The winners and losers of Taylor Swift’s engagement announcement

The world’s most famous celebrity couple got engaged, and the first place the news broke was on Instagram. By now, it’s not much of a surprise that pop star Taylor Swift and football player Travis Kelce opted to announce their engagement on the platform on Tuesday — if it’s good enough for Beyoncé, it’s good enough for anyone. Swift and Kelce are, for the most part, completely unrelatable to the rest of us — due to their wealth and fame, they occupy an entirely different reality that the average person can’t even conceptualize. But one thing actually does make them kind of like us: Instagram is the “I’m getting married!” website (it’s also the “I’m having a baby” website) in the same way LinkedIn is the “I got/need a new job” place. [Media: https://www.instagram.com/p/DN02niAXMM-/?img_index=1] Celebrities and public figures are surrounded by entire teams of people who carefully strategize and plan what, where, and how to post things online. They nitpick captions, which photo comes first, and when to share news. So which platforms got the Swift-Kelce nuptials and which didn’t? It may seem insignificant, but there is no doubt a lot of time, money, and attention that went into it all. Instagram is the obvious winner here, but it’s also not a high bar — if you’re of a certain age demographic, it might feel like all you see on there is people getting engaged. More surprisingly, Swift crossposted the engagement photos on Threads, which I’m sure Meta is thrilled by given it’s not exactly the place you go for timely, breaking news. Nothing so far on Facebook, which must be devastating for them. Also, this is probably going to be huge for Kelce’s podcast. X / Twitter got nothing — not surprising if you know the backstory between Swift and the platform. Last year, X was flooded with graphic and nonconsensual AI-generated images of her, and the problem has persisted; earlier this month, Grok was generating deepfake sexual content of Swift. The AI deepfake problem is clearly something Swift cares about: she cited fake AI images of her endorsing Donald Trump for president as a reason she was publicly throwing her support behind Kamala Harris last fall. Interestingly, Swift’s team didn’t share the engagement news on TikTok at all, not on the singer’s main page or on the “Taylor Nation” official fan page. I’m a little surprised at this given what a core part TikTok plays in the fandom: it elevates specific songs over others and generates trends. It’s clearly important enough to both have a presence on the platform and make sure her music is available for use there. There are already plenty of videos of fans reacting to the engagement news on TikTok — but nothing from the artist herself. Social platforms might be one of the few places celebrities play a bit of catch-up to normal people. Their teams take cues from what organic content looks like in an effort to market their clients as relatable, down-to-earth. Instead of a splashy magazine cover or a buttoned-up press release, Swift and Kelce’s engagement landed on Instagram first, nestled between our IRL friends’ happy moments. That still doesn’t make them just like us.