For celebrities riding the wave of fame, it could well be a rite of passage: a new examination of old social media posts. This week it was Travis Kelce’s turn as Taylor Swift fans rejoiced over banal tweets from her apparent 20-something boyfriend.
Then internet sleuths discovered other tweets – since deleted – that proved more worrying. They showed the future Kansas City Chiefs player commenting about “ugly girls” and “fat people.” Another contained an insult that people with disabilities have long been told to avoid.
At first, Swift’s fans found Kelce’s stream-of-consciousness comments on Twitter from more than a decade ago relatable, hilarious, and even endearing.
In a tweet from 2010 It now has over 16,000 likes. Kelce posted that he didn’t want to work, preferring to “sleep in my bed and not do anything with my life!!”
In another from 2011He described feeding bread to a “squirrel” and how the animal “smashed everything!!!!” I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.” Users of the former Twitter account, now renamed X, have liked it more than 30,000 times.
For a brief time, it seemed as if the two-time Super Bowl champion was “doing the most positive version of the internet by digging up his tweets from 2011.” wrote Alison Herman, critic for Variety.
But later in the week, the deleted tweets appeared in Reddit threads and were authenticated by fact-checking site Snopes.
“As a man, there is something wrong with you if you choose girls who weigh more than you!!!” Kelce wrote in a 2010 post. In another, he joked about being “attacked by ugly girls.”
Screenshots of these posts were shared on X and Reddit, and archived versions of them still exist. But on Thursday they appeared to have been deleted from his page.
The Kansas City Chiefs did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
In the social media age, celebrities have to contend with the resurfacing of past social media posts that may be at odds with the image they project.
For example, Chrissy Teigen, the model and cookbook author, had a reputation online for being funny. But in 2021, some of her contributions from the 2010s have been in the spotlight. In it, she repeatedly harassed Courtney Stodden, a then 16-year-old model.
Previous posts from Iggy Azalea and Kevin Hart have also gotten them into trouble. Azalea, an Australian rapper known for her song “Fancy,” withdrew from a performance at Pittsburgh Pride in 2015 after her homophobic and racist posts from the early 2010s surfaced. Hart, the comedian and actor, resigned as host of the 2019 Oscars after his homophobic posts from 2011 surfaced.
Fans probably sniffed around Kelce so much from the start because “the precedent was the last few people Taylor dated,” said Bobbi Miller, cultural critic and host of the pop culture podcast “The Afternoon Special.”
The critic made particular reference to Matty Healy, an English singer-songwriter who has been criticized for past racist and sexist comments.
one fan wrote that his posts represented a simpler time on that platform: “Travis Kelce’s old tweets perfectly sum up what Twitter once was.”
“Guys who express themselves in the study hall without fear of judgment.”
But not long after, fans were turned off by posts that labeled them misogynistic and fatphobic. In it, he called fat people falling “slow-motion entertainment” and said he judged passers-by as “ugly, fat, funny-looking, sexy.” .”
These posts have sparked debate online about how critically Kelce should be judged for content he shared more than a decade ago. Pop culture lovers were also surprised that the intense focus on the couple’s seemingly budding relationship hadn’t caused him to be more careful about cleaning up his account.
Users found several other minor errors, from spelling mistakes he made in the posts to their lack of sophistication compared to the lyrics written by Swift, a 12-time Grammy winner whose Eras Tour broke concert records this year.
Fans began speculating that the two were a couple shortly before Swift appeared at some of Kelce’s football games in September. The two also appeared together frequently, including on “Saturday Night Live” and at Swift’s concert in Buenos Aires, where she seemingly changed the lyrics to a song as a reference to him.