There has been growing resentment towards celebrities and influencers in light of the ongoing Israel war on Gaza against Palestinians and in the wake of the recently concluded Met Gala, social media users are now blocking them on these platforms with the Block Out 2024 trend.
It all started with people online comparing Suzanne Collins’ YA franchise, The Hunger Games and this year’s Met Gala.
The red carpet event theme was “The Garden of Time” from J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of the same title. In this story, Count Axel and his Countess wife live inside a flower-laden and prestigious walled villa while a mob approaches. The wife and count picked time flowers from their groves to manipulate time and space, rewind time and protect themselves from the mob by flinging them back. The flower beds eventually run empty and the wall gets breached, the mob destroys the house and the two die as they turn to stone. The dystopian short story shows the unstoppable onslaught of popular change.
Block Out 2024 was triggered by a video by influencer Hayley Kalil popularly known as Haylee Baylee posted a video on TikTok saying “Let them eat cake” which was the last straw to break the camel’s back. The offensive phrase is said to have been spoken by a princess in 18th-century France to show elitism and it triggered people to start Blockout 2024 or as tiktok user Rae “ladyfromtheoutside” called it “digital guillotine” in her stitch video.
“It’s time for the people to conduct what I call a ‘digital guillotine’.’ A ‘Digitine’, if you will. It’s time to block all the celebrities, influencers and wealthy socialites who are not using their resources to help those in dire need,” she says in her video.
The Block Out 2024 trend has gone viral with TikTok users joining in with their videos sharing influencers and celebrities they’ve blocked. This trend has started working with them losing followers. Even if you don’t follow them, users are being urged to go and block them.
And it’s messing with brands who work with celebrities and influencers as their ads are not reaching consumers and companies begin losing revenue and dropping profits.
Now content creators have started talking about Palestine and users have been smart enough to notice how scared they are asking their followers to donate in their GoFundMe links when they could contribute by themselves.
This trend has also highlighted celebrities who have been vocal about what is going on in Palestine even before Block Out 2024 like The Weeknd, Quannah Chasinghorse, Kehlani, Melanie Martinez, Jesse Williams, Macklemore, Mark Ruffalo, Melissa Barrera, Amerie, Mahershala Ali, Susan Sarandon, Hozier, Renée Rapp, Gigi Hadid, Bella Hadid, Khalid Abdalla, Kid Cudi, Ramy Youssef, Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas, Ava DuVernay, Nicola Coughlan, Pedro Pascal, Indya Moore, Angelina Jolie, Hunter Schafer, Lena Headey, Sara Ramirez, Annie Lennox, Rachel Zegler, and Boygenius
TikTok users are even sharing tips to quickly block celebrities and influencers and their businesses such as checking their following list or going to Wikipedia to view lists of the most followed TikTok and Instagram accounts because the platform has entire lists of these accounts with links to them. This also includes companies that support Israel.
And people are actually having fun doing this
For those looking to help, check out this link.
