Revisiting the #ThotAudit


Alright, now that tax season and #TaxDay is effectively over, I wanted to revisit a subject that was brought up a couple months ago: the #ThotAudit. For those unaware, the #ThotAudit was a campaign of people online reporting girls and sex workers on the internet to the IRS.
This started with David Wu ranting on his stream of women of ruining streaming platforms like Twitch and leveraging their looks and their bodies to take money from guys that are not deserved. I wrote my initial thoughts on the #ThotAudit in December: Thoughts on the #ThotAudit
I initially came across this campaign on @TheRalphRetort’s show where Mr. Wu and @BrittanyVenti were ‘debating’ this and women personalities online (Full disclousure: I have a crush on Brittany Venti). To say the ‘debate’ was lackluster was an understatement.


The show was what prompted me to write my piece. But the intensity of the interest in this campaign at the time was big, as evidence by the search results on Google Trends.


And I wasn’t alone in talking about this subject. Online personalities with large followings like @PhillyD, @MisterAntiBully, @rooshv, @Styx666Official, Sargon of Akkad, James Allsup and many more created videos and streams covering the subject, some even encourgaing their subscribers to report these girls to the IRS.


The online personalities were not alone: Major news publications like Vice, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The Verge, Newsweek, and many others reported on this campaign, with the targets ranging from said online personalities to sex workers and anyone promoting ‘thottery’.


Now, that’s not to say I am defending sex workers, ‘thots’ or any other form of women debauchery. My main focus is on this campaign of reporting women to the IRS for tax fraud. With this much attention being given by media publications and personalities, you’d think that some of these targets would have been reported and audited by the IRS. But to my knowledge, not a single girl has come out and said they’ve been audited or experienced any kind of financial hardship from this campaign. I’m aware of a woman losing custody of her child due by child protective services due to her history, but I wouldn’t count that. Besides having the usual insults hurled at them, none of the girls accused of being tax cheats and criminals have been hurt financially. In fact, the #ThotAudit campaign hasn’t been trending since around January (as evidenced by Google Trends).
So, what to make of all of this? First, it says my initial take on all of this was correct! Secondly, there should be some sort of accountability from the online personalities to follow up and inform their audience of the failure of this campaign for the sake of transparency and intellectual honesty. To lead your fans/subscribers into believing there would be this sort of ‘reckoning’ into these women, then nothing happening, and not even acknowledging it is unfair in my opinion. You rack up thousands of views, likes, comments and other engagements and don’t even have the courtesy to follow up? Who is to say the next time you cover something and it turns out to ‘flop’ again? Credibility is important, especially online where it is so easy to burn. Finally, this shows the limits of these types of online campaigns have on the ‘real world’.
It is quite easy and simple to leave a negative comment or voice criticism to a person you dislike on the internet. It is easy to baselessly accuse people of being ‘bad’, of having corrupt motives of being dishonest or even being a criminal! I could just as easily say that the top streamers (all of which are male) are also frauds who don’t pay taxes, of bilking their audience of money etc. But to do that without facts or evidence, and to have the IRS step in and audit people because they are making X amount of money is not a good standard.


I’m glad that this has faded from memory. Maybe in the future, we can slow down, digest some of these things, thnk critically, and not jump to conclusions or join a mob in the name of clout.
Maybe that will happen. Maybe it won’t. I won’t hold my breath.
ADDENDUM: I wanted to put this in the middle of the piece but I forgot to mention it. I talked about how online personalities and sex workers were targeted by this campaign, but I failed to mention who was conveniently left out: social media influencers with gargantuan followings across social media platforms.
They have massive followings across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and came up in fields like physical fitness, fashion, make up, and the like. These people arguably make A LOT more money than the women who were targeted by the Thot Audit campaign, but didn’t receive nearly as much attention (if at all!). The women who were targeted were in very specific circles that were ripe for target, but who were vastly more successful and attributed more ‘thot-like’ behavior were left alone. It says that these women with (relatively) smaller followings were receiving this from an even smaller fringe part of their audience.