It’s a familiar pattern these days.
A celebrity or public figure gets drawn into some drama, either online or in person, and while their name is on everyone’s lips, someone gets the bright idea to scroll through their social media pages to find dragging material. And then all hell breaks loose when they find the perfect evidence.
If you’ve ever been on Nigerian Twitter, you know the drill by heart now. You don’t even need to be a celebrity; just say something that people disagree with, or cause a stir.
The so-called ‘banger boys’ need an hour max before they quote your tweet with a screenshot of your digital footprint, saying “This you?”
Recently, this is what has been happening to acclaimed Nigerian singer and songwriter, Simi.
How It All Started
Over the course of a few weeks, many sexual assault cases have popped up online, alarming the general public. The most recent one, a highly controversial case of a girl called Mirabel, who alleged that a man broke into her home and violently attacked her, went viral online, triggering a wave of activism. Everyone was rightfully quite fed up.
The assault cases were getting out of hand, and things needed to change.
Several public figures took to their social media accounts to call for an end to the sexual violence crisis, one of whom was Simi.
When someone raised the issue of false rape accusers to her(something she was very clearly not talking about), she clarified that that had nothing to do with what she said, which the internet (or specifically the male parts) did not like.
The pattern began here. They quickly flocked to her page and began to dig, looking for what they could add to their arsenal to drag her with. They even went as far back as 2012, 14 years ago.Her old tweets about the children in her mother’s daycare, her feelings for different male celebrities, and just general weirdness were screenshot, reframed, and circulated. The issue she spoke up about, the sexual violence crisis in Nigeria, was tossed out, and her digital footprint was the story.
A Global Internet Habit
This pattern is not just Nigerian. It is global online.
In the early 2010s, American rapper and musical artist Tyler, the Creator, built a reputation on shock humor and provocative lyrics that reflected the tone of that early internet culture. He was basically an Edgelord, or, as we call it here, a banger boy online, tweeting things to shock, offend, and impress certain demographics. Years later, he evolved out of it, but the internet never forgot. Especially black Americans, as a lot of the things he said and did in that era were heavily racist.
When he got into some online drama last year after posting a heartfelt tribute to D’Angelo, a black R&B Legend, the majority of his white fans who had followed him during his Edgelord era were disrespectful. He called them out for it, only for the Black community to flip on him for his hypocrisy, bringing up his old tweets.
Another global incident was the Taylor Swift/Kayla Nicole drama that went down in November last year. Kayla Nicole, the ex of Taylor Swift’s current boyfriend, Travis Kelce, responded to some alleged shade thrown by Swift in her recent songs by dressing as Toni Braxton for Halloween and performing t the song “He Wasn’t Man Enough”, getting her own jab in return.Swifties did not like this. At all. So they did an internet search, scrolled down her page to the early 2010’s, and found evidence to cancel her. Kayla had apparently tweeted racist, homophobic, and even black-shaming things as early as 2010, and the internet went wild.
Bear in mind, she was maybe 15\16 years old at the time of posting.
If you watched Heated Rivalry last year, you also remember the Letterboxd saga with Hudson Williams.
If you didn’t, Hudson, who played Shane on the very popular TV show that aired last year, was a victim of mass dragging online.
After his sudden rise to fame, fans and media alike began following him across all his social accounts, and a certain someone who wasn’t satisfied decided to dig into his Letterboxd account — an online community where people who love film rate and critique movies they’ve watched.
There, they found some of the comments he had made on movies he had watched years ago. Some of these opinions were controversial, yes, but many were widely accepted. Despite this, people began bashing him for his comments, forcing him to delete the account.
As this shows, this pattern still works the same way outside of Nigeria.
The Engagement Obsession
Another thing to note is that most people who dig up and share old tweets do not necessarily do so because they care about the topic. They do it for the clicks. They want to clickbait, farm engagement, and make money off these situations and collaborations.
