Authenticity, Cancellations, and The Extreme

PART 1/4

Social media has allowed ‘your friend next-door’ to get famous, the job of being an influencer was mystified as a job that is easy to do since the task is only to be your authentic self, however as an emotional labour they are required to show this gratitude often with a warm friendly personality and being their authentic selves to appease the parasocial relationships they cultivate from their followers (Duffy and Wissinger 2017:4567–4568). Horton and Wohl define para-social relationships as a gratifying feeling of intimacy and familiarity that is felt by the audience to the point that they would tune in to specific programs to check on the cast members as if they were their friends (Marwick 2013:119).

While in the past celebrities had to reply to fan-letters and were subject to cruelty if they were involved in celebrity tabloids scandals nowadays micro-celebrities can easily reply to their followers’ tweets and get cancelled if they were found to misbehave.

Cancel culture is the pervasive trend to cut-out celebrities by means of calling out, boycotting and ostracising both the celebrity in question and those who would choose to associate with them, creating echo chambers of outrage (Geusens et.al 2023:2) The practice can be traced back to calling out in “Black Twitter”, in which they hoped to educate their fellows inappropriate behaviour by mixing political commentaries with comedy thus resembling political correctness activism (Geusens et.al 2023:2–3). While many see this as a positive trend that gave minorities a voice to address misconduct that was perpetrated by individuals as such in the social movement of #MeToo (Lewis and Christin 2022:1633–1634) and #BlacklivesMatter but the practice was also seen as an act of moral terrorisms and a radical way for political correctness as “witch-hunts” that threaten the foundation of liberal discourse perpetrated by overzealous woke generations (Lewis and Christin 2022:1634).

In the case of influencer cancellation, audiences and drama channels were digging to their old posts (Duffy in Geusens 2023:2) to find infractions that ranged from criminal offences or just being unpleasant. The phenomenon asks for the influencers to be de-platformed as a form of punishment. However specific to the phenomenon of #Dramagedon Lewis and Angele argue how scandal could actually make the perpetrator get even more famous and help to raise capital for their businesses thus raising suspicion of whether the conflicts are fabricated or not (Lewis and Christin 2022:1633, Geusens et.al 2023:9).

In the context of gendered visibility and authenticity, scholars argue that members of marginalised communities must carefully police themselves to be both visible to a large audience but not make themselves too vulnerable in the process (Duffy and Hund 2019: 4983–4997). One might argue then that the opposite of this would be an easier way to do. If scandalised influencers are perceived as super authentic and the punishment of being de-platform can be mitigated then why wouldn’t they?

In this study I assessed that following the trend of online cancelation there is a rise of extreme cases of cancelled influencers where they have to deal with actual charges. This study sampled news from online media regarding influencers and lawlessness that were taken from January 1st to April 31st, which were then categorised into three issues (1)The case of ACCC influencers crackdown (2)Instafame public disruptor (3) Andrew Tate and Misogyny. Each case will be explained in regard to studies relevant to the context such as authenticity, platform governance, gendered visibility, and instafame through a tik tok posts and full analysis of the study can be found on medium blog web as a series of continuous articles.

REFERENCES

Duffy, Brooke Erin and Hund, Emily (2019) “Gendered Visibility on Social Media: Navigating Instagram’s Authenticity Bind,” International journal of communication (Online), p. 4983.

Duffy, Brookeerin and Wissinger, Elizabeth (2017) “Mythologies of Creative Work in the Social Media Age: Fun, Free, and ‘Just Being Me,’” International journal of communication (Online), p. 4652.

Geusens, Femke & Ouvrein, Gaëlle and Remen, Soetkin. (2023). #Cancelled: A qualitative content analysis of cancel culture in the YouTube beauty community. The Social Science Journal. 1–17. 10.1080/03623319.2023.2175150.

Lewis, Rebecca and Christin, Angèle (2022) “Platform drama: ‘Cancel culture,’ celebrity, and the struggle for accountability on YouTube,” New media & society, 24(7), pp. 1632–1656.

Marwick, Alice E. (2013) “The Fabulous Lives of Micro-celebrities”,”Status update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the social media age, pp. 112–162.