Last week, One Direction singer Liam Payne died unexpectedly at the age of 31 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. You likely heard about it in fragments, messages popping up on your home screen from lit-up group chats or breaking news push notifications, or after putting together the pieces of contextless tweets like, “This can’t be real” or “I’m literally so shocked right now.”
Facts (and misinformation) were hitting us out of order thanks to the non-chronological timelines of social media sites like X, Instagram, and TikTok. The last hours and minutes of Payne’s life were eerily documented on his own personal Snapchat, highlighting the fragile immediacy of death. Conspiracies, unconfirmed accounts from supposed onlookers, and blame laid at the feet of the ex-girlfriend who had recently issued the singer a cease and desist followed each other in quick succession.
Dormant X (formerly Twitter) 1D stan accounts immediately logged in for the first time in years—the band had been on an indefinite hiatus since 2016—and at the same time that some claimed the news simply couldn’t be true, others were dissuading us from clicking on a callous TMZ report that showed cropped pictures of recognizable tattoos on the singer’s lifeless body. All the while, authorities were still piecing together what exactly had happened and his family and loved ones were still in the process of being informed.
Read more: Liam Payne Is Mourned by Peers and Fans
Liam Payne’s untimely death, to put it plainly, has become an internet phenomenon, which makes sense given that his whole adult life was one too.
Payne first auditioned for The X Factor, the show that would make him a global superstar, in 2008 when he was 14 years old. But it wasn’t until two years later that Simon Cowell cherry-picked him as one-fifth of his next big boy band venture. The rest, as One Direction would later sing in 2016 in their final single, is history.
From the second Payne joined Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik to form One Direction, the quintet was documented. That’s in part because they were on, at that point, the biggest show on primetime British television. But away from the terrestrial airwaves, they were breaking barriers online.
YouTube, founded just a handful of years before the band, became the breeding ground for their global success. It was where they posted their weekly video diaries detailing their competition experience on the now infamous stairs of their shared X Factor house. Those clips found their way onto Tumblr, then a new, semi-secluded home of fandom on the internet, and later Twitter—which, thanks to Justin Bieber’s success a few years earlier, was a tried-and-tested soft-power play area for pop fans to create global impact.
One Direction was only on The X Factor for 10 weeks (they came in third), but it was enough time to harness a legion of fans who were everywhere all at once. Their first single, “What Makes You Beautiful,” debut album Up All Night, and first world tour came less than a year later, in 2011, and they kept on that pummeling schedule of releasing and touring for the next five years. With every new drop, their fan army grew stronger and more devout and systematically changed the way pop music was consumed through an online lens. Directioners—any fandom worth its salt needs a nickname—constituted what can fairly be called a new wave of Beatlemania for the internet age. Barely a week went by where they didn’t smash a chart or YouTube record, and when the band went on tour in 2013, 5,000 fans camped outside their hotel in Mexico City.
Before the benefits and drawbacks of parasocial relationships with celebrities became the subject of common discourse, pop svengalis like Cowell capitalized on fans’ voracious appetites. In 2013, One Direction took part in a seven-hour online livestream called 1D Day, which was part Big Brother, part behind-the-scenes featurette, and part late-night chat show as a way to give back to the fans.
Away from what One Direction produced, the internet of the early 2010s created pocket havens for fans. 1D communities thrived in online spaces where people with niche interests and manifestations of their fandom (such as fanfiction and fan art) could find like-minded compatriots. Some of that was wholesome, and much has been made in the last few days of the tangible ways that the fan community impacted peoples’ real lives. In that safe space of unbridled adoration, some found friends for life, career opportunities, and even romantic partners. But it could also be invasive, as with the fans who engaged in stalking behaviour or “shipped” members in ways that made them uncomfortable to the point where band members themselves criticized the practice in the media.
In 2015, the band faced its first big blow with the departure of Zayn Malik. That week, four million fans used the hashtag #AlwaysInOurHeartsZaynMalik to express their grief. Then, less than six months later, the group’s remaining members parted ways. They called it a “hiatus,” but boy band fans have heard that one before. At their last ever concert in 2016, Niall Horan ended the show by promising: “We will be back.”
