I Cringed Reading CNN’s Brutal ‘Everyone Hates JoJo Siwa’ Piece – Here’s Why Her Fans and Family Are Furious
By Erin Whitten
I cringed reading CNN’s Everyone Hates JoJo Siwa hit piece.
It’s not that the piece is inaccurate, it’s that it’s needlessly cruel. Written as a profile of the 22-year-old pop singer, the article, published October 25, 2025, walks readers through rehearsals, self-doubt, and sheer fatigue. There’s a moment of sympathy when JoJo Siwa cries in her room after a particularly rough day and nonetheless the prevailing tone of the article is ghoulish, as if the fact that Siwa, at 22, was working to recalibrate her image should be a revelation. In many ways, JoJo Siwa has always been a cultural provocation. A child reality star with a rainbow empire who transitioned to a queer icon and then… who knows what. It’s not that the piece is devoid of insight. Siwa is many things at once as we’ve seen, brash and insecure, motivated and messy…You know what else though? It’s also drenched in pessimism.
It seems to ask: How can we know her? How can we know anyone? But mostly, how can we know that she, like we do, is a deeply contradictory person? The writer infuses these reflections with a dark satisfaction, as if Siwa’s faltering toward a more honest self was a final front to be laid bare. Where lines could be compassionate, about her fumbling efforts to be more “authentic,” and her messy transitions between phases of public selfhood, they settle for cynical reprimands that she’s been “teetering between niche fame and lucrative stardom for more than half her young life.” It uses her boyfriend as a badge of how she’s lost her spark, noting that she’s “toned down her vocal advocacy for LGBTQ rights” after starting to date Chris Hughes.
Siwa has been candid about needing to reset after the success of her “gay pop” era, which embraced a more grownup look and experimented with sexual boundaries that she now acknowledges “went a little too much.” CNN frames it like an exposé of a conscious sell-out rather than the confessions of a 22-year-old who has always been self-aware but is still trying to figure things out. The truth is more simple, and maybe sadder, JoJo Siwa has been a public performer since she was nine years old, and the world still will not let her change without an asterisk.
The publication of the profile followed on the heels of another incident that garnered less deserved attention… her Infinity Heart Tour stop in Glasgow on October 1. In a video from the night, Siwa can be seen demanding a fan wearing a hoodie leave the venue. On the shirt is a meme that photoshopped Siwa’s face onto an egg, alongside a photo of her distinctive hairline. Siwa’s expression in the video is less furious than wounded. “You’re not going to come to my concert and bring a hoodie making fun of me,” she tells the audience member. The fan, a young woman named Anjali, later apologized for wearing the image, which she had not realized was associated with Siwa’s personal insecurities. The moment was captured, clipped, and shared as further evidence of JoJo “overreacting.”
Chris Hughes took to Instagram and X to call out the article as “agenda driven” and the journalist for writing in a way that perpetuates “the same culture of bullying they should be working to eliminate.” The language was direct and emotional “lazy and disgusting journalism,” he called it. That’s exactly what this moment reveals: Not that JoJo Siwa can’t handle criticism (she can, and she has), but that she has grown up in a media ecosystem that incentivizes violence on women. She’s a fair target… too bold in color, too earnest in sensibility, too known for too long, and now apparently too human.
JoJo Siwa is not a perfect artist, or even a mature one. She’s still becoming, which is exactly what’s so interesting about her. What’s cruel is the way the world wants to ensure that she fails, in public, to prove that she’s still maturing. If the CNN piece wanted to capture her contradictions, it succeeded, but not the way it wanted to. It revealed a double standard. JoJo Siwa is only allowed to evolve if she does it quietly, apologetically, and offstage. And that’s not who she’s ever been.
