Hey everybody, I am excited to announce that There Are No Girls on the Internet. We'll be back with a brand new season on May sixteenth, and and even more exciting news, There Are No Girls on the Internet is a finalist for a Shorty Award for Best Technology and Science Podcast, and y'all, I am so thrilled about it. So can you do me a huge favor and vote for us to win. Just go to tangoty dot com slash vote or use the link in our show description. It only takes a moment, I promise, and you can
vote every day until April twenty sixth. Just go to tangote dot com slash vote. That's t a n G O t I dot com slash vote or use the link in our show description. It would really mean a lot to me. There Are No Girls on the Internet as a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. So if you've been listening to their No I was on the Internet for a while, then you probably know that I have been on the Internet for a very
long time and I joined the podcast. Main accounts the story of MySpace to talk about the early days of one of my favorite ever social media platforms. You guessed it, MySpace and Wyatt was such a huge part of my online upbringing and development, and it was really fun to take a nostalgic, sometimes cringey, digital walk down memory lane. So take a listen and don't forget to vote for us to win a Shorty Award Originals.
This is an iHeart original.
If the beginning of Tila Tequila being on my radar as this, like, you know, MySpace influencer for being a queer woman of color, if that was like the promise of the Internet. The day that I saw that image of her in my hometown in DC doing a Nazi salute at a restaurant with a bunch of al right dirtbags, that was the nail in the coffin. And so I feel like that moment for me really crystallized where we started and unfortunately where we wound up.
I'm Joanne McNeil and this his main accounts the story of MySpace, Episode three, MySpace Famous. In this episode, we're going to discuss how MySpace, like reality TV, became a vehicle for celebrity. The people who became famous through the platform gave way to the culture of influencers. MySpace felt like a party. I've heard a few people make this comparison when I've talked about the platform with them. Recently. Julia Angwin said it in the first episode of our series.
Was definitely a party atmosphere, and my friend Dorothy Santos said it too when we were reminiscing about it the other day.
So I wasn't really seeing MySpace as a professional platform as this kind of digital party that just would I could pop in anytime.
Well, what's something people usually want to know about a party before they show up? Who is going to be there? The answer was Tila Tequila.
Was that rare bids you go?
Miss Tila also known as Cio Tequila.
Tila was the party before MySpace. Tila was a model in Playboy and car shows. In two thousand and three, she appeared on Surviving Nugent, a reality show on BH one hosted by Ted Nugent on his Texas ranch.
Lare I can't handle?
But it was social media that made Tila famous.
The very first MySpace kind of influencer celebrity that I was very, very interested in and like she was on my top eight and it was this person, Tila Tequila. When I think about like, who was the first MySpace big account, it was her.
That's Bridget Todd, host of the podcast There Are No Girls on the Internet on my Space way back when, Bridget was one of Tila's hundreds of thousands of fans.
One of the notable things about her is that she was openly queer. And you know, I'm queer and she's a person of color. I'm a person of color, and I remember thinking like, wow, how cool, Like this famous person of color, you know, has a platform around the fact that she's queer.
Tila, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, was no heiress like Paris Hilton. Her parents didn't have a lot of money. She had to hustle to get her name out in the world. The Internet was part of that hustle.
I have an addiction, yes, okay, So my theramist is that I have a highly addictive personality, and you know I do.
So it's I'm addicts internet. So I'm always sweating them online trying to fans. I do this, do that, And I'm addicted to shopping.
I'm addicted to sex.
You know whatever.
This is how people came to know Tila Tequila. She sent friend requests to hundreds and hundreds of people. First she did this on Friendster, and Tila ran into some trouble doing this because Friendster, compared to MySpace, did not feel like a party. Friendster was pretty rigid about rules. In the summer of two thousand and three, Friendster started cracking down on accounts known as fakester's accounts that represented
anything other than a user's real identity. So you might have seen Marilyn Monroe fakester that was a user impersonating Marilyn Monroe on Friendster, or you might have come across a snowy owl fakester and people obsessed with bird watching would have friended that account. The fakesters became sort of like community pages, but Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams hated them. He hired a bunch of moderators to remove them all. A group of these outlaw fakesters came together and wrote
an open letter protesting Friendster's policy. The ringleader was someone who went by Roy Batti on Friendster, you know, like the Replicant and blade Runner.
