How Rare Beauty founder and Emilia Pérez star Selena Gomez became an internet lightening rod
There are three things guaranteed in life: death, taxes, and Selena Gomez pissing off the internet.
The latest instance occurred on Jan. 27, when Gomez posted (and quickly deleted) an Instagram Story of herself crying in response to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, including increased ICE raids and mass deportations. “I’m so sorry,” said Gomez, who’s half-Mexican and whose paternal grandparents came to the United States undocumented. “All my people are getting attacked, the children. I don’t know what to do. I’ll try everything. I promise.”
It wasn’t an uncommon sentiment to see online at the time, or from Gomez, who has advocated for DREAMers and better immigration policies. She was also a co-executive producer in the 2019 Netflix docuseries Living Undocumented. Still, from one of the internet’s most unlikely but repeatedly controversial figures, the emotional outpouring didn’t quite land — even among those who might have shared the same feelings. Some critics claimed Gomez, a heavily followed billionaire, could’ve done more to help at-risk immigrants than post a video. Others suggested she was a hypocrite for acting in the controversial Oscar-nominated film Emilia Pérez, which has been lambasted for its sensational depiction of the Mexican border.
MAGA, including two Trump-appointed officials, inevitably joined the chorus of boos, denouncing Gomez’s sympathy for so-called criminals. A former Republican Senate candidate tweeted that she should be deported.
It’s an unusual feat, making polar-opposite sides of the internet equally furious over the handling of an issue like deportation. And yet it’s the kind of fury Gomez repeatedly inspires.
In the peak of her career, Gomez is a successful multihyphenate, tabloid fixture, and reported billionaire. Her public persona, calcified through her character on Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, is a fairly reserved millennial, introspective, and often struggling with mental health or even confidence issues. At the same time, Gomez has earned a bizarre reputation for her incendiary social media presence. It’s not that she has a notable track record of offensive tweets (a la her Emilia Pérez co-star Karla Sofía Gascón) or getting into nasty fights with other people online — although, her name has been caught up in some silly beefs. Nor can she be classified as a nefarious or provocative celebrity. Her online activity is mostly nothing more than messy; a relatively benign disaster.
It’s partly the result of a very strange and scattered career that’s been prone to scrutiny since she was a child star, but Gomez also has a unique penchant for stepping into chaotic situations. All in all, she remains one of the most mystifying and paradoxical celebrities of the current century. She’s one of the most popular and powerful women in the world who still feels oddly out of place as a public figure.
A busy but distracted career
For a while, before she founded the bestselling makeup company Rare Beauty in 2019 and starred in and co-produced Only Murders in the Building in 2021, it might have been hard to attach Gomez to specific projects if you didn’t grow up watching her on Disney Channel. More than the usual stream of eye-catching creative work, her long-term massive popularity — she became the first person to reach 100 million Instagram followers in 2017 — can largely be attributed to her candor and relatability as a public figure.
It’s something Gomez has admitted to herself in a Vogue cover story in 2017: “I’ve been very vulnerable with my fans, and sometimes I say things I shouldn’t. But I have to be honest with them. I feel that’s a huge part of why I’m where I am.”
It’s not that Gomez hasn’t been arduously working from a young age. Following a stint on Barney & Friends around age 10, Gomez became a childhood TV staple playing the sarcastic teenager Alex Russo on Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place, which ran from 2007 to 2012. The network quickly maximized her talents, making her the frontwoman of the pop band of Selena Gomez and the Scene and casting her in the Disney Channel Original movie Princess Protection Program, in addition to a Wizards of Waverly Place film. While at Disney, Gomez launched her own production company called July Moon Productions. By the time she had wrapped up four seasons of Wizards, she had three Selena Gomez and the Scene albums under her belt — all of which debuted in the top 10 on the Billboard 200. She was not yet 20.
By the time Gomez graduated from Disney, she seemed primed for adult success, with a blockbuster acting or singing career at her fingertips. Neither immediately manifested. Her breakout adult role in the 2012 Harmony Korine film Spring Breakers was not followed by many leading acting roles. Despite declaring her aspirations to solely be known as an actor, she’s been more consistent as a pop star. Between 2013 and 2021, she’s released three No. 1 solo albums — Stars Dance, Revival, and Rare – a greatest hits album called For You, as well as a Grammy-nominated Spanish-language EP, Revelación.
Still, her hitmaking ability has not always translated into respect for her artistry or musical talent. She’s been mocked frequently online for her vocal ability and lambasted for allegedly lip-syncing during live performances. (This online ridicule has also followed her on-screen career, as clips from Emilia Pérez have been circulated on social media to show she can’t act.)
Gomez has also experienced several mental and physical health emergencies that have presumably kept her from having the laser-focused music career as some of her pop peers. In 2015, she revealed that she received chemotherapy after she was diagnosed with lupus. In 2017, she underwent a kidney transplant. In her 2022 Apple TV+ documentary, My Mind & Me, she shared that she had sought treatment for bipolar disorder in 2018 after going into psychosis.
