During her appearance on Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcast in August, Taylor Swift made a shocking assertion. “I’m not an online person at all,” she told Jason. “I’m not, like, on social media like that.” What? Taylor Swift? The girl whose MySpace vlogs I watched in 2008? The same Taylor Swift who kept up a very active Tumblr presence throughout her early 20s? Just a few years ago she was commenting on fan TikToks left and right, but now she claims that she’s “not an online person.”
Well, people are allowed to grow and change. “I do detach from the internet in a huge way,” she said on the podcast. “I’ve had my comments disabled on Instagram for, like, ten years now, and I don’t miss it.” On Friday, Swift appeared on BBC Hits Radio and doubled down on this claim. “I really am not much of a scroller at all,” she said. “I don’t have the apps on my phone.”
While I do believe that Swift has developed a healthy relationship with her phone and is really on her sourdough grind, I find it hard to believe that she is fully offline. Mostly because there are several parts of The Life of a Showgirl that seem ripped straight from TikTok’s “For You” page.
On “The Fate of Ophelia,” Swift sings about “keeping it one hundred” and pledging allegiance to her prince’s “vibes.” We can let those slide, because while that is how people are talking online, it’s also likely that her writing has been influenced by Travis’s lexicon.
However, “Eldest Daughter” is not a song written by someone who is offline. The track’s first verse is about Swift’s disdain for keyboard warriors. “Everybody’s so punk on the internet,” she sings. “Everyone’s unbothered till they’re not / Every joke’s just trolling and memes / Sad as it seems, apathy is hot / Everybody’s cutthroat in the comments.” Later, she plaintively sings, “But I’m not a bad bitch, and this isn’t savage.” What does a Luddite know about bad bitches or, for that matter, savagery?
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Actually, the phrase eldest daughter is itself a bit of a meme. Over the last two years on TikTok, videos using the #EldestDaughter hashtag have been viewed millions of times. In 2021, the singer Isabel Pless wrote a song called “Eldest Daughter,” and the top comment on one of her TikToks about it reads, “This gives me Taylor Swift energy.” Viral video after viral video shows a woman talking about the undue burden placed upon her as the eldest daughter, and I’m to believe that Swift independently stumbled upon this phrasing?
Swift most obviously betrays how online she is on “CANCELLED!,” where she literally cribs a viral TikTok audio in the lyrics. “Did you girlboss too close to the sun?” she asks in the song’s pre-chorus, a direct lift from Caroline Timoney’s massively viral 2021 TikTok, the audio of which was inescapable on the app for months and months. (Timoney has heard the song. “Am I her Shakespeare? Yeah,” she joked in a video on Friday.)
Swift has said that she made this album in 2024 while on the European leg of the Eras Tour. Since then, it’s entirely possible that she’s stopped looking at her phone and fully committed herself to what she’s described as “hobbies you could have had in the 1700s.” Maybe, in 2025, she wasn’t lying when she told Jason that “all I really use the internet for is sourdough.” However, the Swift of 2024, the Swift who was making The Life of a Showgirl? That woman was logged on.
