The internet loves to pretend that online hate is just “snark.” Just jokes. Just gossip. But sometimes the line between parasocial obsession and real-world danger becomes terrifyingly clear.
This week, prosecutors in Los Angeles charged Ivanna Lisette Ortiz, a 35-year-old woman from Florida, with attempted murder after she allegedly opened fire on the Los Angeles home of Rihanna with an AR-15-style rifle. According to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, ten people were inside or nearby when the shooting occurred, including Rihanna, her partner A$AP Rocky, their three children and several members of household staff.
Miraculously, no one was injured. But prosecutors say Ortiz fired multiple rounds toward the property before being arrested during a traffic stop. If convicted, she faces life in prison.
Authorities are still investigating the motive. Yet videos circulating online show Ortiz making disturbing claims about Rihanna long before the shooting. She allegedly said Rihanna was “jealous of her,” that the singer appeared in her dreams and that God would “take her to her future” once Rihanna was gone. It sounds deranged.
But if you spend even a few minutes scrolling certain corners of the internet, the tone starts to feel… strangely familiar.
Snark culture and parasocial obsession
For years, researchers have warned about coordinated online harassment campaigns targeting female celebrities, particularly women of colour. One of the most documented examples involves Meghan Sussex. In the Netflix series Harry & Meghan, tech researcher Christopher Bouzy revealed that much of the online hostility directed at Meghan was not random. His firm found that 70 percent of anti-Meghan abuse on Twitter came from just 83 accounts, many of which spread racist conspiracy theories about her children and even claimed she faked her pregnancy.
Similar patterns of obsessive hostility have also appeared on other platforms, including dedicated Reddit communities, where criticism often blurs into fixation and conspiracy.
Bouzy described the campaign bluntly: a “coordinated, targeted harassment campaign.”
And it didn’t stop with X. YouTube channels built entire businesses around attacking Meghan, monetising hate through endless conspiracy videos and commentary.
“The platforms are complicit,” Bouzy told Rolling Stone, arguing that tech companies profit from outrage while doing little to discourage it.
That ecosystem matters. Because the language used in those spaces often drifts from criticism into something far darker: fixation.
Once again, I am calling on @YouTube to enforce its policies and suspend, or at the very least, demonetize channels dedicated to maliciously insulting an identifiable person. If YouTube is unwilling to stop the targeted harassment and abuse, then Congress must step in… pic.twitter.com/T3d96sBoSb
— Christopher Bouzy (spoutible.com/cbouzy) (@cbouzy) December 15, 2022
When “snark” stops being harmless
Spend time on celebrity hate forums, and you’ll see the same patterns repeat. Celebrities are accused of secretly controlling events, manipulating people they’ve never met or possessing strange personal power over strangers’ lives. Their actions are interpreted through elaborate conspiracies. Their existence becomes personal.
It’s the kind of thinking that fuels parasocial obsession: the illusion that a stranger’s life somehow revolves around you.
And when that mindset spirals, it can become dangerous.
No one is suggesting that every commenter on a snark forum will turn violent. Of course not. But environments built on obsessive hostility can blur the boundary between entertainment and fixation, especially for people already struggling with reality.
The Rihanna case is an extreme example. Yet it exposes something uncomfortable about internet culture: millions of people spend hours each week dissecting celebrities they have never met, convinced those strangers somehow deserve their rage.
The internet’s hostility toward women in the spotlight
Female celebrities often receive the most intense version of this treatment. Women like Rihanna and Meghan Sussex are dissected not just as performers or public figures but as moral battlegrounds. Their parenting, relationships, clothing, business decisions and even pregnancies become subjects of constant suspicion.
And the commentary often drifts far beyond criticism into obsession. For Meghan, the consequences have been deeply personal. In Harry & Meghan, she described reading death threats online and fearing for her children’s safety.
“That’s what’s actually out in the world,” she said through tears. “You are making people want to kill me.”
Those words sounded dramatic to some critics. But incidents like the Rihanna shooting remind us that the internet does not exist in a vacuum.
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Why this culture should scare people
This is why the hate directed at celebrities online has always felt unsettling. Not because criticism is wrong. Public figures will always face scrutiny. But because some corners of the internet seem to thrive on something more extreme: personal obsession disguised as commentary.
The same rhetoric that appears in certain snark spaces, the same conspiratorial language, the same belief that celebrities secretly control people’s lives. Those ideas don’t always stay confined to message boards.
Sometimes they spill into the real world.And when that happens, the results can be frightening.
Which is exactly why bizarre online behavior deserves to be taken seriously. Because in an era where parasocial obsession thrives, the difference between a hostile post and a real-world threat is not always as large as people like to pretend.
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