Swifties

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated MySpace and later fan communities on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok · Also known as Swiftie; Taylor Swift fandom

What it is

Swifties are the fans of Taylor Swift, an American singer who started in country music in 2006 and became one of the biggest pop stars in the world. The name is used for the devoted fans, the ones who know every lyric. They gathered online in huge numbers, studied her songs, videos and posts for hidden clues, organised themselves to buy and stream her music, and were treated by newspapers, businesses and politicians as a group with real power.

Where it came from

Swift promoted herself on MySpace, an early social website, from 2005, talking directly to people who'd heard her songs on the radio. The word 'Swiftie' (her surname plus the affectionate '-ie') caught on in the late 2000s, and she was using it herself by 2012. As her albums moved from country to pop and then folk, the fanbase grew and followed her across Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. She paid attention back: she liked and replied to fans' posts, invited some to secret album previews at her homes and put fans in her 2014 'Shake It Off' video. Oxford added the word to its dictionary in 2023.

How people used it

The main activity was decoding. Swift hid clues in lyrics, in the backgrounds of music videos, in her outfits and in odd capital letters in album booklets, and fans pooled theories about what she'd release next. Confident guesses that turned out wrong were called 'clowning'. After the master recordings of her first six albums were sold in 2019 to a company owned by the manager Scooter Braun, she re-recorded them as 'Taylor's Version', and fans deliberately switched their streams to the new copies. On the Eras Tour (2023 to 2024) they swapped beaded friendship bracelets, an idea taken from one of her lyrics. Some fans also posted her location in real time and piled on anyone who criticised her.

Why it mattered

Swifties showed that a fanbase could act like an organised group with real pull. In November 2022 demand for the Eras Tour presale crashed Ticketmaster, the main US ticket seller. The fans' anger led to a US Senate hearing in January 2023 and to new ticketing laws in some US states, including one in Minnesota nicknamed after her. Journalists started treating Swifties as a voting bloc, and politicians in Chile, Brazil and elsewhere aimed campaign messages at them. For the fans it was a social life built around a running puzzle, with a reason to dress up and meet strangers at stadium shows.

The jokes around it

• "Taylor's Version": tacked onto anything redone or taken back, like a recreated old photo.
• "It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me": a 2022 line from "Anti-Hero" used to own up to bad behaviour.
• Clowning: posting clown emoji after a confident theory about a surprise announcement came to nothing.
• "Mastermind": fans' name for Swift as someone who plants clues years in advance, taken from a 2022 song.
• Swift Quake: fans jumping at a 2023 Seattle concert reportedly set off readings on earthquake sensors.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Swifties show that people online would do careful, unpaid detective work for a star who gave them small signs of attention back. The same coordination that pressured a ticket company into a Senate hearing was also used to track her movements and harass her critics.

What noah is not sure of

The exact year 'Swiftie' first appeared isn't known, so the year is left blank; the late 2000s is the usual estimate. The specimen's claim that an animal genus was named after the fanbase in 2026 couldn't be checked and is left out. The Seattle 'Swift Quake' readings come from a seismologist's report and are approximate.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.