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Once celebrity gossip had a home in the columns of publications like People <\/em>magazine or The Daily Mail<\/em>, and popular blogs like LaineyGossip and Perez Hilton; now celebrity dirt is sprawled across Instagram. Ever since The Shade Room recreated the tabloid magazine for the app in 2014 with a focus on Black celebrities, celeb gossip accounts with far less legitimacy have proliferated on the platform. There are accounts like @tiktokroom<\/a>, for TikTok personality gossip, and @overheardcelebs<\/a>, which brands itself as the \u201canti-gossip\u201d account for benign stories of celebrity encounters.<\/p>\n The Instagram account @DeuxMoi, which posts anonymously submitted anecdotes of celeb encounters and sightings, has been acclaimed as \u201cthe Internet\u2019s best gossip<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cthe best gossip site<\/a>.\u201d But rather than fill their Stories with lurid screenshots detailing the divorces, adultery, and silly transgressions of stars, @DeuxMoi for the most part keeps it pretty tame: details of Olivia Wilde\u2019s skincare routine, a Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet spotting at a West Village cafe, industry baseball blind items, and the occasional scoop, like when the account reported that Colin Jost and Scarlett Johansson were getting married. It\u2019s a far cry from what the aggressive and invasive tabloids of the early \u201900s and the snarky gossip blogs that would follow their lead made their bread and butter: stoning celebrities in the digital town square with crude insults and embarrassing paparazzi photos.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That\u2019s on purpose. \u201cSomebody\u2019s going to message me and say like, so-and-so was caught doing drugs at a party or having a threesome or whatever,\u201d the anonymous owner of @DeuxMoi told <\/a>The New York Times.<\/em> \u201cIt\u2019s just not as exciting as it sounds anymore.\u201d Instagram accounts like @DeuxMoi, as well as @overheardcelebs and @commentsbycelebs, tend to traffic largely in banal, personal stories about celebrities. \u201cOur whole goal is that we would never want the person in the picture to look at it and be like, \u2018Wow, really sucks that they posted that,\u2019\u201d the co-creator of @commentsbycelebs told<\/a> Vox\u2019s Rebecca Jennings. What constitutes celeb gossip now, casual anecdotes of celebrity encounters and spottings, stands in opposition to the salacious, now criticized era of celebrity gossip that came before it, in which clownish bloggers like Perez Hilton scrawled penises on photos of celebrities.<\/p>\n Before social media disrupted the celebrity journalism industry, gossip blogs did the same decades ago. In the mid-\u201900s blogs like Crazy Days and Nights, Lainey Gossip, PopSugar, and Bossip emerged in a moment of non-stop celebrity media coverage. It was the era of Us Weekly<\/em>\u2019s \u201cStars, They\u2019re Just Like Us\u201d feature, which would remake mundane celebrity sightings into spectacle, and the debut of TMZ<\/em>. The paparazzi hounded young celebrities like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and printed their weakest moments and breakdowns in photos gobbled up by tabloid magazines and websites. And the new names in gossip<\/a> like Elaine Lui, Jared Eng, Michael K, and Crazy Days and Nights\u2019 mysterious Enty had snarky, recognizable voices as they moved celebrity coverage online while the old-school press slept on it. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n But the difference between an account like @Deuxmoi and its blog predecessors is how remarkably voiceless it is, beyond the anonymity of the account\u2019s creator. There is no analysis like Elaine Lui might offer, or crude comments like Perez once delivered. Instead, @DeuxMoi seems to have no curating whatsoever, a stream of copy-and-pasted texts about celebs spotted walking their dogs or images of celebrities eating at restaurants, and \u201cstudio execs\u201d confirming projects are being shot. There are some revelations, like when the account broke the story that celebrity Hillsong Church pastor Carl Lentz was fired<\/a> for \u201cmoral failures,\u201d but often the posts are so tedious you might get better drama from reading a suburban middle schooler\u2019s group chat. @DeuxMoi is not the \u201cjuiciest\u201d new outlet for celeb gossip so much as it\u2019s a public bulletin board littered with even the most boring scraps of celebrity comings and goings, more dedicated to quantity over quality.