Jeremy-oh-my! Seven months ago, the actor Jeremy Renner released an app called “Jeremy Renner.” At the time, I figured the app was a shoo-in for the least hostile place on the internet, as it was tailored to the presumably docile population of self-selecting Rennerheads. Recently, I checked up on the Jeremy Renner app, curious to see how its community had flourished. I expected to discover a heartwarming fellowship of Renneristas. And I did find that. Users swap uplifting memes, selfies, and diet tips, and wish each other “Happy Rennsday” en masse on Wednesdays. But I also found DRAMA.
I had reckoned that the biggest #RenHive beef would be over obscure trivia, like whether Renner’s uncredited role in Lords of Dogtown should’ve been credited. If you log onto the Jeremy Renner app, you will find an active community of Renner fans, leaving thousands of sweet comments below his posts. In fact, within the confines of the Jeremy Renner app, it looks like a digital utopia, a cocoon of Renner love and inspirational quotes. But elsewhere on social media, a small but very vocal group of impassioned fans has posted fierce accusations of censorship and contest-rigging. Here is a sampling of earnest statements from Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram from some of those apps’ users:
- “Dammit Renner, do something.”
- “It’s hurtful.”
- “You need to apologize to all your fans, STAT.”
- “Your app is like [a] totalitarian regime.”
I tried to understand the roots of this truly perplexing rancor via further investigation (reading thousand-word Tumblr invectives and angry Instagram posts, and corresponding with some irate Rennies). There are, as far as I can tell, three main complaints within the current, extremely weird backlash against both Jeremy Renner (the app) and Jeremy Renner (the person):
1. The Relaunch
The Jeremy Renner app was abruptly shut down and relaunched with an updated version earlier this month. Some angry users claim that this occurred primarily to wipe critical comments, rather than to update the app. “This grand gesture is you sweeping the shit under the rug. You bring back the app with a shiny new toy after deleting all the ‘negative’ comments, and everyone will forget. I won't forget,” one incensed fan wrote.
The Jeremy Renner app was created by a company called EscapeX, which handles personal apps for a variety of celebrities, including Marc Anthony and Bob Marley. Rafe Lopresti-Oakes, who works as EscapeX’s director of engagement, maintains that the relaunch was a straightforward update. “The restart of the app was to update to the latest version,” he said.
2. The Contest
In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, Jeremy Renner (the person) used Jeremy Renner (the app) to pull off a classy move—he donated $20,000 to Corpus Christi’s Driscoll Children’s Hospital, using money raised through an in-app contest in which users entered to win a visit with Renner on the Atlanta, Georgia, set of the latest Avengers movie.
Some fans, however, became furious about the outcome of the contest. They feel that the contest was rigged in the winner’s favor. Some users also took umbrage because the “set visit” ultimately took place at Renner’s home rather than on the set of the film, which they believed was false advertising. What’s more, users grew even angrier when the winner claimed that she hadn’t actually gone to Jeremy Renner’s home, but then Jeremy Renner explained that she had gone to his home. The angry fans detailed these grievances on social media.
3. “Infiltration” and “Bullying”
One recurring theme among the irate Rennerinos was that the app had been overtaken by bullies. “People called out the bullying multiple times, EscapeX had a policy against it as outlined directly in their user agreement, but didn’t seem to intervene,” app user Brianne Giordano told me over email.
I decided to reach out to the person who I assumed would be the least angry user of the Jeremy Renner app—Jeremy Renner’s no. 1 fan, according to the in-app “Fanboard.” The app ranks its users based on how many “stars” they have accumulated. Users can purchase stars, and they can also gain them by participating on the app, or they can be “boosted” by other users who appreciate their posts. The person who is currently listed in the top spot is named Victoria Logue. While she still appears at the top, she claims that another user has since unseated her as the no. 1 fan—and she believes this person is an “infiltrator.” “I have a very strong feeling [the user] is one of the app’s many admins that have infiltrated, so to speak, the feed to act as a kind of cheerleader to keep things happy,” Logue told me by email, noting that she had unsubscribed to the app after the scandal over the contest, and had only recently downloaded it again. “I’m really just interested to see if Jeremy Renner ever acknowledges what happened or if he apologizes for hurting many of his fans.”
When I reached out to Jeremy Renner for comment, I heard from his business manager Kristoffer Winters, who explained that the app had been beset by an unexpected volume of vile comments, and that Renner and his team had decided to enforce more content moderation on the updated version in order to keep its atmosphere positive. “It’s not censoring. I wouldn’t say censoring. It’s just that, if someone says something to somebody that is nasty, we’ve decided to block them,” Winters said. “If someone doesn’t like Jeremy, they don’t have to like Jeremy. But that doesn’t mean that we have to post their comments in his app. They can go to a hundred other places and say something negative.”
“The internet is a weird and scary place, and it has a lot of negativity on it, and it’s something that we don’t condone on our private platforms,” Lopresti-Oakes told me. He noted that the app does indeed have stipulations against bullying in its rules, and said that what was happening was not censorship but simply the company’s attempt to remove cruelty from the Jeremy Renner fandom. Lopresti-Oakes also emphasized that he sees the angry users as an outlier. “There was a really sour little group of people that just weren’t Jeremy Renner fans,” he said.
“The metaphor that I always like to use, which we actually have in our legal terms and conditions when people sign onto the app, is called our ‘living room’ policy,” Lopresti-Oakes said, noting that the company uses between 40 and 50 Taiwan-based moderators to evaluate comments as they come in. “We put it to the test of, ‘If someone said this to you inside your living room, would they still be welcome in your living room?’ That’s basically how we make our decisions toward anyone we feel we need to block.”
While the moderation seems to be working—the vast majority of comments within the Jeremy Renner app are now overwhelmingly positive—Renner is still experiencing backlash elsewhere on the internet. His Instagram posts, in particular, are now littered with digs. In response to a photo he posted on Monday, Renner received the following comment: “I hope you die man. I’m not even a fan. I just genuinely hate you and wish you the worst of humanity.”
“I don’t even know if we’re going to keep the app,” Winters said.
