The “Woman” rapper has lost social media followers over the past few weeks in the wake of comments made about her fans
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Doja Cat is feeling “free” after losing a significant amount of social media followers.
The past few weeks have seen the “Say So” rapper, 27, reportedly lose nearly 300,000 followers on social media, according to Billboard. This comes after she responded “i don’t though” when a Twitter user asked her to say she loved her fans, and reportedly called out her followers for naming themselves “Kittenz.”
“Seeing all these people unfollow makes me feel like I’ve defeated a large beast that’s been holding me back down for so long,” Doja Cat said on her Instagram Story on Wednesday. “And it feels like I can reconnect with the people who really matter and love me for who I am and not for who I was.”
“I feel free,” the rapper added.
Back in July, Doja Cat took aim at her fans for calling themselves “Kittenz” and “Kitten.” “My fans don’t get to name themselves s—,” the artist said in since-deleted tweets posted on the New York Post‘s Page Six. “If you call yourself a ‘kitten’ or f—ing ‘kittenz’ that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house.”
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Doja Cat also told another fan to delete their Twitter account after they asked if she’d prefer her fans to call themselves another name. The rapper, who was born Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini, additionally called a fan “creepy” for using her name as their surname.
In another interaction with a fan, a user wrote, “I wanna hear you say (I do love you guys),” to which the “Get into It” artist replied, “I don’t though, cuz I don’t even know y’all.”
The rapper recently opened up about why she thinks her personal choices — like her hair transformations — cause a stir on social media.
“My theory is that if someone has never met me in real life, then, subconsciously, I’m not real to them,” she told Harper’s BAZAAR. “So when people become engaged with someone they don’t even know on the internet, they kind of take ownership over that person.”
“They think that person belongs to them in some sense,” Doja Cat added.
