The Swift Life

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Part of a series on Taylor Swift. [View Related Entries]

About

The Swift Life is a social networking app for fans of pop singer Taylor Swift. The app features exclusive content from Swift as well as opportunities for fans to talk to Swift. After launching, the site quickly became a hotbed for controversy as it was flooded by right-leaning, racist and homophobic posts.

History

The Swift Life was developed by Glu Games. It was first announced in October of 2017 and launched on December 14th, 2017 (launch trailer shown below).^[1] It is free to download but in-app purchases can be made. On the app, Swift fans can communicate with one another and potentially talk with Swift, using "extremely rare and valuable Taymoji," which can bump users' posts such that Swift may see them. The app also offers fans the chance for exclusive updates from Swift.^[2]

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Trump-supporting Users Controversy

Shortly after the app launched, it attracted controversy as right-leaning, Trump-supporting users posted inflammatory remarks on the site. The Daily Beast^[3] first covered the phenomenon on December 19th, 2017. One Trump-supporting post reported on by The Daily Beast featured a woman named Britt giving an all-caps screed on why she voted for the President (shown below).

According to The Daily Beast, this led to a political discussion on whether or not it's okay to accept homosexuals (example shown below). The Daily Beast also reported that some fans claimed political posts were deleted by an unseen moderator, while others complained that Americans were ruining the app by talking about politics and not Swift. The controversy was also covered by Fortune^[4] and the Independent.^[5] It was noted in several reports that Swift's silence on politics and her subsection of white supremacist fans brought more attention to the controversy.