The Art of Trolling
Doja Cat has been a staple of internet culture since the start of her music career, mastering the art of trolling her fans to keep them engaged with her music.
Doja Cat performing at Outside Lands in a zebra-print, shoulder-padded bustier with long sleeves, matching V-waist leggings, and a studded belt courtesy of her stylist Brett Nelson. Photographed by Steve Jennings, August 2025. Available via IG @gettyentertainment. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
After uploading her music to SoundCloud as a teenager, Doja Cat caught the attention of Kemosabe and RCA Records with her song “So High,” prompting her first recording contract in 2013. Her 2018 single “Mooo!” from her debut album Amala went viral as a meme thanks to its humorous premise of her being a cow. However, this was only the beginning of Doja’s reign as a chronically online rapper. Throughout her career, she has perfected the art of internet trolling, using it as a strategy to keep fans interested and guessing about her relationship with them and the state of her music career.
One of Doja’s most infamous trolling sprees happened on her Twitter during the summer of 2023, when she went on a rampage about how she doesn’t resonate with her past projects and has no time for parasocial relationships with her fans. Regarding her previous projects, which achieved vast commercial success, she tweeted, “Planet Her and Hot Pink were cash-grabs and y'all fell for it. Now I can go disappear somewhere and touch grass with my loved ones on an island while y'all weep for mediocre pop.” She tweeted this after spending most of April 2023 teasing her highly anticipated new album with other facetious tweets regarding potential song titles, claiming she would be releasing no more pop music, and that her upcoming project would be a “rock/spoken word” album titled Moist Holes.
Although Doja Cat’s fans should know to take what she says with a grain of salt, they were still up in arms about her July 2023 tweets, especially when she took aim at the nickname her fans had given themselves. “If you call yourself a ‘kitten’ or f***ing ‘kittenz,’” she tweeted, “that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house.” Remarks like these led some loyal fan pages to label her ungrateful, claiming she’d be nowhere without their support. However, when Scarlet, the very album she spent that summer trolling online, dropped in September 2023, it sold over one million units and became the best-selling project globally by a female rapper in 2024. The backlash dissipated, and fans returned, proving Doja’s strategy of using internet negativity to stir hype had worked exactly as planned.
Doja’s latest trolling stunt unfolded during the rollout of her upcoming ’80s pop–inspired album. In early May 2025, she teased a snippet of a new single, “Jealous Type,” in a Marc Jacobs ad featuring the brand’s latest dual bags. The following month, a seemingly sweet interaction with TikTok creator Pablo Tamayo, who hugged her and gave her his shirt, took a turn when Doja tweeted that she doesn’t like being “manhandled” by fans and had thrown away the “musty” shirt given to her. The comment stirred backlash from fans and from Tamayo himself, but the drama came full circle at Doja’s Outside Lands set this past weekend. Not only did she debut “Jealous Type” live, but Tamayo appeared on the big screen to reveal a shirt featuring the words musty boy. Thus, the beef was squashed, and Doja Cat succeeded in bringing heightened attention to her music by engaging in calculated internet trolling.
As a firm believer that all press is good press, celebrities and artists alike might benefit from taking a page out of Doja’s book and creating some online chaos to promote their upcoming work. Nothing creates hype like a controversial headline. As for Doja, it’s refreshing to see someone so successful not take herself so seriously online. One thing’s for sure: we haven’t seen the last from one of the internet’s most talented trolls.
