Teen Vogue has done it again: It’s trending on Twitter for saying something over-the-top. “Accused war criminal and torture defender dead at 88,” reads its tweet on the death of Donald Rumsfeld. The tweet currently has around 8,000 retweets and 24,000 likes.
It’s obvious what the publication is doing because it has done this before. Teen Vogue’s business model is to tweet out something incendiary every once in a while to drive Twitter engagement because otherwise hardly anyone would know it exists.
It’s easy to think the publication is influential. It has 3.2 million followers on Twitter, and it carries the name of one of the most prominent fashion magazines in the world. But if you look at more than just the incendiary tweets, you’ll find that hardly anyone cares about anything Teen Vogue puts out.
Scrolling through Teen Vogue’s Twitter feed, you’ll find the kind of stories you’d expect from a teen-fashion magazine. June 25: “The Best Drugstore Shampoo for Your Hair Type.” June 26: “Your Summer of Romance, by Zodiac Sign.” June 27: “Hailey Bieber Just Wore a $72 Handbag.” June 28: “Lizzo Wore a Corset with Her Own Face on It.” June 29: “21 Questions Game: Dig Deep with Fun and Flirty Questions.” Then, June 30: “Accused war criminal and torture defender dead at 88.”
One of these things is not like the others.
Why does Teen Vogue tweet stuff like this? Look at the engagement numbers. The stories from June 25 through June 29 that I listed above have, one, one, two, two, and four retweets, respectively. The Rumsfeld tweet has over 8,000. Teen Vogue is responding to incentives.
To repeat, Teen Vogue has 3.2 million Twitter followers. Yet its account regularly gets single-digit retweets for content geared to a teenage-girl audience. If you’re assuming people follow Teen Vogue for fashion tips, only getting one or two people out of 3.2 million to retweet content they’re interested in is stunningly bad.
It’s not that teenage girls don’t care about fashion. They just don’t care what some journalist who works for Conde Nast has to say about it. They care much more about what YouTubers or Instagram influencers say. Many fashion brands have realized this and ink sponsorship deals with YouTubers or Instagram influencers to promote their products.
That helps explain why writing about fashion is failing, but it doesn’t fully explain the pivot to politics. To explain that, you must know that Twitter thrives on incendiary political content, as the previous president of the United States demonstrated so often. And it’s more than that: According to the Pew Research Center, the top 10 percent most-active tweeters create 80 percent of all tweets and are “much more likely to be women and more likely to say they regularly tweet about politics” than other Twitter users. Factor in that Twitter users are more likely to be young and more likely to be Democrats than the average American, and the highest probability to go viral is to post left-wing feminist political content. They’re just playing to the largest crowd.
Even though it hasn’t put out a print magazine since 2017, Teen Vogue continues to exist. So every once in a while, Teen Vogue posts something incendiary to get attention. The people who run it know most of their Twitter followers really don’t care about teen-fashion news. They know if they tweet something insane every once in a while and get conservatives to start dunking on it, that’s a surefire way to get social-media engagement, so that’s what they do.
Conservatives don’t need to be concerned about Teen Vogue turning the youth socialist. The youth aren’t reading it. After Teen Vogue published one crazy article in 2018 (it has used this strategy for a while), Tiana Lowe of the Washington Examiner found that, based on web-traffic data, only 4.3 percent of Teen Vogue’s audience was under 24 years old. After a 2019 article that portrayed prostitution as just another career choice, Madeline Fry Schultz, also in the Examiner, wrote that, since the publication has demonstrably failed to reach young audiences, it has to try something else. “If it gets clicks from middle-aged feminists,” Schultz wrote, “then Teen Vogue has found, finally, some success.”
The only thing teen about Teen Vogue is its business model: Act out every once in a while to get attention from a world that’s not currently giving it to you. We would all be wise to stop giving it.
So why am I giving Teen Vogue attention right now? So that I never have to again. In about a month, a crazy article about how we need to normalize bestiality or something will appear in the publication, and everyone will want to dunk on it. Just ignore it, and the incentive to create crazy content will go away.