They don’t care if they are maligning or ruining the image that the celebrity or public figure has worked so hard to build, which, of course, shouldn’t matter, but most of the time, it’s not about the issue at hand or the risks involved. They mostly care about making their name known and getting a “gotcha” moment.
Most of the time, they do this with celebrities or public figures they have a problem with or don’t like, and they save these tweets or evidence for the fateful day when this person messes up so they can release it.
The Double Standards
Of course, it is worth noting that Simi is being cancelled for a case that really should not even be discussed. Her words were for activism. She spoke up about the painful and harsh realities many women go through in Nigeria, and the reason most people felt triggered was that her words seemed like an attack on men, when it wasn’t. The entire vitriol being spilled towards her online is all because she refused to diminish the fact that there is a sexual crisis happening in Nigeria.
The same standard cannot be said to be afforded to men in Nigeria. Eric Gugua, a popular male content creator and personality online, spoke up about false rape accusations and added his voice to the majority of those online who were recently accused of making a rape joke on his account in 2012. When people online questioned him, he claimed the previous owner of his account had posted the tweet, and they accepted his explanation without protest, moving on as if it were nothing.
Where was that energy for Simi?
The Cultural Difference
While I’m not trying to make excuses for anyone, and I certainly wouldn’t for a topic as sensitive as Simi’s, it is important to remember that the concept of the digital footprint wasn’t ever in anyone’s minds at that time. The internet was a discovery, one that had not yet been documented, and no one knew how far-reaching the consequences would be. The internet was simply a concept that had not been fully explored, where people could say whatever they wanted and log off, without caring who saw it.
Unlike now, when social media is a huge part of people’s incomes, is used by almost everyone, and so intertwined with society that your posts are a direct reflection of who you are as a person. Now, whatever you put out online can change your life, either good or bad.
We’ve heard countless stories of people who said the wrong thing and got cancelled online, potentially losing their sources of income. A very recent example is Cole Walliser, popularly known as the guy behind glambots, who got cancelled online and hasn’t been seen on any red carpets since some emails surfaced in which he was rude to a potential client who was making enquiries.
Cancel culture based on one’s digital footprint would have been unheard of in the past, so one cannot help but wonder if maybe more grace should be given.
Can You Truly Outgrow Your Digital Footprint?
Now, this is a tricky question.
Ordinarily, I would say yes. I am not the same person I was last year, nor the year before that. I will also not be the same person next year, nor the year after that.
People do change, grow, and evolve.
But that sense of reasoning cannot be safely applied in every scenario, especially when the safety and well-being of others are at stake. Mindsets and beliefs can be outgrown, but it’s still an immeasurable thing.
Like an average Nigerian child, I used to be homophobic when I was little, but I have since then learnt to think for myself, not what society tells me, and I have gotten rid of that belief system. The same thing applies to some people with feminism, misogyny, and all. You can become less ignorant over the years.
However, applying this thought process to concepts like rape culture, alleged pedophilia, and stances on culturally harmful topics can be dangerous, because then, just like Eric Gugua’s case, people can easily brush off the impact of your words. After all, you’re not the same person any longer, right?
While I am not and will never be in support of any of these tweets, both Simi’s and the global cases, nor will I make excuses for them, like I have tried to explain, this is a very complex ethical dilemma.
But I’ll end with this: people’s pasts are meant to be exactly that, their pasts. This pattern of uncovering their actions from more than ten years ago to find ammunition for a smear campaign or to further backlash only causes more harm than good. We’ve seen it happen time and time again, and the only change it results in is growth for the engagement farmers.
But at the same time, it’s because of this same digital footprint that we’re able to discover the true natures of some of the most influential people. Like Elon Musk’s emails in the Epstein files, to Ezra Olubi’s disgusting posts on bestiality, their posts from the past caught up to them in the future.
So can people truly grow beyond their digital footprint?
I don’t have an answer for that.
I can only hope that this cancel culture pattern stops.
