Source : the age
For weeks, the name “Kath Ebbs” is all over my TikTok. Ebbs, an Australian actor, presenter, writer and content creator, is also at the centre of international news headlines, their smiling face plastered on the homepages of TMZ and People and OK! Magazine.
While Ebbs (who uses they/them pronouns) has had a somewhat public career, they’re not used to this kind of fame. The kind that compromises your privacy and your safety. The kind that involves being hounded by journalists overseas, being tagged in tens of thousands of comments, being fodder for a viral conversation online. Millions of people around the globe are clicking on Ebbs’ name, but Kath Ebbs, the person, is not OK.
When I meet them about a fortnight after the storm has died down, Ebbs describes it as “some of the darkest times mentally that I’ve had in my adult life – really distressing, really confusing, really overwhelming”.
The world has followed JoJo Siwa growing up, from loving hair bows at age 11 to a very different look as an adult singer.Credit: Compiled by Bethany Rae.
Six months ago, Ebbs started dating American singer, dancer, actress and media personality JoJo Siwa. Siwa, 21, first appeared on popular reality show Dance Moms when she was 11 years of age, and has since released music that has been streamed billions of times. Siwa’s line of hair bows were so popular that schools in Britain had to ban them. She’s featured in films and TV shows on Nickelodeon, performed world tours, competed on The Masked Singer in the US, as well as Dancing with the Stars, and has been a judge on So You Think You Can Dance.
In April this year, with her relationship with Ebbs already in the public eye, Siwa flew to London and entered the Celebrity Big Brother UK house. The attention began when Siwa appeared – on international television screens and in countless social media clips – to be falling in love with English TV personality and sports presenter Chris Hughes. Then, following the finale and the afterparty, where Ebbs was dumped in a “humiliating” way, the attention turned to the fallout. And fallout is blockbuster entertainment.
US reality star JoJo Siwa and Australian Kath Ebbs were in a relationship (pictured here with Chris Hughes). When they broke up the whole world had thoughtsCredit: Fairfax Media
Ebbs posted a 13-minute video that they deleted, then re-uploaded, then deleted again. Siwa addressed the break-up in podcast and television interviews. This fallout caught fire and followers, and even those who didn’t follow, couldn’t help but read and inhale content about this high-profile lesbian relationship.
Last year, actor Blake Lively started trending on TikTok for her “tone-deaf” promotional tour for the film It Ends with Us. A few clips were stitched together to build an image of someone who was behaving in a way that was too cavalier, too self-involved, too light-hearted for a movie about domestic violence.
Every sound bite was analysed through that prism, and then, as they always do, people started digging. Wider media caught onto the story and old interviews were resurfaced and torn to shreds, with one journalist even sharing a tense exchange with the actor from eight years earlier. Months later, Lively sued her co-star and the director of the film, Justin Baldoni, for sexual harassment and retaliation. Baldoni fired back with a $400 million lawsuit, accusing Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, of defamation and civil extortion.
It would be impossible to quantify the hours of online attention that have been dedicated to stories like Lively’s and Ebbs’. The videos with millions of views, the articles with extensive traffic, the comments and the interactions and the shares.
This kind of content is a money-making machine for tech companies and media companies and advertisers and individual creators. Now that we live online, there’s an insatiable demand for more and more fresh content. Media sites need it. Social media algorithms need it. And stories involving real people, of course, make the best content. It’s better than a movie or Netflix series. And the algorithm that does the heavy lifting for advertisers knows it.
But for the people involved, the people it’s about, there’s a human cost so great they’re willing to fight in court over it.
I’ve worked in digital media for more than a decade, and when you’re swimming in news and pop culture stories, when you’re pursuing clicks, when you’re living and breathing “content”, people stop being people. They’re avatars. They’re two-dimensional images. They’re a series of letters at the end of the URL of a viral article. You’re not thinking about whether they might see the content about them, and how it might make them feel. About the nuances of their lived experience.
The algorithm couldn’t get enough of Blake Lively’s (here with husband Ryan Reynolds) feud with her It Ends with Us co-star and director Justin Baldoni.Credit: Getty Images
As clips of Siwa in the Big Brother house went viral on TikTok, and viewers were begging for a response, and media outlets were running stories, Ebbs was trying to understand what was happening to her relationship via a reality TV show and dealing with the emotions surrounding her father, who had just had a stroke.
“I stopped watching,” Ebbs says. “I couldn’t watch it. It was ruining me. I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to survive this.”
I asked Ebbs why they chose to stay silent, not posting to social media (though they did post and take down a video), not responding to requests for comment. It must be difficult to judge whether feeding the media beast will satiate the public, and shut it all down, or just make it hungrier.
“I didn’t want to … involve myself in the celebrity of it all because the celebrity of it all was what was causing me so much distress,” Ebbs says.
“It was why people were hounding me, why people were commenting, why there was paparazzi outside my house.”
Ebbs’ desire to tell their side of this messy, painful story now – in a non-monetised interview with me on their podcast Conversations with Kath – comes from the sense that their voice has been taken away. By virtue of being in the public eye, they had the choice of staying silent and being beaten (the commentary online has been vicious, about Ebbs and the nature of their relationship), or speaking up and being beaten. They chose the latter because they want the public to know that human beings are not content. That social media dehumanises us.
“There were so many points within this where I thought about not being here because I was like, I can’t deal with this. I feel so misunderstood. I feel like everyone’s coming for me. “Everyone can see it. I feel humiliated. This is never going to go away. People won’t leave me alone. My voice has been taken away … I actually don’t want to be here.”
For me as an interviewer, it’s an arresting moment. It’s been my job to turn people and their pain into content. To assume that if someone has a public profile, they’ve consented to becoming a character in a story. But across from me is a person called Kath Ebbs. Heartbroken and frustrated and haunted. Wanting only what the rest of us want: to be understood.
