Doja Cat may have lost 250,000 followers – but the rapper is right to call out ‘creepy’ fans who get too close

The singer has always had a fraught relationship with her fans. This most recent controversial interaction is not a surprise, writes Laura Barton, but it could herald the start of stars retreating from the front lines of social media

Doja Cat has lost 250,000 followers in the last few days (Getty)

It is rare that any star would regard the sudden loss of 250,000 social media followers as a victory, but in the case of Doja Cat, the shedding of hundreds of thousands of fan accounts in just a few short days has been nothing short of a triumph.

Over the past few years, the Californian rapper and singer’s devotees have assembled themselves into a battalion of sorts, labelling themselves “Kittenz”, the better to show their allegiance. Doja Cat has rarely engaged with the term until last weekend, when she took to Threads (Meta’s answer to Twitter) to address the matter in a series of since-deleted tweets. “My fans don’t get to name themselves s***,” the 27-year-old announced. “If you call yourself a ‘Kitten’ or f***ing ‘Kittenz’ that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house.” The Kittenz were aghast. One implored their hero to reassure her fans she still loved them. “I don’t tho cuz I don’t even know y’all,” the rapper replied, describing the extreme levels of worship as “creepy as f***.”

Doja Cat’s relationship with fame has long been highly charged. Earlier this year, her track “Attention” catalogued her frustration with the endless tittle-tattle and dead-eyed devotion that so often hovers around successful figures: “Talk your s*** about me, I can easily disprove it, it’s stupid/ You follow me, but you don’t care about the music.” We’re accustomed to celebrity strops, of course; the acts of wild frustration that erupt when a star’s privacy has been so thoroughly invaded by both the media and the masses that lashing out seems a perfectly reasonable response. One thinks of Britney Spears shaving her head and brandishing an umbrella at the paparazzi, Justin Bieber throttling photographers, or even that day last year when Tom Hanks once told a crush of fans in New York to “back the f*** off” when they almost knocked over his wife, Rita Wilson.