Haters gonna hate: the dark side of ‘going viral’ that no one talks about
Less than two weeks after posting the video that would make him famous, and less than one week after appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Josh Holz experienced the latest milestone in the viral-fame cycle: The 15-year-old was hacked on Twitter.
His account, @joshholzz - the original site of the “Damn Daniel” meme - began tweeting out racist memes on February 27. At some point after that, screenshots show, someone changed the account’s header to read “Meme Team” and the listed name to “XTM”. At some point, the hackers also deleted the original “Damn Daniel” video - in which Holz repeatedly admires his friend Daniel Lara’s fashion choices - a sin about which they apparently feel no regret.
This is the current cost of Internet fame. In addition to the hacking, Holz was “swatted” last week, a prank in which a fake police tip gets a SWAT team sent to your house. He and his 14-year-old meme-mate, Lara, have been the subjects of steady Internet nastiness, from homophobic Twitter jokes to mild threats.
Alex from Target or Keyboard Cat or the “prancercise lady” could have warned them: Sometimes being one of the Internet’s most beloved people is almost as bad as ranking among its most hated.
“If you’re going to be out there, part of the deal is that you’re going to get a lot of hate,” said Ben Lashes, the business manager of memetic phenoms from Scumbag Steve to Grumpy Cat. “If you’re in the entertainment business, you sign up for it. But if you put something up on YouTube and it explodes overnight, often you don’t realise there will be a backlash.”
You may also not realise that, over time, the blowback has gotten worse. When Lashes began representing online celebrities in 2011, the worst you might expect was schoolyard-level bullying: name-calling, nasty emails, weird conversations with strangers at bars - generally, Lashes says, the online equivalent of “throwing eggs at the popular kid’s house.”