T-STaylor Swift has been given a “secret weapon” Instagram tool to help her fight off hordes of Kim Kardashian fans dissing her on Instagram.
Swift, who has 86 million followers on the site, can now identify and delete comments she doesn’t like en masse.
The special treatment is surely linked to Swift’s position as the site’s second most-followed celebrity, after Selena Gomez.
The Sunday Times revealed the existence of the new “tool”, which it said can purge disobliging comments by the thousand.
It came into force as Swift was under fire from enormous numbers of fans, attacking her for apparently lying about whether Kanye West could refer to having sex with her in one of his songs.
Many chose to diss swift by posting snake emoji underneath recent Instagram posts, seemingly following the lead of a subtweet from Kim Kardashian the day before.
Fans began noticing the swift evaporation of disobliging comments a week ago, just as the Swift-Kardashian feud was erupting.
Madison Malone Kircher, a writer for New York Magazine, relayed tales of her repeated attempts to leave snake emoji on Swift’s page, many of which seemed to vanish in an instant.
Other times she was ordered to “rewrite” her comment, seemingly after including too many snakes.
The special treatment will do little to erase Swift’s reputation as a perpetual victim and master manipulator.
It is also yet another example of social networks bending over backwards to keep the right kind of celebrity cocooned from people’s opinions of them.
Last week Twitter was at the centre of its own firestorm after banning Milo Yiannopoulos from its network at the insistence of Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones.
In a TV interview a few days later, Jones said that Facebook – which owns Instagram – was just as keen to boot off users at her request.