Celebs are being despatched to the ‘Digitine’ in the event that they utter pro-Israel views

Many celebrities live and breathe for a bit of recognition on social media. But there is one form of online acknowledgement that they have started to dread — with good reason.

In recent weeks unlucky stars — be they singers, actors or amorphous ‘influencers’ — have been hauled on to the chopping ‘block of the day’ and metaphorically executed before a cheering online mob. Echoes of the bloody French Revolution are entirely intentional.

This so-called ‘digitine’, or digital guillotine, is reserved for unfortunates deemed by the ‘people’ — in this case self-appointed judges on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram — to have failed in their duty to speak out in support of the Palestinian cause.

Although the reputation executioners at blockout2024.org haven’t formally added any offender to its ‘block of the day’ list since Hailey Bieber, socialite model wife of Justin, was digitined a couple of weeks ago, plenty of others have stepped into the breach and supplied their own villains.

Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood currently finds himself the target of pro-Palestinian detractors who claim that he is ‘artwashing genocide’ by collaborating with an Israeli artist and performing in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago. Greenwood has rightly condemned the online attacks as ‘unprogressive’ and ‘silencing’.

Any more insubordination like that and he can surely expect to find himself joining Hailey Bieber. She is already in exalted company on the blockout list.

Singers Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Selena Gomez, actresses Zendaya and Drew Barrymore, the Kardashians (all of them) and Hailey’s husband himself are all on the list.

Not even Oprah Winfrey, compassionate confessor of Harry and Meghan and patron of all good causes, has escaped the fury of Blockout 2024 and its zealous moralists.

The above celebrities, it is claimed, ‘support Gaza genocide’ because they have failed to use their fame to condemn Israel and highlight the plight of Palestinians.

If this smacks of the darkest days of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Stalin’s Russia, the punishment is decidedly 21st-century. Supporters are urged to ‘block’ these traitors en masse across a range of social media platforms.

Blocking someone is not the same as simply ‘unfollowing’, the normal procedure for making sure you don’t receive that person’s messages or see their posts on sites such as Instagram, Facebook or X (formerly Twitter).

A full-scale block means cutting off any contact whatsoever: you can’t see their profile or their messages, and they can’t see yours, including all of your personal information.

This is a crucial and potentially very expensive development for ‘influencers’ and anyone else who wants to make money by promoting products online.

If you block them, they can’t promote anything to you. And if they are blocked widely enough, a great deal of money could be at stake. Estimates vary widely as to how effective this latest iteration of ‘cancel culture’ is proving — but it is clearly having a significant impact.

According to online analysis company Social Blade, many names on the lists have lost tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers every day since the ‘digitine’ started slicing through follower counts last month.

Taylor Swift lost 300,000 TikTok followers in a week from her total of 32 million. Beyonce lost 186,000 and Gen Z singer Billie Eilish lost 137,000 followers.

Blockout’s anonymous organisers claim that Kim Kardashian lost three million followers overnight, although Social Blade suggests the hit was closer to 123,000 Instagram followers in one day, with a total of 810,000 followers lost on the platform in the course of a month.

Kardashian has 362 million followers on Instagram alone, so she is hardly reaching for the smelling salts. But lesser celebrities seem worried.

With Blockout 2024 gaining momentum, stars — including American singer Lizzo and ‘internet personality’ Chris Olsen — are putting out their first videos requesting donations to help Palestinians after featuring on the list. Even human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, wife of actor George, was criticised by Blockout supporters for failing to speak out about Gaza.

Although she wasn’t officially digitined, it appears she was at pains to defend herself. When she finally revealed her behind-the-scenes work to prosecute Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes, in a jab at online detractors who’d rushed to judgment, she added pointedly in a statement: ‘My approach is not to provide a running commentary of my work.’

While pro-Palestinians have spent months on social media pressing celebrities to speak out on Gaza, the trigger for the digitine came at New York’s glitzy Met Gala on May 6. For those itching to find fault with out-of-touch celebrities, this year’s ball — famous for its ostentatious fashion statements and general air of monied excess — was judged particularly inappropriate as the photo galleries of guests in all their finery emerged alongside images of contrasting misery and bloodshed.

That same night, Israel had started its assault on the Gazan city of Rafah.

Haley Kalil, a former US model and social media star, riled the Gala’s critics still further when she posted a TikTok video of herself wearing an elaborate 18th-century gown and headdress, Marie Antoinette-style, while lip-synching the line famously attributed to the doomed queen of France: ‘Let them eat cake.’

Already angered by the failure of the Gala’s guests to make suitable pious statements about the Middle East, Gen Z — the woke, TikTok-savvy generation born between the late 1990s and early 2000s — was incensed. It didn’t seem to matter that Kalil hadn’t even been a Gala guest. Or that

she denied she’d been referring to Gaza.

A TikTok user calling herself ‘ladyfromtheoutside’ nevertheless stepped in and, warming to the Marie Antoinette theme, issued a revolutionary demand on video. Posing in front of a picture of a guillotine, she said: ‘It’s time for people to conduct what I want to call a digital guillotine. A ‘digitine’ if you will.

‘It’s time to block all celebrities, influencers and wealthy socialites who are not using their resources to help those in dire need. We gave them their platforms, it’s time to take it back. Take our views away, our likes, our comments, our money by blocking them on all social media and digital platforms.’

And so Blockout 2024 was born. The first sentenced to digital death was, predictably, Kalil herself — who had ‘done nothing’ with her ’10 million-follower platform as people are starving and dying’.

TikTokers have been gleefully packing them off in the tumbrils ever since.

There are few clear criteria as to who should be executed online. In fact, there are several rival lists floating around — compiled by so-called ‘netizens’, not all of whom have done their research.

Selena Gomez, for instance, wrote to Joe Biden calling for a ceasefire in November, but got the chop all the same. Some marketing experts say there’s little evidence that celebrity intervention has changed the course of geopolitics. Even the advent of social media, and the potential financial power it gives users over celebrities if they act together, won’t end wars.

But that won’t stop the Gen-Z ‘netizens’ nor this particular campaign of online retribution — or those that will no doubt follow.

Others, meanwhile, might think that stars who make a living cosying up to their followers on social media have only themselves to blame when their combustible fans find reasons to criticise. Or that, perhaps, celebrities on the make should take the rough with the smooth…