Britney Spears deleted her Instagram for awhile last week. I can’t blame you if you didn’t notice. The beloved pop star has gotten rid of, then reactivated her account several times over the past few months. She’s back now, and it’s pretty much business as usual over there, which, of course, means a carnival of fascinating and sometimes NSFW weirdness.
In just the past few days, she’s treated fans to a highlight reel of her adjusting her hair and making faces while wearing a nightgown, a montage of different, non-Christmas dresses set to Christmas music, and some random artwork presented without commentary but with proper credit. All of it feels very on brand for the legend’s Instagram account but perhaps not as on brand as the conspiracy theories running wild in her comments.
I wouldn’t describe myself as a big comment section person or a big conspiracy theory person, but if you’ve spent any time on Britney’s Instagram over the past few months, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. Damn near every single post the singer drops is immediately flooded with questions asking what the heck is going on with her house and/ or questioning when the content was recorded. Let me back up and explain.
This past summer, Britney Spears mentioned she was moving into a new house with new husband Sam Asghari, which was covered extensively by the media. She also later put out and then deleted a video that seemed to be shot by the pool in the new backyard, but over the last few months, Spears has continued to drop numerous Instagram videos that seem to take place in her old house. She’s also dropped videos that she claims are from the same day but feature numerous comments from fans saying she already posted them months or even years ago. Every time it happens, the WTF questions just get louder and more aggressive.
Let’s take her most recent video, as an example. It’s the one of her in the nightgown. She posted it yesterday. Here’s the top comment…
It’s not like some random person posted that and it attracted no notice. That question has more than 2,000 likes. And this isn’t some weird outlier that just happened on this video. Almost all of the top comments on her Instagram posts over the past few months are 1) people asking what’s going on with the house, 2) people speculating the video was shot awhile ago, 3) people expressing concern about Spears’ well-being.
Last week, she posted a fun video of herself riding a bike, which she claimed she does every morning. Almost immediately, comments started pouring in claiming she'd already posted the same video years ago...
That last post seems to imply that someone else is running Spears' account. Certainly some fans are convinced others are posting on behalf of Spears, but that's not a uniform consensus. In fact, the majority of fans don't seem to be speculating about what's going on at all. They're simply raising their hands and saying something weird is going on.
Here are some more examples from other recent posts...
This past week, Spears’ husband Sam Asghari attempted to go live with her while the two were in bed. She refused without being shown. I have no idea if the brief live was his way of addressing the people in the comment section who have been imploring Spears to go live in her new house, but the short clip, which quickly went viral, did nothing whatsoever to stop the conspiracy theories. In fact, they’re quite clearly getting louder.
Britney doesn't owe it to anyone to go live or to answer any of the questions in her comment section. If she wants to post old videos, she can. If she's still living at her old house and making new videos, she's not required to clear up that confusion. Given what she went through with the conservatorship, she, more than anyone else, should get to make her own choices.
But at this point, it's also probably fair to admit that barring answers at least on the house question, these conspiracies are going to continue to dominate her comment section.
