Zendaya at the 2024 Met Gala in New York City. The actress is one of many celebrities whose name has appeared this week on social media “block” lists for not speaking out publicly about the conflict in Gaza.

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Zendaya at the 2024 Met Gala in New York City. The actress is one of many celebrities whose name has appeared this week on social media “block” lists for not speaking out publicly about the conflict in Gaza.

Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

A collective effort on TikTok and other social media platforms to push celebrities to speak publicly about the conflict in Gaza went into overdrive this week after The Met Gala.

Creators on TikTok have earned millions of views for videos they’ve made linked to hashtags like #celebrityblocklist, #letthemeatcake and #blockout.

Many of these posts list the names of actors, musicians and other high-profile figures whom the video creators say had not yet spoken out against Israel’s attacks on the region — or hadn’t spoken out sufficiently — and therefore should be blocked.

And there’s been a special push in recent days to name those who attended the opulent, star-studded annual Met Gala on Monday.

“I made a Google Doc of every celebrity that attended the Met Gala, and now I’m going through and writing if they’ve been silent, or if they’ve been using their platform to speak up about the genocide in Gaza,” said one TikTok user in a video displaying a long list of celebrity names against a black background with the word “SILENT” in red next to to some, including Zendaya, Nicki Minaj, Keith Urban and Andrew Scott. “Some of these celebrities have not been completely silent,” the Tiktoker continued. “Zendaya did make a post back in October on her story supporting Palestine, but has been silent since. So I went ahead and put ‘silent.’”

The Met Gala fans the flames

Calls on social media to boycott celebrity silences have been on a slow burn for months.

But the fact the New York event, with its unchecked display of privilege and wealth, took place at around the same time as thousands of Palestinians were being forced to flee Rafah at less than 24 hours notice as Israeli troops took control of the Gaza territory’s border crossing with Egypt, fanned the glowing embers into full-on flames.

“The Met Gala was a bit of a hyperbolic moment that got a lot of people’s attention,” said Marcus Collins, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan. “The celebrity boycotts had existed, but they weren’t really at the top of the social zeitgeist. But then you have a moment like the Met Gala that wasn’t really related to the conflict, but the pieces were all at play. When the attacks [in Gaza] were happening the same day, the juxtaposition just got people talking and moving.”

Even relatively minor celebrities like social media influencer Hayley Baylee — who wasn’t even a guest at the event, but had been hired as a pre-gala host to interview those invited as they headed to the party — were caught up in the backlash on TikTok.

Many creators posted negative reactions to a video Baylee posted of herself that night (which has since been taken down), saying, “Let them eat cake!” It was a nod, as she later admitted in a video apologizing for her actions, to a current trend on social media for looks inspired by Marie Antoinette, and a line from the 2006 film starring Kirsten Dunst, about the ill-fated French queen.

“The world is just not peaceful or stable enough for the average person to accept and enjoy celebrities flaunting their wealth on social media,” said one user on TikTok in response both to Baylee’s faux-pas and the overall flaunting of wealth in New York that night. “Flexing on the peasants only works when the peasants aren’t watching other peasants be wiped off the face of the planet.”

The impact of blocking celebrities on the people of Gaza

The rationale behind the calls on social media to block celebrities, thereby negatively impacting their advertising revenue, is to put pressure on them to use their massive influence to try to stop the violence in Gaza.

“The hope is that it will either bring more visibility to the cause and shift the balance in getting political forces like the U.S. government to do something to mitigate the violence that’s happening in the Middle East,” said Collins. “But as rational as that logic may seem, I don’t think there are very many examples where this has actually worked.”

Collins cited the example of George Clooney’s efforts, albeit in an era before the rise of social media, to end the war in Sudan. A 2014 article in The Guardian by the Sudan-based journalist Maeve Shearlaw assessed the impact of the celebrity’s dedicated efforts over the years to bring about change: “I don’t see that it has halted, or even reduced, the genocide. The killing, displacement, sexual assaults and rape never stopped.”

On the other hand, pressure on social media has occasionally impacted the ways celebrities speak out about world events. For example, the backlash against Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson for asking the public to donate to a Maui wildfire recovery fund last fall caused the pair to put more of their own significant resources into the effort. However, the amount they contributed was not disclosed.

The impact on everyone else

It remains to be seen whether the latest celebrity-blocking social media campaign will bring about positive change for the people of Gaza.

But some experts say the fact that it doesn’t directly target the issue, but rather focuses on which celebrities are remaining silent, obscures the desired goal.

“That’s not what we’re debating on and trending about and talking about and arguing about,” said Chris Morse, a communications professor at Bryant University. “It’s the fact that Celebrity A won’t tell us their stance. Isn’t that weird that they won’t do that? Let’s boycott them until they do do that.”

Indeed, some stars have seen a fall-off in followers over the past week. For example, Taylor Swift, who’s at the top of many of the block lists, lost around 300,000 followers on TikTok over the past week, according to a comparison between her current TikTok follower number and the number obtained from last week via Wayback Machine, and around 50,000 on Instagram. But that’s nothing for a star of Swift’s magnitude.