The corporate masters at Friendster should be thrilled that they have such a vibrant online community as they now have on their hands. What they forget is that a living community, by definition, has a life of its own.
Deleting the photos in or entire accounts of fakesters is going to rudely, terribly backfire against the management of this site and will ultimately take the entire community, real or parodied, down with it.
The rumblings of descent are already grown, getting louder by the minute. If Friendster wants to see all of the goodwill and excellent word of mouth that is generated go down and scorching, smoking very public flames, then they can go right ahead with their little extermination campaign. The Internet is a big place, and we can easily take our party somewhere else, to a site where we are not only tolerated, but enthusiastically embraced.
You know where they took that party. I mean, of course, the fakesters went to MySpace. Friendster was so aggressive about kicking out faxters that it impacted people using their real identities on the platform too. This happened to Tila Tequila. She kept getting kicked off Friendster for adding too many friends. Tila knew about MySpace because Tom Anderson had been an offline acquaintance. He sent her a bunch of invites to join MySpace, but she declined. It wasn't cool. In Tila's mind.
MySpace wasn't a party yet. The site had just launched, and no one was really on MySpace yet except for Euniverse staff and their immediate friends. Still, it was a hassle dealing with Friendster mods. Each time Tela's account was deleted from Friendster, she'd have to rebuild her list of friends manually add all of her friends again. And in September two thousand and three, when Tila got kicked off
Friendster for the fifth time, she'd had enough. Tila finally took Tom up on his offer, and Tila didn't just sign up for MySpace, she invited everyone she knew on Friendster to join her there. At this point, after months of strategies to evade friends to mods, she had tens of thousands of friends on friends der MySpace exploded with thousands of new users. By two thousand and six, Tila
had over a million MySpace friends. It's possible MySpace never would have taken off without Tila if she had declined Tom's invitation social media history might have gone another way, and without MySpace, we probably never would have heard about Tila Tequila. Tila was a new kind of st are, someone who became famous because of the Internet. Sure, on MySpace you called each other friends, but what Tila and many other Internet celebrities were collecting were really just fans.
Something about her really represents the sort of duality of all of our Internet experiences, and.
What happened next in Tila's career feels representative of how social media itself has changed.
I think about her all the time. It's just such an interesting case study for what social media and the Internet can do to people. On the one hand, it can be this like fabulous way to connect and to like see yourself and be seen and build a platform around that. On the other hand, it can be so dark.
You had these people that kind of became known from MySpace and from this particular scene and had a very definitive esthetic and sort of cults around them.
That's Taylor the Runs, a technology reporter at the Washington Post. Those people today would be just regular influencers. What actually is an influencer? When we use that word, what are we talking about?
I think if it as somebody who creates content and sort of monetizes that content through social platforms or builds an audience through social platforms. They're almost independent media companies where there are people that have a lot of times developed an audience for around their own personality, but it can also be around a certain interest or style or whatever, and then they monetize that online audience. Basically, I guess someone who builds and then monetizes an online audience.
Taylor makes an interesting distinction. People figured out how to get famous on MySpace, but it wasn't exactly a business, not like what you see with internet celebrities on Twitch or YouTube or Instagram these days.
My Space was pretty like embedded in sort of the music industry, not quite the way TikTok is now, but you know, music was a strong culture of MySpace, and so you had a lot of people growing audiences on the platform and using that to get a record deal, you know, or sell out shows or promote themselves. And then you kind of had these more like individual figures that I think seemed like kind of like party type
of people. And then you of course had celebrities using it as well, like you know, Katie Perry again because it was sort of like music adjacent, and Jeffrey Star started in music.
Jeffree Star, like Tila Tequila, was another larger than life MySpace superstar. He had an iconic look, mac makeup, hot pink hair, a look that you could instantly identify in a thumbnail profile picture. He got famous for creating drama and feuding with other MySpace celebrities. But to be honest, Jeffree Star's deal, I don't get it.
Hello, Hey God, it's Jeffree Star.
Yeah.
Well, if been in flux with me, they kind of die, okay, love.
You to your bike.