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s also explicitly a free-for-all in terms of truth. \u201cthis account does not claim any information published is based in fact,\u201d the account\u2019s bio reads. In an interview<\/a> with Vanity Fair, <\/em>the original creator (who may or may not still be attached to the account) admitted that not only does she not research any of the stories she receives, she also published information she believed to be false. The account, the VF<\/em> piece reported, has likely managed to avoid liability so far because it posts stories received verbatim as a screenshot. It also regularly deletes offending material because it automatically disappears in the Instagram Stories feature, the only place @DeuxMoi actually posts gossip. And while @DeuxMoi\u2019s owner says they try to discern between what\u2019s submitted by publicists or rabid fandoms and regular readers, she says<\/a> she sometimes just posts them anyway. <\/p>\n But are fleeting celebrity encounters like what @DeuxMoi and @overheardcelebs post actually gossip? For the most part, they\u2019re barely newsworthy, inoffensive posts that celebrate famous people being surprisingly kind (Daisy Ridley gave me<\/a> a tampon! Kelly Rowland paid for<\/a> my cream cheese!) Other times people take to social media to share how rude certain celebrities have been to service workers, like when TikTok user @juliacarolann said in a video<\/a> from last July that she had met Hailey Baldwin a handful of times working as a hostess in New York City and that \u201cevery time she was not nice.\u201d Baldwin later apologized in the comments, writing that she was \u201csorry if I\u2019ve ever given you bad vibes or a bad attitude. That\u2019s not ever my intention!\u201d<\/p>\n There is power in stories about how celebrities treat the unfamous, from rank-and-file production workers to restaurant waiters and hostesses. Sometimes these interactions can be more revealing than a PR-approved multi-page magazine cover story, a glimpse at how the rich and famous encounter the civilians who serve them. When the entertainment press is too often governed by the interests of studios and publicists, and celebrities forgo the media to control their image via social media, these stories of bad behavior can break through a star\u2019s highly manicured reputation. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Anyone with a TikTok, Twitter account, or podcast can now drop secret insight about a celebrity, and a small admission can then become a national news story. After a comedian Kevin T. Porter requested stories<\/a> on Twitter about Ellen DeGeneres being \u201cone of the meanest people alive\u201d in April 2020, thousands of people replied, some alleging that she was rude to her staff, which news outlets like Buzzfeed then reported out<\/a>. In 2019 an anonymous caller dialed into the podcast Britney\u2019s Gram <\/em>and claimed they were a paralegal for a lawyer representing Spears and that her father was instrumental in canceling her Vegas residency. The unverified call helped jumpstart the #FreeBritney<\/a> movement, a group of activists who protest Spears\u2019s father being her conservator in a controversial arrangement.<\/p>\n While @Deuxmoi doesn\u2019t shy away from posting criticism of celebrities, the easily digestible nuggets of celebrity news the account offers tend to approach famous people with adoration. When @DeuxMoi and @overheardcelebs post cute first-person stories about brushing against celebrities, they tend to be gushy and reverent of these stars. Submissions romanticize even the most basic encounters into something enlightening, even if it\u2019s as boring as a celebrity being \u201cchill\u201d when they\u2019re ordering an orange juice at a diner. These \u201canti-gossip\u201d accounts basically traffic in the same content as \u201cStars, They\u2019re Just Like Us,\u201d but with the added intimacy of a fannish bystander. The draw doesn\u2019t seem to be necessarily the content of these stories but the realization that if this person could meet a sitcom star in the flesh and bask in her normalcy, so can you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The new wave of \u201canti-gossip\u201d accounts still treat celebrities as otherworldly specimens, and at worst they contribute to the idea that gossip that paints celebrities in an unflattering light is inherently bad, even in a moment when gossip about the rich and powerful has never been more potent. In the wake of #MeToo, stories that were once derided as hard-to-pin-down, frivolous rumors about a celebrity\u2019s personal life by the press (Harvey Weinstein\u2019s predatory behavior, allegations that Louis C.K. masturbated in front of women without their consent) became hard news. A collection of stories about DeGeneres being \u201cmean\u201d on Twitter turned into reportage on her toxic workplace. In another era the racism of celebrities like Vanderpump Rules<\/em>\u2019 Stassi Schroeder, actress Ali Larter<\/a>, singer Morgan Wallen<\/a>, would likely have been brushed off; now it\u2019s a major news story.<\/p>\n The softness of these new gossip accounts may be a backlash to the cruel gossip industry that preceded it, but anti-gossip accounts\u2019 polite reticence still feeds into a machine that valorizes celebrity, pampering the famous already well-pampered by entertainment outlets that want to stay on good terms. But if you\u2019re looking for a way to indulge in celebrity stories without really confronting their dark side, @DeuxMoi\u2019s Instagram stories are right there waiting for you. <\/p>\n (Updated 3\/2\/22 with new details)<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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