You Must Pay the Toll to Pass

Loving you unconditionally does not mean I won’t send in the trolls if you threaten my ego or reputation. It’s not hard for me to do, you understand this by now. My network is so large it’s hard for you to wrap your head around where exactly it begins or ends. I have my recreational alt accounts, my ghost writing accounts, my music career boosting accounts, my paid fans and followers, my romancing catfish, and just my basic trolling accounts. The lines between a lot of these can become blurry. I haven’t been the best at keeping them segregated and organized, you know I’m messy.

A lot of these I outsource to the Philippines and India, inexpensive labor. I’ll get a PR firm or a troll farm there to run things, make comments, create content, etc. They’ll do the work of commenting on posts about my music career, boosting visibility, you know your basic, “Good work bestie” and “We love you king” kinda vibe. But I can also use them in my harassment campaigns against you when you piss me off or start trying to post your evidence online like you have in the past. Once you start acting up it’s not hard to bury you in negativity, discredit the account you’re using and really make you feel ganged up on and alone in the world.

A lot of the content and stuff you think is for or about you, I don’t necessarily have time to write myself. I can give the troll farms writing prompts that have some thread of your personal life in there and just let them go. It will be just a whisper, enough to keep your brains in a mixer trying to figure out what’s happening. The employees don’t have any idea what they’re actually doing. They just think they’re getting paid a couple bucks to populate online accounts with personal sounding stuff, or leave crazy comments and downvotes. I can also log into these accounts personally if I want to add some of my own personalized spiciness.

I know you kind of caught on to some of this in the beginning before I moved most of the work overseas. I had a lot of paid American fan bloggers who would write about my career and fawn over me, dissecting the meaning of my lyrics, things like that. I could see from your browsing history you were skimming through these blogs and I wanted to test you. I had one of the blogs start making many consecutive posts about wanting to commit suicide, to see what you would do. Surprisingly you reached out to him and spent the next few days talking through all his feelings. Quickly you began to feel it was part of a set-up and cut contact but when you checked on the blog a year later there were pictures of me and my brother with this guy. That’s when you made the connection that all my “Number One Fans” were actually my employees and the only “fans” who were ever allowed to meet me in person or take photos with me. I don’t have the stomach for meeting random strangers after shows but I want to appear as if I’m a nice guy. You really took a beating when you tried calling me out on that. I love watching a good take down.

So please stop blaming me for the things they say. I’m not the one actually writing that stuff so I can’t be held personally responsible. Even the ones I do write, you don’t know for sure if it’s me doing it so how can you say you have a right to be angry? I’m the guy who loves you, always showing up with your best interests at heart. Don’t you forget it, babe.