Will fans pay Lady Gaga to return to Twitter?

Lady Gaga&#039;s more than 30 million social-media fans will have to go without the pop star&#039;s Twitter and Facebook posts until $1 million is raised for charity.

(Image credit: Facebook)

last updated 8 January 2015

This Wednesday, Lady Gaga will kill herself, at least figuratively. She and other celebrities such as Justin Timberlake, Kim Kardashian, and Ryan Seacrest are ending their "digital lives" — that is, quitting their Facebook and Twitter accounts — until fans donate $1 million to an AIDS charity. Texting the name of the "dead" celebrity to 90999 will donate $10 to Keep a Child Alive, a charity set up by pop star Alicia Keys to raise money for HIV and AIDS sufferers in Africa and India. Should fans pay to bring celebrities back to the internet?

This is guaranteed to succeed: "Where we once had sponsored silences or fasts," says Mark St. Andrew at Cream, swearing off the internet is apparently now a "sufficient hardship to endure" in the name of a good cause. The involvement of Lady Gaga and her millions of fans more or less "guarantees the success of what promises to be a short, sharp effective fundraising scheme."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Some people would pay more to keep the stars offline longer: This initiative's worthiness depends on how you feel about Gaga, says Chris Matyszczyk at CNET. In some ways, the fundraising effort might have been more successful if the incentive for potential donors was a chance to keep her away from social media entirely. I fear that, for some Twitter users, the chance to rid the site of these stars might trump the worry of depriving "an excellent charity of much-needed funds."

Have it both ways: Donate to another charity and keep them silent: This "poses a dilemma" for me, says Bill Barol at Forbes. "More than almost anything, I would like Lady Gaga to clam up for a while." But I don't want to deny a charity of funds. What I'll do is send a donation to an alternative HIV/AIDS charity, and "sit back and enjoy the sound... of an online world that's a little less full of gabble and blather than it normally is." I wish fans would join me.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox