The Internet Is in Crisis

Almost 20 years ago, I had tickets to see Amy Winehouse perform in London, at a show that was canceled just an hour before it was scheduled to start. A friend and I went to a nearby hotel bar instead, and not much later, in walked Winehouse herself—tiny, grubby, and completely incoherent. She walked over to us and stared, her eyes both furious and vacant, until someone in her entourage came and dragged her away. I remember the person who flashed to mind in that bizarre moment: the gossip blogger Perez Hilton.

If you weren’t regularly online during the late 2000s, it’s hard to explain how dominant a presence Hilton was—how incessantly he posted about what celebrities might be doing on any given day, how shameless he was about posting upskirt photos, how judgmental his tirades about young women in crisis were. His fiendish MO was lifting pictures from paparazzi agencies and then scribbling penises or obscene epithets on them in order to claim fair use. Hilton—whose real name is Mario Lavandeira Jr.—was particularly cruel about Winehouse, who was being photographed by the celebrity press almost daily in states of disarray. He posted, by turns, about her physical appearance (“super skinny, dirty and wasted”), false rumors of her pregnancy (“We were sure that her ovaries were too gin-soaked to be of any use”), and a performance in which she wasn’t wearing underwear (“Grrrossss!!!!!!!!! Who needs to see cracked out snatch?”).

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PerezHilton.com was relentless and brutal, and its readers could not get enough, especially when the blog’s coverage collided with moments of calamitous celebrity breakdown. (When the actor Lindsay Lohan was arrested in 2007, the site reportedly received 8.8 million pageviews that day.) Since then, the internet has metastasized into something officially kinder—we no longer berate famous people in crisis for sport quite as much as we used to—and quietly more appalling, where irony-poisoned young men broadcast their executions and social-media companies seem to basically shrug in response. And so, on Tuesday night, during what seemed to be a mental-health breakdown of his own, Hilton was able to stream himself live on TikTok cutting himself with a knife for about 15 minutes before his broadcast was finally interrupted.

Any number of Hilton’s followers on TikTok could have clicked on the stream thinking they were going to see a standard broadcast about Ariana Grande or Trader Joe’s ready meals (both of which Hilton had posted about on YouTube in recent weeks). Instead, they got a scene of unimaginable violence. “I am fine with horror/gore, have seen a lot real and fake, and this was so deeply disturbing I could not get the image out of my head all night,” one commenter posted on Reddit. Another added, “I watch cartel torture and beheading videos with no issues. I had to turn the perez video off after about 20 seconds, and I felt deeply disturbed for hours.”

TikTok’s failure to interrupt Hilton’s broadcast for such a long time, even as horrified viewers were reporting it, is astonishing. (A spokesperson for the site told Wired that a “moderator error” caused a delay in removal; another told Vanity Fair that Hilton was persistent in his attempts to broadcast what he was doing, using several different streams to do so.)

[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]

In the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Act shields technology and communication companies from being held legally responsible for third-party content that appears on their platforms. And since Facebook launched livestreaming in 2015, social-media sites have struggled to establish safeguards for atrocities being broadcast in real time, to the point where the phenomenon of people livestreaming their own attempts to die has become “an emerging public health crisis,” in the words of psychology researchers. After a man livestreamed himself killing 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 on Facebook Live, Facebook said it was investing in “technical innovation” to prevent people from abusing its platform. Nevertheless, footage of mass shootings and other atrocities proliferates globally before befuddled tech companies can tie their shoes.

The tone of the contemporary internet is also darker and more nihilist than it has ever been. “Social-media platforms—and especially X—have loosened their grip on moderation at the same time that AI tools have allowed for the easy proliferation of slop,” my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote earlier this year. “Never before has there been so much cynical, cruel content and trolling.”

But the idea that Hilton might end up turning self-harm into content feels particularly fraught. A statement from his family posted online said that the influencer had been “experiencing a severe mental-health crisis,” and that his three children, his niece, and his sister were at home with Hilton when he began hurting himself, although they left immediately “to protect the children from witnessing any further trauma.” Over the past decade and a half, Hilton has tried to pivot away from the bilious celebrity coverage that made him so successful: In a 2010 video, he announced that he would no longer be cruel. But his popularity never quite recovered, and he argued in his 2020 memoir, TMI, that the toxicity of his site was what had appealed to his readers, even if they didn’t want to admit it to themselves: “The more snarky names I gave the celebrities, the more penises or coke or boogers I drew on pictures of them, the more people visited my page.”

It’s also true that PerezHilton.com peaked in its cultural relevance around 2007, the year that celebrity after celebrity seemed to be breaking down in public while pursued by paparazzi on mopeds. That year, Britney Spears shaved her head (when the actor Heath Ledger died in 2008, Hilton sold T-shirts emblazoned with the words Why Couldn’t It Be Britney?), Anna-Nicole Smith overdosed on prescription medication, Lohan was arrested for cocaine possession, Paris Hilton went to jail, and Mischa Barton was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. Hilton documented each of these moments in vivid and elaborate detail—my browser finally quit when I got to page 79 of his archives related to Amy Winehouse—because he understood what people wanted from him and his work. “When Britney Spears was at her wildest, people were glued to my website,” he wrote in TMI.

It’s impossible to know whether this awareness informed what he did to himself this week, and how he did it. Hilton’s breakdown is desperately sad; I’m haunted by the idea of what his children might have seen happen in their home, but also by the idea of what all children might see, at any time, in this hopelessly corrupted and seemingly unsalvageable internet.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.

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