Stan culture is proof that people still crave a public burning, only now the flames are tweets, and the stakes are reputations.
In 2015, Justin Bieber posted a photo with Hailey Baldwin. No caption. No context. But for those invested in his on-off relationship with Selena Gomez, it was clear: the replacement had been cast.
At 15, Ellen Conolly, from Leeds, was tweeting anonymously under the pseudonym @SelenasRose. Her bio was a flower emoji. Something soft. Something harmless.
Her first reaction wasn’t.
She tweeted: “Die you Botox witch.”
Later, on Reddit: “If she ever gives birth, I hope that’s what kills her.”
The reaction was instant: likes, retweets, strangers cheering her rage, but by 2022, she deleted the account.
Ellen says: “Being angry all the time wasn’t good for my mental health.”
Admittedly, she still scrolls. Still clicks. Still reads the comments turning silence into confession.
A decade later, Hailey and Selena remain locked in a feud they never chose. The conflicts erupt in cycles. Hailey’s engagement to Justin. Selena’s song lyrics. Paparazzi photos reframed as evidence.
Kristina Busse, who studies fan culture, calls it ‘moral theatre’: a public ritual of judgement, staged for validation. She says: “The stan pile-ons, callouts, loyalty tests, are all modern witch trials.”
The term stan entered pop culture in 2000, from Eminem’s cautionary tale about a fan whose devotion turns deadly. By 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary formalised it: a blend of “stalker” and “fan”, now shorthand for obsessive loyalty.
But obsession alone doesn’t explain what happens when stan culture turns cruel.
Rachel Christ-Doane, director of education at the Salem Witch Museum, says the stan war between Hailey and Selena mirrors the emotional mechanics behind the Salem witch trials in 1692, when more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft in Massachusetts and 19 were executed.
Rachel says: “It wasn’t fear of witches. It was rivalry, suspicion, jealousy.
“The people accused weren’t always outsiders, they were neighbours, ex-friends, even romantic competitors.”
She highlights the case of Rebecca Nurse, a 71-year-old grandmother admired for her piety. Rebecca was accused by a family entangled in a feud over land and social status. Despite 39 neighbours petitioning in her defence, she was hanged.
Rachel says: “She was killed because the community needed someone to blame, and Rebecca disrupted what others believed was theirs.
“Accusations often carried a deeply personal edge, where young women accused their peers or romantic competitors of bewitching them.”
To Ellen, the logic is familiar.
She says: “Hailey wasn’t just another girl, she was stepping into a story people didn’t want rewritten.”
But how did mere belief become enough to condemn?
Rachel points to spectral evidence – testimony not of actions, but visions and dreams. During the trial of Bridget Bishop, the first woman executed in 1692, witnesses claimed her spectre appeared at night, pinching and choking them. No physical proof was needed. Conviction rested on fear and belief.
Today, stan culture follows the same instinct. Hailey’s Instagram posts become confessions. The gaps get filled. What’s unseen is made certain by collective conviction.
Ellen says: “When Hailey stayed silent, we’d twist it into some kind of guilt.
“When people say it was a witch hunt, I can’t argue with them, it was.”
Miranda Corcoran, author of Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture, sees the persistence as more than metaphor. She says: “The term ‘witch hunt’ still circulates in political speeches and tabloid headlines, showing this archetype is embedded in our cultural psyche.
“The reason we keep invoking it is because we haven’t stopped enacting it.”
Modern witch hunts don’t need trials. Just a thread, a whisper, a well-timed edit framed for likes.
Dr Charlotte Millar, a historian who studies witchcraft and gender, says: “In witch trials, women accused women. The betrayals felt personal because these were people they knew. That dynamic hasn’t disappeared; it’s just gone online.”
Online, betrayal often demands a theory.
A YouTube series titled Hailey Bieber’s Dangerous Decade-Long Obsession, which has racked up over two million views, assembles hairstyles, hand gestures and red-carpet moments into a mosaic of ‘evidence’ alleging Hailey’s fixation on Selena.
In the comments, one user writes: “She used witchcraft to trap Justin.”
Another replies: “It’s called destiny swapping, that’s why Selena has lupus.”
“Destiny swapping,” a phrase born in TikTok stan spaces, describes the belief someone has taken a life path never meant for them; superstition dressed up as a dramatic narrative, rooted in instincts that reach back centuries.
Historian Éva Pócs describes this as magical aggression: the belief that witches could siphon health, luck or prosperity from others and redirect it. During the witch trials of the 15th to 17th centuries, illness, infertility or sudden misfortune were rarely seen as accidents. If your child sickened or your crops failed, the explanation wasn’t random, it was theft from your competitor/rival.
Fan scholars argue this logic still drives much of stan culture’s cruelty. Dr. Lucy Bennett, who studies digital fandom, calls this ‘affective truth’: when something feels true enough, no proof is needed.
She says: “What begins as suspicion becomes performance, a ritual of loyalty enacted through condemnation.”
Seen this way, the cruelty is not random, it is righteous. It is about defending the ‘rightful’ story, the ‘rightful’ girl. The fandom feels robbed and demands someone pay.
For Ellen, now 25, fandom was a lifeline. She joined the Selena Gomez community (Selenators) while coming to terms with her sexuality.
She says: “I didn’t have the language for what I was feeling in my personal life.
“But in the fandom, I could express love, devotion and extreme intensity without feeling shameful.”
Ellen says she would wake up, post something about Hailey, get dressed for school, and check for replies at lunch. In a life that often felt invisible, the attention made her feel, briefly, like she mattered.
Fandom gave her structure. Belonging. It felt less like a community and more like a family: tight-knit, intense, unbreakable.
Dr Lyn Zubernis, a clinical psychologist, says fandoms offer a script when identity feels uncertain. A space where intense emotion is organised, bringing people together in collective belief.
To Miranda, the same group dynamics were central to witch trials. She says: ”Targeting someone becomes a way to protect the community, it’s classic mob mentality.”
In 2022, when Hailey publicly asked fans to stop the hate, Ellen stepped away from the stan war. She says: “I realised out of a selfish need to be a part of something, I turned someone into a target.”
Though she sees the harm stan culture can cause, nothing has replaced the purpose and ritual it gave her.
She says: “Despite how cruel it got, it gave the hurt I felt in my personal life a home.”
Stan wars like Hailey versus Selena aren’t rare, but their feud is notable for it’s duration. Zee, a pop culture journalist, says these group dynamics repeat across fandoms, from K-pop to Swifties, even to Marvel.
The weapons have changed: tweets instead of torches, memes instead of gallows. But the choreography remains the same: a rupture, a scapegoat, a crowd convinced it’s delivering justice.
Maybe the question isn’t whether stan culture is a witch hunt.
Maybe it’s why we keep hunting witches we created ourselves.
