The fans who won't leave Britney alone

Since 2021, Britney Spears has said she's free. Not all of her fans believe it. vox.com/culture CULTURE   The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. 🌀 Free Britney's dark turn 👸🏼 A few months ago, [I started talking to people]( who believed Britney Spears had never actually been freed from [the conservatorship]( that had controlled her life for 13 years. Some thought her social media team was trying to frame her as “crazy” by posting bizarre videos and images to her Instagram; others thought she was being held in a facility and replaced by AI or a body double. Some gained hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers detailing these theories; others spent their time investigating the people closest to Britney for reasons why they were “Team Con,” or in cahoots with the people responsible for her conservatorship. According to Free Britney 2.0, the subset of Free Britney who believes Britney is still not yet free, posting about their theories was the least they could do to continue the fight for Britney’s freedom. They knew they seemed absurd to the outside world, but the media had thought the same thing about the original [Free Britney movement](, and it was ultimately proven right. In a small attempt to rectify some of that mistrust between media and fandoms, I tried to approach Free Britney 2.0 with curiosity, not judgment, and to take their theories seriously, contextualizing or debunking them wherever I could. With any stories involving conspiracy theories, though, journalists need to walk a thin line. You want to be able to do justice to the people who’ve trusted you by sharing what they believe, but you also want to make sure you’re not spreading those theories further without providing larger context. Your ultimate obligation is not to individual sources but to the truth, or as close as it is possible to get. Tracy Ma for New York magazine and Vox But when we’re talking about one of the biggest celebrities on the planet, a woman who has been controlled for nearly half her life, who does not speak to the press and has every right to despise the media in general, and who has by all accounts struggled with mental health, “truth” is entirely dependent on whom you ask. Though I talked to multiple people who are friends with and who work closely with Britney, all did so anonymously or off the record; I was told Britney does not allow anyone who works with her to talk to the media, making it difficult for them to clear up the many rumors that have spread about her — and about themselves — on social media and in the tabloids. All of them told me the same thing: These conspiracy theories and tabloid rumors have no basis in reality and are actively harming Britney’s ability to heal from what has happened to her. What much of this boils down to, I think, is the public’s inability to understand why a person as famous as Britney Spears could be posting the kinds of things she posts to her Instagram. This might sound like an oversimplification, but more than anything else, it was her Instagram that triggered some fans to believe she might not actually be as free as people thought, speculating that it was the work of her social media manager to make her “seem crazy” or sow doubt about her mental health. But what if … that’s just Britney posting what she wants to post? What if we’re watching a human being who has lived an unfathomably bizarre, unfair, and difficult life express herself in the one way she feels she can? I knew I was never going to be able to tell the “true” story of Britney Spears — only she can do that — but I wanted to understand why so many people (some of them also celebrities) earnestly believed it was their duty to rescue her when it wasn’t clear she needed rescuing. If we collectively learn to leave Britney alone, we also have to learn to leave other people on the internet alone: people who do not have millions of dollars or have been in the public eye since they were teenagers, people whose struggles are not offered up to the world as entertainment but scar them nonetheless. Perhaps some of them are people who, due to one woman’s extraordinary ability to entertain and delight, have developed a strong bond with someone inherently unknowable, and who genuinely, truly, want the best for her, and believe they are helping by “speaking out.” I hope this story leads to less harassment among Britney’s fans and less vitriol on social media, because everyone in it genuinely believes they are doing what is good for Britney, even if they disagree on how to accomplish it. Maybe there’s a world in which we’re able to look at a celebrity’s behavior and find comfort in the vastness of the spectrum of human experience rather than jumping to conclusions. Or, you know, maybe people will continue to be people and believe whatever we want. Anyway, [I hope you read it](!  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Clickbait - How [Blind became]( the app Silicon Valley bosses love to hate. - Clickbait is dead, [long live Pop Crave](. - The scammers [pretending to be Mr. Beast](. - We need new social norms for [posting photos of strangers](! - The future of [kids’ TV isn’t TV](. - Finally, a guide for boyfriends on [how to take a damn picture](. One Last Thing [This TikTok]( starts out with the line, “Let’s talk about the politics of the dopamine mythos,” which sounds extremely boring and honestly I was prepared to be kind of annoyed by it, but then I watched the whole thing and there’s a lot of really incisive criticism about a certain insidious strain of tech speak. Watch it if you’re interested in that!  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...](   [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [YouTube]( Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=culture). 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