Following the economic recession of 2008, news reports and media texts blamed individual consumers and their reckless and wasteful consumption on designer accessories and extravagant homes for contributing to the financial crisis. Within the current context of the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis has led to substantial increases in everyday necessities like groceries and rent. At the same time, social media influencers on platforms like Instagram and TikTok continue to promote excessive consumption of viral products that are often discarded upon purchase. In the latter half of 2022 and early 2023, “deinfluencing” has become a popular trend on TikTok. Influencers and everyday users alike post videos on the platform encouraging other users to purchase certain products and not others, advice that has become referred to as “deinfluencing.” This paper analyzes “deinfluencing” to understand how this TikTok trend reproduces cultural formations of consumer citizenship. Drawing upon the theoretical foundations of Zygmunt Bauman and Sarah Banet-Weiser, a multimodal discursive analysis on “deinfluencing” TikTok videos will reveal how the trend works to individualize the cost-of-living crisis in accordance with neoliberal logics. Particular attention is directed towards identifying the parallels between “deinfluencing” and previous cultural formations that emerged during other periods of economic and financial crisis.

Building on two case studies, this paper will discuss emerging healing, health and therapy cultures on social media and the role of (micro-)influencers within these cultures. While influencer cultures have become an important field of internet research over the last decade (see for example Abidin, 2015), scholars typically focus on commercial influencers in the context of fashion, beauty, travel, lifestyle genres, and adjacent genres. This paper contributes to extending how we imagine and theorise influencer practices and explores influencers and influencer practices that are motivated, arguably, by healing rather than financial or ideological ambitions. Theoretically, we consider how digital affect cultures enable influencers and followers to (re)create narratives about health, relate through resonance and engage with media rituals rather than merely seek information. As influencer practices and cultures continue to expand beyond popular or normative conceptualisations, this paper offers empirical accounts to open up the contexts and theories we use to explore influencer dynamics. Our paper is a starting point to invite conversation at the conference about the diversity of influencers and influencer cultures, how we might theorise their roles, and how care, healing, health and therapy is felt and communicated.

Sex education has historically been destabilised through moral panics and political agendas. Therefore, some content creators have taken to disseminating sexual health information on social media, including YouTube. Some content creators, who become influencers, mix sex education with entertainment tropes to create engaging sex edutainment about sex, relationships and sexual health. Peer-led knowledge sharing is often delivered in a shame-free way utilising direct-to-camera address, approachable language and networked friendship to build audience rapport and parasocial trust relationships. Whilst this trust relationship has been studied extensively in marketing, there is also a growing body of work considering how this trust can be applied to influence health.

This paper builds on existing scholarship around influencers in health by exploring the relationships formed between sex edutainment influencers on YouTube and their audiences. The paper asks the question ‘can social media influencers can act as a new form of digital peer-educators and sexual health influencers through the formation of parasocial trust relationships?’ and interrogates what the possibilities and problems of this might be. This paper draws on data from a three-phase digital mixed-methods study rooted in actor-network theory which utilised comment analysis, online surveys with young people, email interviews with influencers and a walkthrough method reading of YouTube.

The findings suggest that YouTube sex edutainment influencers act as health influencers and digital peer-educators to some of their followers, however they face an uphill battle due to the way the influencer/audience relationship is mediated through YouTube, its policies and algorithmic governance

In Western culture, wellness is often invoked as a catchall solution for myriad problems, especially within wellness discourse on social media. The wellness industry is largely portrayed online through personal experiences and anecdotal evidence where popular users promote products, services, and habits to digital audiences. However, influencers often lack credibility resulting in the spread of medical misinformation and disordered advice. Recently, wellness influencers have begun to promote wellness through tourism. Wellness tourism has experienced significant growth and researchers expect it to continue. To analyze how wellness tourism is communicated through influencers’ content created while at The Ranch Malibu, we analyzed the TikTok content of one influencer whose account grew in popularity throughout her time at The Ranch. The findings explicate how an influencer sharing her time at The Ranch Malibu on TikTok operationalizes wellness tourism in a way that encourages orthorexic behavior, furthers the moralization of health, and acts as virtue signaling toward online audiences. This project critically examines the rise of an industry that is tied up in appearance, self-presentation, privilege, and lifestyle norms of contemporary Western culture. We fill a gap in internet and wellness tourism research by examining what values wellness retreats communicate to attendees and the public especially when communicated through an influencer’s experience.