Doja Cat has lost almost 1 million followers after telling her fans that she doesn't "love them."
The 27-year-old has been having a back-and-forth with her own fandom - the 'kittenz' for a little while now, but the repercussions are only getting worse.
The recent scandal started when the 'Like That' hitmaker took to Threads via her now-deleted account to criticize her fans for giving themselves a pet name, insinuating that they have no lives if they brand themselves an exclusive part of her fan group.
"My fans don't name themselves s***," she said on July 23. "If you call yourself a 'kitten' or f****** 'kittenz' that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house."
Responding to her post, a fan account with the handle @thekittenzweb, asked: "What should I change my name to since you don't like the term kitten."
Doja replied: "Just delete the entire account and rethink everything it's never too late."
Not only that, but Doja also hit out at another fan for using her official "government" name - Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini - as part of their username.
"You making my government name ur sn is creepy as f***," she wrote to an account with the handle @amalazandiledlamlni.
When another user said they wanted to hear her say she loved her fans, she responded back saying: "I don't though cuz I don't even know yall."
Her blunt words had a mixed response from fans, with some of the biggest Doja Cat fan pages deciding it was time to fully sever their relationship with their idol.
"It is with great sadness that the DCBR team announces an indefinite break from the page for the first time in 3 years! We thought a lot about how to say this to you and there’s no other way: Doja’s latest pronouncements on social media left us kittenz very disappointed... If we can call ourselves that, since even Doja doesn’t seem to like the name of the fandom she herself created," the Instagram account for Doja Cat Brazil wrote.
They continued: "Every day, we put our sweat on this page to keep it active and it is with great pain that we see the end approaching. What we hope is that Doja rethinks her actions as an artist and has the least amount of consideration for the fans who have been with her since the beginning, supporting and motivating her... because without us, she wouldn’t be where she is."
Other social media fan accounts including Cat News and The Kittens Room also followed suit.
While you may think Doja would have re-considered her harsh approach given the nature of some of the comments, instead she decided to double down.
After losing almost a million followers on Instagram - 911,910 to be exact, according to Social Blade - the Grammy-award winning singer took to Twitter to say that she feels "free."
"Seeing all these people unfollow makes me feel like I've defeated a large beast that's been holding me down for so long," she wrote on her Instagram Stories on Wednesday (Sugust 16). "It feels like I can reconnect with the people who really matter and love me for who I am and not for who I was."
The following day, she also reposted a meme to her Stories that read: "People pleasing is over become unacceptable."
Is this the new way of setting boundaries? Or is Doja triggering a new for herself? Either way, let's hope it works out for her in the end because social suicide is hard to come back from.