Likewise, her work has historically taken a backseat to headlines about her personal life. Her on-and-off relationship with singer Justin Bieber, which ended in 2018, has cast a shadow over her career until very recently. Her musical output — confessional songs like “The Heart Wants What It Wants” and “Lose You to Love Me,” for example — have largely been used as an occasion to discuss Bieber. Her feuds and friendships have garnered headlines nearly as often as her romantic life has. Likewise, My Mind & Me is partly about the double-edged sword of being valued for your openness and vulnerability when it inevitably overshadows your work.
A history of online mishaps
So how does a popular and transparent child-star turned-celebrity fixture keep finding herself the center of controversy? Gomez’s unvarnished social media presence is the real double-edged sword. She can be sloppy, reactionary, and even contradictory online. There was the time, in 2016, when she gave an acceptance speech at the American Music Awards and told her fans that she “didn’t want to see their bodies on Instagram.” A few weeks later, she posted a semi-nude selfie in a thong and deleted it after fans called her a hypocrite. Despite her previous attempts to distance herself from social media for her well-being, she simply can’t stay offline.
Around the same time, she made a more consequential “flub.” While Gomez has done extensive charity work throughout her career, including working as UNICEF ambassador, she’s proven to be less eager and fluent in discussing politics and hot-button social issues, a skill the public has increasingly demanded from A-list celebrities with a lot of influence.
In 2016, she gave a defensive and dismissive response when asked by a user on Twitter (now X) why she and her friend Taylor Swift hadn’t offered their support to the Black Lives Matter movement. “Oh lol so that means if I hashtag something I save lives?” she responded. “No, I could give two f—ks about ‘sides. You don’t know what I do.” Two years later, she participated in the March for Our Lives for gun control and posted a photo on Instagram that included the seemingly pointed #NotJustAHashtag. This, of course, drew widespread criticism, with users claiming that she was belittling the Black Lives Matter movement. Like many celebrities in 2020, she would go on to wholeheartedly support the movement and condemn police brutality.
In recent years, Gomez’s public persona has taken a fascinating shape. She’s become more solidified in her career, producing big projects, like 13 Reasons Why and Only Murders in the Building, and becoming a disruptor in the makeup space with Rare Beauty, which has reportedly boosted her net worth to $1.3 billion. At the same time, her social media activity has gotten increasingly chaotic. She’s become the queen of social media breaks that are ultimately short-lived. She’s often criticized for being too online regarding minor gossip (like when she fired back at multiple Instagram commenters about her then-newly announced relationship with music producer Benny Blanco) and not being vocal or articulate enough during crucial moments (like her reputedly insufficient responses to the recent violence in Gaza).
Even in the most innocuous scenarios, like crying over mass deportations or getting caught gossiping at the Golden Globes, she has an inevitable ability to fire up the internet.
Occasionally, the mess is fun, like in 2023 when she got caught up in a TikTok beef with her ex’s wife, Hailey Bieber, and Bieber’s model friends Kendall Jenner, Kylie Jenner, and Bella Hadid. It started with a TikTok of Gomez’s poorly laminated eyebrows and almost immediately became a war between their stans. (To this day, Bieber and Gomez’s stans are still going at it.)
That same year, she fired back at critics of her new relationship with Blanco. Meanwhile, she announced a break from social media in response to the “violence and terror that’s going on in in the world” — only to return some days later to promote her partner’s cookbook. Throughout the year, she left and returned to social media several times, mainly over her frustration with users.
The rawness that initially made Gomez such a popular Instagram follow has now given her a vexing online reputation as an adult. Understandably, there’s an expectation that the more time celebrities spend in the spotlight the better they should be at engaging with the public. For instance, Beyoncé and Swift were always skilled in sharing intimate but PR-friendly curations of their life on social media, specifically Tumblr. Rihanna even managed to be an online troll, with enough wit and the right targets to get away with it. However, the later stages of their careers have seen them practice even more restraint and consideration regarding what they post.
Gomez, on the other hand, is still lacking this level of grace — weighing in, deleting, responding to random users. She has a long track record of missteps, and plenty of followers who have not forgotten about them. Still, in typical Gomez fashion, this uncurated behavior felt extremely familiar to many people who live on the internet.
What’s maybe most interesting about Gomez is that she’ll never not have the public’s attention, no matter how bad she is at managing it. She has the glamorous life, the high-profile friends, the nostalgia factor, and the continued professional success. She’s not exactly the self-destructive celebrity train wreck that feels icky to gawk at. Rather, she’s constantly putting her foot in her mouth or rubbing someone the wrong way. She is the person we all love to gossip about with our friends, or might be ourselves. She’s, in a word, relatable.
