International pop sensation Taylor Swift already has an answer for her critics from her hit single"Shake It Off." She sings,"And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate."
"The public will always have strong opinions about celebrities who are highly successful, and some find Swift's level of success to be unnatural. For some reason, people don't want to believe that she is simply an incredibly hard-working and talented worker."The posts on social media of Swift flashing a satanic hand signal or promoting witchcraft repeatedly trend, but in part that's only because the evidence is cherry-picked.
This level of hate towards Swift—likely driven in no small part due to her politics—likely couldn't exist with social media. Yet as Katya Varbanova, viral marketing and public relations expert added,"Social media on its own doesn't make something more believable. People and viral trends do."As long as there have been pop stars—something that existed even with classical music composers like Mozart and Beethoven—there have been rabid fans.
"The outcome is what psychologists call the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion, where once you see something once, you see it everywhere and you're more than likely to pay notice it and as a result, believe it," said Varbanova.