The 2000s celebrity turned alt-right promoter

(no, it’s not Ye)

Younger readers may not be aware that there was once a time when we distinguished between someone being “famous” and being “internet famous”. In the 2000s, the internet was still seen as some kind of separate realm that we would periodically visit, contrasted with what got referred to as “the real world”. That meant that what happened online was somehow seen as less real than what happened in other media. When traditional media began to cover the people who had become internet famous, there wasn’t yet the vocabulary to do so. When talking about Tila Tequila in a 2006 article for Time magazine, Lev Grossman wrote “As for what she does for a living, there isn't really a word for it yet.” 

Today the word we seem to have settled on is “influencer”, and Tequila, whose birth name is Nguyễn Thị Thiên Thanh, was one of the first influencers. She amassed 1.5 million “friends” on the social networking website MySpace, but prior to that had already established a sizable enough following on early social networking site Friendster to have been personally invited to the MySpace by founder Tom Anderson in 2003. 

Tequila had previously modelled for auto magazines and at car shows, and posed for playboy.com as their first Asian “Cyber Girl of the Month”. She explained how she had turned this modelling career into fame with an astute comment to Grossman; “There's a million hot naked chicks on the Internet," she told him. "There's a difference between those girls and me. Those chicks don't talk back to you."