Swifties Delight, Then Backtracking, Based on Travis Kelce’s Old Tweets

For celebrities riding a wave of fame, this might just be a rite of passage: new scrutiny of old social media posts. This week, it was Travis Kelce’s turn, as Taylor Swift fans delighted in her apparent early 20s boyfriend’s banal tweets.

Then Internet sleuths discovered other tweets — since deleted — that proved more troubling. They showed the future Kansas City Chiefs player commenting on “ugly girls” and “fat people.” Another included an insult that people with disabilities have been asking for a long time people to avoid.

At first, Swift fans found Kelce’s streams of consciousness from over a decade ago on Twitter to be relatable, hilarious, and even endearing.

In a tweet from 2010 which now has more than 16,000 likes. Kelce posted that he didn’t want to work, preferring to “sleep in my bed and do nothing with my life!! »

In other from 2011, he described giving bread to a “squirrel” and how the animal “broke everything!!!! I didn’t know they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy. Users of the old Twitter, now renamed X, have liked this one more than 30,000 times.

It briefly seemed like the two-time Super Bowl champion was “living the most positive version of the internet possible by digging up your tweets from 2011.” wrote Alison Herman, Variety critic.

But later in the week Deleted tweets surfaced in Reddit threads and have been authenticated by the fact-checking site Snopes.

“As a man, you have something wrong with you if you go for girls who weigh more than you!!” Kelce wrote in one post in 2010. In another, he joked about being “attacked by ugly girls.”

Screenshots of these messages circulated on X and Reddit, and archived versions of them still persist. But from Thursday, they seems to have been deleted from his page.

The Kansas City Chiefs did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

In the age of social media, celebrities struggle with the re-emergence of past social media posts, which may be at odds with the image they project.

Chrissy Teigen, a model and cookbook author, for example, had a reputation for being funny online. But in 2021, some of them his publications from the 2010s were highlighted. In these documents, she repeatedly harassed Courtney Stodden, a model who was 16 years old at the time.

Older posts from Iggy Azalea and Kevin Hart also got them in trouble. Azalea, an Australian rapper known for her song “Fancy” came out of an appearance at Pittsburgh Pride in 2015 after his homophobic and racist posts from the early 2010s came to light. Hart, the comedian and actor, resigned as host of the 2019 Oscars after his homophobic posts from around 2011 surfaced.

Fans probably did a lot of investigating around Kelce at first because of the “precedent of the last two people Taylor dated,” said Bobbi Miller, cultural critic and host of the pop culture podcast “The Afternoon Special.” .

The critic notably pointed the finger at Matty Healy, an English singer-songwriter who has been critical because of past racist and sexist comments.

A fan wrote that his posts represented a simpler time on the platform: “Travis Kelce’s old tweets perfectly encapsulate what Twitter used to be. »

“Guys express themselves without fear of being judged during study hall.”

But soon after, fans were turned off by posts they called misogynistic and fatphobic, in which he said big falls were like “slow motion entertainment,” and said he judged passers-by for their “ugly, fat, funny, sexy”. .”

These posts sparked online debate about how Kelce should be judged critically for content he shared more than a decade ago. Pop culture aficionados were also surprised that the intense attention paid to the couple’s apparent budding relationship didn’t lead him to be more careful in deleting his account.

Users found some more minor flaws, ranging from spelling mistakes he made in posts to their lack of sophistication in relation to the lyrics written by Swift, a 12-time Grammy winner whose Eras tour is this year concert records broken.

Fans began speculating that the two were dating shortly before Swift began appearing at a few of the events. Kelce’s football matches in September. The two have also made frequent appearances together, including on “Saturday Night Live” and at Swift’s concert in Buenos Aires, where she changed the lyrics of a song apparently to refer to him.