When Liam Payne went out on his own in 2017, it was an exercise in how a boy-bander should go solo, with collab features from hit artists like Quavo and J Balvin and the lead single for a major movie, Fifty Shades Freed. But goodwill shifted with the release of his debut album, LP1, in 2019, which was relentlessly torn apart by critics and debuted outside the Billboard Hot 100. This fall from grace, for a member of one of the biggest cultural behemoths of all time, was too delicious for people not to mock on Twitter.
After that, Payne slipped out of favor not just with the public at large but with Directioners. When he was in One Direction, he was pegged very early on as the “dad” of the group. He wasn’t the oldest member, but his lame jokes and slightly too-earnest takes elicited a kind of endearing embarrassment. But as the public view shifted, the same qualities that once made him lovably cringe were skewered as shameless and awkward. A weird interview on the Oscars red carpet where his accent jumped all over the place landed firmly in the Twitter meme reaction lexicon; a video of his choreography to the single “Strip That Down” got the dance trend treatment nobody wants on TikTok, and an ill-conceived interview with perhaps the most divisive figure in YouTube history, Logan Paul, during which he talked about a physical altercation with one of his One Direction bandmates, led him to publicly seek treatment for substance and alcohol abuse.
If his death was an online storm, then the weeks leading up to it were a red alert.
Over the last month, new discourse had started brewing about Payne’s alleged behavior. After courting attention at his ex-bandmate Niall Horan’s solo concert in Argentina, fans online started to rip him apart, bringing back to light accusations of physical and emotional abuse made by his ex-fiancée Maya Henry, which she then publicly discussed on her own TikTok page. After that, more girls, many of them fans who claim to have been underage at the time, came forward with their own accounts of inappropriate behaviour by Payne. At the time of his death, the conversation around him had reached a fever pitch, and it seemed like some kind of reckoning, or at least a response from Payne, was imminent. That never happened.
The internet is a much different place than it was 14 years ago, when Payne first emerged as a fresh-faced teenager. The thriving pockets of community that bolstered One Direction’s early fandom barely exist now. Instead, everything is funnelled into two or three apps whose algorithms favor the most inflammatory opinions. Adults and children are thrown together into one town square where nuance, as we all know, has long since gone to die. This is exemplified by the ways in which people were tying themselves in knots to appropriately grieve Payne’s death without angering anyone critical of his alleged behavior. (Spoiler: it can’t be done.)
Our relationship to celebrity has also changed. The internet of the late 2010s where A-listers and their fans broke digital bread together is no more, with most celebrities having learned the downside of letting people have too much access to their lives. You need only look at the backlash to Chappell Roan’s recent plea for privacy to see just how much we’ve turned artists into friends, then idols, then personal playthings in a few short years.
Liam Payne’s fame spanned the entirety of that cultural shift on the internet, and it’s probably fair to say that the sky-scraping highs of his early online power turning into engagement-garnering meme fodder took its toll. One Direction broke the mold for celebrities in many ways, but fundamentally in how they marked a sea change in how a constant, monetized, live-streaming camera lens is pointed at even their darkest moments.
The fallout of the internet storm of Liam Payne’s passing is still unfolding. Conversations have opened up about how to publicly mourn whatever version of someone you once loved, while also making space for the ways that others claim to have been hurt by them.
The four remaining members of One Direction came together for the first time in nine years to release a joint statement on Instagram about their loss, as well as making personal statements that included photos with Payne from their early days. Memorials have been organized online to take place all over the world, video clips and emotional fan edits have been shared, and the group’s music streams have skyrocketed as fans gather digitally to cherish what they didn’t expect to lose.
The fandom that shaped the online world as we know it has had to come together in a way they never imagined. One Direction changed the internet, and Liam Payne was always going to be immortalized by it. But that fact has never been more sobering than in his death.