Why does someone follow a person like Jeffree Star, Like, what do the users who follow the page of a celebrity on MySpace get from that interaction?
Well, a lot of it was like aspiration around kind of like emo culture or like esthetics. It was like people with a certain aesthetic, and you would follow these people because they were like a lot of modern day influencers or content creators. They were kind of aspirational figures for that era where they were kind of leading this cool party girl lifestyle or they had like, you know, awesome tattoos and makeup and this.
Aesthetic that people really gravitated to. On MySpace, people could advertise themselves. Users would post comments like thanks for the ad when someone added them as friends. The visibility was, in a way its own reward. Jeffree Starr could get gigs for his band through MySpace. Tila Tequila found modeling and acting opportunities through it, but this happened informally, and mind you, most people on MySpace were not trying to be Tila or Jeffrey.
My Space was never really like pushing you to like become a creator. You mostly just like looked at other people's pages. The stakes were so low for the average user, and nothing on the internet feels that way now.
And if you did become famous on MySpace, it wasn't entirely clear what that would even bring you.
I never had a strategy because there was no such thing as being an influencer back then, so like I literally was just posting my life and I guess people enjoyed it, so then I kind of built a following.
That's Hannahbath. She wasn't an influencer, but she was definitely MySpace famous.
I never had like a plan where I was like, oh, yeah, like I'm going to do this, and like that's how I followers. I literally just did it because I was having fun, and then a following grew from that, and people seem to enjoy to watch me and my friends kind of live our lives.
So Hannah Bath was in high school in southern California, where she ran in similar circles with jeffree Star. They were in each other's Top eight. Hannah Bath had an offbeat fashion sense, which came through in the picture she posted to MySpace.
When I first started on MySpace, when I was probably like around fifteen or so, I was very into like kind of like a vintage like punk look. I was listening to a lot of like late seventies punk bands.
I cut my hair.
Really short, and I just like it was kind of like a vintage punk golf.
Look that I was going with.
But I'd wear like all these like wild like vintage clothing, like a vintage wedding dress or something crazy.
Hundreds of thousands of people visited her page just to look at her.
And then it kind of went from that to like, as I was getting older and kind of finding like who I was, the whole kind of like scene kid thing was starting and I had made friends with a few other girls that were also kind of like MySpace people, and I guess we started the whole kind of scene girl look or vibe, and then that was just that took off.
I mean I'd like, like look at the.
Photos now and like I feel like it looks ridiculous, but like back then, like I don't know, we thought we looked like so cool.
MySpace became a huge part of Hanna About's daily life. She even traveled across the country to meet friends she met on MySpace. I think I was like fifteen or sixteen.
I'd met this girl who lived in Minnesota, and like she had messaged me because I always wore like these like gluin extensions because that was a big thing back then, which was horrible for your hair, and she was like, yeah, look, i'd love it. It's like you did my extensions. And I was like, yeah, for sure. So if my dad got me a ticket to Minnesota, who lets meet this random girl. I ended up staying with her for like a week or like maybe two weeks even, and I
made all of these friends in Minnesota. I met someone else that I knew from MySpace, and it was like such a fun and awesome time. I feel like MySpace could kind of bring you together like that. Like I feel like now there's maybe like more danger going on on the internet, but back then maybe because it was so new, but I'm sure there was danger there as well.
I don't know, everyone was kind of like in this scene and everyone kind of knew everyone, or there was just some kind of like you felt more safe just meeting up with random people.
Part of what drew her to connect to people online, even traveled across the country to meet people, was that her offline life could be rough. On my Space, Hannah Bath was glamorous, a scene queen at her high school. People made fun of her for dressing the way she did.
At that time in my life, I was like getting bullied really bad. I was dealing with like self harm, and I was just like very depressed and all of that. And I was very open about all of my struggles through like my blogging and my rioting, So the people I was connecting with knew like the real me, and I feel like that's why I was so drawn to it.
I just started like posting like things I liked, and then people like like that as well, and I love being able to like express my fashion through my Space because I feel like I got bullied a lot for like how I looked in my style, and then on my Space people like loved how I look looked up to me and like loved my style. So it was like a whole different thing for me because I was like, I'm such a loser at school, and then when I'm like online, I was becoming this like my Space girl.
