The internet’s weirdest stan war

You probably never thought you’d see Malala Yousafzai lip-syncing to a 4 Non Blondes/Nicki Minaj mash-up on TikTok with Jimmy Fallon. And yet the Nobel Peace Prize winner has spent the past couple of months churning out this sort of uncanny, “normie” content on social media. If anything, she’s aware of the irony. “Not me becoming chronically online,” she captioned one of her latest Instagram posts.

Outside of making content, Yousafzai recently appeared at a New York Liberty game, talked to celebrity whisperer Jay Shetty, and has gone on a number of talk shows and podcasts. The Pakistani education activist is currently promoting her newly released memoir, Finding My Way, in which she grapples with her rise to prominence after surviving being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman at 11 years old while returning home from morning classes. But the 28-year-old has been evolving into a media impresario for some years now, producing films — one of which was Oscar-nominated — and a musical with Hillary Clinton.

Yousafzai is not the only icon of progressive girlhood whose image has gone through an evolution. There’s also Greta Thunberg. On October 2, the 22-year-old Swedish climate activist, whose focus has recently shifted to the genocide in Gaza, was reportedly detained by Israeli forces, along with more than 400 people, while on a flotilla mission delivering aid to Palestinians. Thunberg and other witnesses allege that Israeli soldiers dragged her by her hair, barely gave her food and water, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag while in captivity. Thunberg and other detainees were deported to Greece days later.

Seeing two of the biggest names in activism in two very different places in their careers — one on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and one on the front lines of a humanitarian crisis — has generated a lot of commentary online, resulting in something of a stan war between their respective supporters. To many, it seems like Yousafzai and Thunberg have come to represent two opposing activist tropes: the sellout and the true revolutionary, respectively.

Pitting a firmly liberal activist against an anti-establishment figure in a fake online beef may seem like a time-wasting and reductive exercise. Still, the response to Yousafzai and Thunberg’s diverging second acts shows how expectations for young, progressive leaders have changed in our unsettled and increasingly authoritarian political age. Thunberg is the leftist action hero Gen Z seems to be clamoring for, while Yousafzai has become a cringy relic of the Obama years.

Yousafzai has faced plenty of scrutiny and questions lately about her integrity as an activist, especially when it comes to her affiliations with certain Western leaders.

She received backlash last April, after the announcement that she would be co-producing Suffs, a Broadway musical about the suffragette movement, with Clinton. After all, the former secretary of state oversaw drone strikes in Pakistan that killed civilians, and when Yousafzai visited the White House in 2013, she expressed her concerns over the attacks to President Barack Obama. More than a decade later, critics see Yousafzai’s new partnership with Clinton as hypocritical.

The optics got worse for Yousafzai after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Clinton, a longtime and well-documented supporter of the Israeli government, pushed back against early calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, a position that directly contradicted progressives in the United States, European leaders, and Yousafzai herself, who demanded a ceasefire in the days after the attacks.

But because she highlighted the suffering of both Palestinian and Israeli children, Yousafzai was swiftly accused of “both siding” the issue by failing to directly acknowledge the power imbalance Palestinians faced after Israel’s invasion and occupation.

Yousafzai’s initial response to the October 7 attacks doesn’t paint a complete picture of her posture toward Gaza, however. Her Malala Fund donated money to children in the war-torn region prior to 2023, and following the Suffs controversy, she reiterated her support of the people in Gaza and directly addressed the genocide.

“I have and will continue to condemn the Israeli government for its violations of international law and war crimes,” Yousafzai posted on X. In a May British GQ profile, she reflected on the backlash she’s received over Gaza, arguing the limits of providing public statements on social issues and claiming that there’s “a lot more you can do.”

At home in Pakistan, Yousafzai’s reputation has been much more complicated since becoming a global icon. While she’s been deified as a sort of girlboss hero in the West, in her home of Pakistan, she’s been the target of antagonism, erasure, and even conspiracy theories, stemming from the notion that she’s a puppet for Western imperial interests.

It’s important to remember, too, that Yousafzai ended up on the global stage unwittingly. As she discusses in her book, she hasn’t been in control of her own narrative since she was a child.

Criticism of Yousafzai happened to reach a boiling point — fueled by people seeing her on TikToks and reading about her weed use in college — at the same time that reports of Greta Thunberg’s detainment in Gaza emerged. Over the past month, remarks like “Greta Thunberg is what Malala thinks she is” and comparisons of their recent endeavors have been all over X and TikTok.

“I went down a bunch of these accounts and what I found…was that many of them were what I would call stan accounts,” says Ryan Broderick, editor-in-chief of Garbage Day, an internet culture newsletter. “It looked to me like very young people without any real background in politics effectively treating Greta and Malala like you would Sabrina Carpenter or Taylor Swift.”

The juxtaposition is striking. In 2018, Thunberg gained worldwide attention for staging a strike, refusing to go to school for three weeks while sitting outside of the Swedish Parliament ahead of the country’s general election in order to draw attention to the global climate crisis. Thunberg vowed to strike each Friday until Sweden agreed to follow the Paris climate agreement, inspiring other “Future for Fridays” protests around the globe.

World leaders and organizations, including the British Parliament and the United Nations, quickly recognized and celebrated Thunberg’s demonstrations. In 2019, Time named her Person of the Year. But her rise to prominence wasn’t uncomplicated. Some critics saw her as emblematic of white privilege in activist spaces — a daughter of two famous parents who got accolades that other activists, especially ones of color, were denied.

Over the years, Thunberg has seemingly proved her activist bonafides to the public, refraining from extracurricular activities and remaining a radical voice on the left. From the Saharawi refugee crisis to factory workers’ rights to the Israeli government’s recent war crimes, her causes have become a lot less palatable or easily co-opted by the liberal establishment.

At a time when radical ideas and leftist figures are becoming more mainstream, however, it makes sense that Thunberg would be the more appealing public figure at the moment, according to Broderick. After all, Yousafzai is working directly with the liberal, institutional figures who are, in many ways, responsible for pushing folks further to the left.

“I think that [Greta’s activism] is a better fit for a more militant, radicalized political space,” Broderick says. “I’m not downplaying [Malala’s work]. It is just activism of a very different kind, and ultimately, happened in a different world.”

There’s a certain absurdity to the pitting of Yousafzai against Thunberg. After all, these two are not pop stars. They’re not competing for a number one spot on the charts. While online fights over Yousafzai and Thunberg’s second acts show how people on the left are demanding more from progressive leaders, this manufactured contest is also just another example of how stan culture has rotted our relationship with politics.