From a young age, I’ve always loved and idolized Taylor Swift.
However, as I’ve grown up, I’ve learned a crucial lesson — the importance of being able to think critically about the things and people we love. Our bias toward things we have affection for can often cloud our vision and make it harder to critique and assess things for what they really are.
Blindly loving someone is dangerous because we become unable to use proper judgement. This is something that happened to me with Swift. I looked at her and saw a glimmering superstar who had never done anything wrong in her life.
But, like everyone else, she’s human. She makes mistakes and she has faults. While I don’t endorse Taylor Swift haters who go on the internet and hound her as rage bait, I think it’s important to acknowledge these mistakes and think critically about them.
The biggest thing that has disappointed me about Swift is her lack of advocacy. For a large part of her life, Swift didn’t get into politics at all. However, this changed when she urged her fans to vote in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections in Tennessee. She explained in the 2020 documentary “Miss Americana” why she decided to break her silence on politics, claiming that she couldn’t sit by while people’s rights were being taken away.
In 2020, she endorsed Joe Biden during the U.S. presidential election, and continued this support in the 2024 election by endorsing Kamala Harris, writing in an Instagram caption: "I'm voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them."
In the first 24 hours after posting it, about 406,000 people clicked on a link to Vote.gov included in the Instagram post. The CEO of Vote.org, Andrea Hailey, stated Swift’s “impact on voter engagement is undeniable.”
Additionally, after announcing her endorsement, initiatives were made to target younger voters by using Taylor Swift “branding.” In Vermont, multiple organizations came together to set up voter registration booths at Essex Cinemas during the opening weekend of "The Eras Tour” film. The Democratic National Committee also created a Taylor Swift-themed “I Will Vote” compaign during the last leg of “The Eras Tour” that included Snapchat filters with Taylor Swift lingo like “In My Voting Era” and billboards close to concert venues that encouraged young voters to be in their “Kamala era.” However, none of these initiatives were organized by Swift herself.
While Swift made a big deal about speaking out on political matters in “Miss Americana,” she has rarely commented on politics since, most recently only posting about her upcoming album “The Life of a Showgirl” instead of anything else going on in the world.
I am a firm believer that having a platform is one of the biggest powers a person can have, and, as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility.
If you have a platform, especially one of Swift’s scale, I believe you have a responsibility to use it to promote change. Platforms can help inform people, increase donations and get the world talking about problems that are often overlooked.
Swift undoubtedly has one of the biggest platforms in the world, with approximately 282 million followers on Instagram alone. When she went on the podcast “New Heights,” hosted by her fiancé, Travis Kelce, and his brother, Jason Kelce, the episode garnered 22 million views after only two weeks — around 60 times more than their other episodes. This is the magnitude of the “Taylor Swift effect.”
Imagine if that kind of reach could be used to draw attention to topics actually affecting the world, like the Israel-Hamas war. Despite the bloodshed and war crimes that have been committed in Gaza for almost two years, Swift has not once spoken out about it. Even injustices happening within the U.S., which she has claimed to care about in the past, she has not stood up about.
I think the reason she doesn’t speak out about these things is because Taylor Swift is, above all else, a business woman. She knows that speaking about “controversial” topics, even when it relates to basic human rights, could make her lose half her audience, and despite being at the top of the industry, she can’t have that.
This is what I find so frustrating about Swift. She seems to always put her reputation, numbers and charts above everything else. Even now, when she is the most successful a person could be, she cannot let go of the desire for more. While she may lose some fans for speaking out about current issues, it wouldn’t even make a dent into her career. And even if it did, I wish she cared more about the fans that are aligned with her views, rather than making everyone happy.
There are several artists that use their platforms for advocacy. Take the “Take Me to Church” singer, Hozier. He said in an interview that for him “music is political no matter what... If something concerns the experience of people, it concerns some political dimension.” He makes a speech at each of his shows urging fans to “support a meaningful political solution for the kind of violence we’ve been seeing on our TV screens over the last two years.” Hozier has a much smaller following compared to Taylor Swift, and yet he has never backed away from using his platform as a gateway for change, regardless of what fans he may lose in the process.
Other people within the music industry have also been speaking out about issues in the U.S. as well as the Israel-Hamas war, including Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Lorde, Green Day and Coldplay. These artists have large audiences, and yet they still decided to use their platforms for good.
If Taylor Swift were to take five minutes out of her day to repost information about what is happening in Gaza and how the general public can help, I guarantee there would be a visible global impact through donations and media coverage. If she can go through the trouble of posting about “Happy Gilmore 2,” urging people to watch it just because her fiancé is in it, I feel like she could do the same, only urging people to take action for Gaza and problems in the U.S. instead.
As a Swiftie, I hope that Taylor does better and starts advocating for human rights because I genuinely believe she could inspire real change in the world if she were to let go of her people-pleasing nature and harness the full potential of her platform.