I don't know, it was just it was a trip.
With the attention she garnered from MySpace, Hannah Beth built a career, first as a blogger with Buzznet and later working in fashion, including a spot on the reality TV show House of DVF a competition to become a brand ambassador for Diane von Furstenberg, Hannah Beth won. Hannah Beth was never Kardashian style famous, but people paid attention to her in a way that didn't really happen to ordinary
people before the Internet. There are blogs dedicated to MySpace stars, and these people were kind of covered in other Internet like subcommunities and forums places like Sticky Drama. But for other MySpace celebrities, the Internet was a double edged sword. They faced harassment online where they built their fate.
People would set up blogs about MySpace stars and they would sort of speculate on different things. They would try and find information on these people, and a lot of the comment section would be other fans and they would kind of all Sometimes it was really positive, and then obviously some of it turned extremely dark, where you had kind of the worst of internet comment culture attacking these people, and they had stalkers and you know, harassment and safety problems.
Unlike movie stores, the MySpace famous probably didn't have the money to hire bodyguards, they didn't have representation agents, managers invested in their career longevity, and it all came out the cost of privacy.
All of that stuff was so niche and so misunderstood at the time, Like now we have this concept of online safety. There wasn't that in the two thousands. So you know, these a lot of women were kind of like building audiences, getting micro fame and had this like dedicated group of people on the Internet that was obsessed with them. But there wasn't like there weren't really like guardrails around any of it. They were almost like too
accessible to their fandoms. Like now there's this like you think of influencers as celebrities, so you kind of almost respect them a little bit more, whereas back then, I think my Space stars felt almost like too much, like like they were too kind of on the level of normal people almost, and so like average people just felt
entitled to be horrible to them. The visibility that users like Tila Tequila could attain on MySpace was like a hyper popularity I think, the most popular kid at high school times a thousand, and in some ways it could be more invasive than a traditional celebrity experience because my Space, like every social now work, was designed for looking at others,
surveilling others. People clicked on other people's profiles and assessed them from a distance, and there was no blueprint for it, Like there was no understanding of online fame at that point, so people I think had less boundaries. And then also, you know, the mid two thousands was kind of like peak reality fame and kind of like this really toxic type of celebrity, Like that was like that whole Britney Paris Lindsay era where it was like this culture of excess.
No other form of entertainment defines the aughts like reality Television. Survivor and Big Brother both debuted in two thousand that shows like The Bachelor, The Osbourne's and American Idol arrived shortly after These programs could be made cheaply. New software had just made it easier to edit down large quantities of video footage. Producers didn't have to hire professional actors
or screenwriters. It's no coincidence that the reality TV boom happened while the Screen Actors Guild and later the Writer's Guild were negotiating streaming royalties. With reality TV, celebrities projected the illusion of living ordinary lives, while ordinary people projected the illusion of celebrity. It was a lot like the immediacy and intimacy that early online celebrities like Tila Tequila
offered their friends on MySpace. Tom Anderson even said in an interview once he thought of my Space as the reality TV of the Internet. It felt inevitable then that Tila Tequila would leverage her online popularity with a reality show of her own. In two thousand and seven, A Shot at Love debuted a.
Tila Tequila began her Quest for Love.
I'm a bisexual. Oh.
This season on A Shot at Love, it was the first reality dating show featuring a bisexual person.
She got a reality show on MTV called Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, and the conceit was that you know, she's a queer girl looking for love and that the house was going to be filled with both women and men because she's queer. Me and my friends like my queer circle of friends when I say that, we watched this show religiously, like we had parties, but we thought it was so earnest.
It was one of MTV's biggest releases that year and ran for a couple seasons. Tila appeared to be doing really well in the late odds. She made music and published a book, and she made some savvy business decisions to monetize her fame, working with Joe Francis, he of the Girls Gone Wild franchise. She set up a website called Tela's Hotspot, where she had a blog and webcam and basically posted the kind of content she had on MySpace, but on a website of her own. Tela even appeared
to be settling down. In two thousand and nine, she was engaged to Casey Johnson, the Johnson and Johnson Heiress, but then tragedy struck.