“A large celebrity has their touring, has multiple large social channels, is featured on television, is featured in the press,” said Eric Dahan, CEO of the social media marketing company Mighty Joy. “If you have north of 100 million followers and you lose three or five million, it sucks. But is that the end of the world for you? No.”

Dahan added that blocking celebrities doesn’t prevent them from appearing in targeted social media ad campaigns.

“Blocking an account doesn’t prevent you from receiving an ad, because the ad is not run through the celebrity’s account per se,” said Dahan. “And so, for example, you can block Kim Kardashian, but Hulu could run an ad targeting the Kardashians at you.”

Meanwhile, controversies involving celebrities very often bring attention to social media platforms.

“TikTok definitely benefits, right? Because the trend is happening on their format,” said Bryant University’s Morse. “We are constantly mentioning TikTok in all of the stories, and that makes people curious in order to see the trend and see what people are doing. So you got to go to TikTok, and you really got to become a member because you can’t really see too many things without actually engaging with the platform.”

TikTok did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment.

And even if the many, much-viewed videos aimed at canceling celebrities don’t help to bring about a change for the people of Gaza, there’s at least an emotional reward for those doing the canceling.

“It does provide some sense of agency,” said the University of Michigan’s Collins. “A sense that I’ve done something to influence other people to do something that perhaps maybe might make a difference. Because in the minds of those folks, it’s better than doing nothing.”

A Jedi and a Jar Jar walk into a movie…

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A Jedi and a Jar Jar walk into a movie…

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The year is 1999. Fans are lined up around theaters. News stations are treating it like a breaking news event.

On May 19, Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace hit theaters, the first movie of the franchise to be released in well over a decade. It promised to tell the origin story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.

Fans were so excited some camped out for days, sometimes even weeks, to see the film on opening day.

“The original trilogy was so phenomenal,” said one eager moviegoer. “People have been waiting for this for, like, 16 years.” Another went so far as to say, “There are now eight wonders of the world, one of them being this movie.”

When one reporter asked a crowd if there was any concern the movie might be bad, they responded with a resounding “No.” Oh how wrong they were.

You’re reading the Consider This newsletter, which unpacks one major news story each day. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to more from the Consider This podcast.

The consensus? It was a huge flop

NPR sent two critics to review the film. Neither had much good to say.

Here’s how Tom Shales described the movie: “The new Star Wars movie Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace is a menace. It’s not about storytelling and it’s not about people … it’s about effects and technology. It’s a computer movie through and through, by computers and maybe for computers.”

NPR’s Bob Mondello took issue with the infamous Jar Jar Binks: “‘What could he have been thinking,’ you say to yourself as [George Lucas] introduces a race of idol-worshiping primitives who speak with Caribbean accents and behave like refugees from Amos n Andy.”

The backlash didn’t stop there. People hated nine-year-old Darth Vader. They didn’t like all the talk of taxes and trade embargoes.

Hating on The Phantom Menace has become somewhat of a punchline in Star Wars circles, says Erich Schwartzel, who covers the film industry for The Wall Street Journal and is writing a book about George Lucas and Star Wars.

He told NPR the hype only amplified the sting of disappointment: “It’s really, looking back I think, the first example that I have, and maybe the film industry has, of the movie almost being beside the point.”

25 years later, nostalgia has given the film new life

While the overwhelming consensus was The Phantom Menace was terrible, only a Sith deals in absolutes (sorry).

To understand how popular opinion on the film has changed, Schwartzel points to Jar Jar Binks. Schwartzel said most of the fans who grew up on the original Star Wars trilogy would have been in their late 20s or early 30s when they lined up to watch The Phantom Menace.

“[Jar Jar] represents the inherently childish nature of Star Wars, and how childish it can be,” Schwartzel said. “I think Jar Jar is a bit of an affront to those fans, sort of being a reminder that this is also for kids.”

Fans line up at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York on May 6, 1999 to be the first to see the movie, Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace.

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Fans line up at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York on May 6, 1999 to be the first to see the movie, Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace.

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Now that those kids, whose introduction to the Star Wars world was The Phantom Menace, are adults, it’s unsurprising the film is remembered more fondly. The “prequel kids,” as Schwartzel puts it, hold The Phantom Menace as dear to them as older fans revere A New Hope.

After a recent anniversary screening of the film in D.C., All Things Considered host Scott Detrow met 29-year-old Eleni Salyers, who said she’s been a fan of the prequels since she was a kid: “For me it’s nostalgic. Growing up I always preferred the prequels, which is a hot take for many Star Wars fans.”

To fans like Salyers, some of the best moments include the lightsaber fights, which compared to those in the original trilogy, are faster and flashier. The Phantom Menace also introduced fans to podracing, with its now iconic visual and sound effects.

The prequel trilogy has played a foundational role in building the Star Wars franchise into a “multigenerational juggernaut,” Schwartzel said. He notes that if you look at the fire hose of Star Wars content Disney has released over the last decade, you’ll see much of the themes and characters come from the world the prequels created.

This episode was produced by Marc Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.