horribly askew? Indeed, analysis of conspiracist TikTok videos about Spears points to a lack of antagonism against specified others, and instead is a looping, rhythmic phenomenon that uses unusual sounds to make ordinary content extraordinary and creepy.