She was young, beautiful, and an heiress to an empire. Now, Casey Johnson's sudden death has many asking how and why.
At the end of two thousand and nine and the beginning of twenty and ten was very hard for me. And as you get to know, during those times, I made lots of headlines of meltdowns, and you know, that was my way of like when you lose someone and I didn't know how to cope.
Casey died of diabetes complications. It was only a month after they announced their engagement. Things went down hell from there. In twenty twelve, Tala was hospitalized after a drug overdose and a brain aneurysm. It had been a suicide attempt. In twenty fifteen, Tila prepared to come back and joined the cast of Celebrity Big Brother. Then post resurface of Tila two years earlier in twenty thirteen, defending Hitler on her blog and posing a Nazi regalia. She was kicked
out of the house because of it. Tila apologized. Tila called it a terrible mistake. In a statement posted to social media, she mentioned her suicide attempt and said she suffered from severe depress and addiction, and her words, I felt worthless and unloved as that pain continued to grow, causing me to further spiral out of control. And then she reiterated that she is absolutely, one hundred percent not a Nazi supporter. Tla's apology sounded heartfelt, and maybe it was.
But two months later, Tila posted a photo of her baby daughter with a Hitler mustache, and for Bridget, who had followed Tila's career for over a decade by that point, it was heartbreaking.
And I remember watching her trajectory from being this person that I loved and really admired as like a clear woman of color, watching her go from someone who like that was her thing in my mind to the way that now she basically was like radicalized on the Internet and via the alt right.
In twenty sixteen, Tila was photographed giving a Nazi salute at a conference with white nationalists in Washington, d C.
If the beginning of Tila Tequila being on my radar as this like MySpace influencer for being a queer woman of color, if that was like the promise of the Internet. The day that I saw that image of her in my hometown in DC doing a Nazi salute at a restaurant with a bunch of alt right dirt bags. That was the nail in the coffin. And so I feel like that moment for me really crystallized where we started
and unfortunately where we wound up. But those early days were so full of promise, and then that picture is like burned in my mind of because of platforms like MySpace. This was a person who allowed me to see part of myself that I was still getting comfortable with, and then where we wound up was so dark and so sad and so heavy.
For others, Fame on MySpace came as easily as it went.
You had people like Tila Tequila go on to become a reality star because that was the only kind of attainable access to quote unquote like mainstream fame in the two thousands was like reality shows. But even then, like going on a reality show doesn't mean that you yourself profit very much. So I think all the people from that era kind of fell off and never really were able to capture the true value of the brand that they built Back then.
A few MySpace celebrities dropped out of the public eye by choice, including Hannahbath.
I think just like as I got older, I just started to enjoy like having like my privacy a bit more now, and I just don't love social media like how I used to love it. So it's just like it's not one of my top priorities.
But for others who became famous on MySpace, those years were less than idyllic. It was a horrible time to be famous. Like it was so toxic and so bad. Tabloid culture ruled.
It was really playing out on the inner in small scale through blogs, and so I think a lot of MySpace stars just kind of like got chewed up by that system. And you see them now like into crystal healing, or they've totally reinvented themselves, or they're like super offline, or you have people like Jeffrey who just leaned one hundred and fifty percent into it and kind of became this like internet villain because he literally thrived in that type of toxicity.
The blowback to visibility online that Taylor describes wasn't only impacting people like Tila with hundreds of thousands of friends on social media. People with small followings and relatively ordinary lives faced harassment and fullying on a social network that had quickly become the center of their social life. More on this in the next episode of Main Accounts. Thanks for listening to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace and iHeart original podcast Main Accounts. The Story of MySpace is
written and hosted by me Joanne McNeil. Editing it's sound design by Mike Coscarelli and Mary Do Original music by Elise McCoy, Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher, Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson, Jocelyn Sears, and Marissa Brown. Show logo by Lucy Kintania. Special thanks to Ryan Murdoch Grace Views at the head Frasier. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip, our senior producer is Mike Coscarelli, and our
executive producer is Jason English. If you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform Sadly, my MySpace page is no longer around, but you can find me on Twitter at Joe mick. Let us hear your MySpace story at check out my book Lurking Main Accounts. The Story of my Space is a production of iHeart Podcasts.