How does monetization complicate efforts toward social justice in online communities? For knitters, whose online community emerged on monetizable social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram, a years-long internal controversy about problematic creator content has become a springboard into leveraging monetization toward social justice. Yet although this effort has been largely successful, it continues to spark questions about how platformization and its logic of monetization – predicated on values like competition, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, and self-discipline – constrain possibilities for collective solidarity and mutual support. This paper examines the controversy by performing a rhetorical analysis on representative media objects including Instagram posts and Stories, YouTube videos and comment fields, and supporting materials such as blogs and website content. Situating my analysis in a theoretical context of affect and rhetorical circulation, I argue that participants use the concept of “authenticity” as a tool to negotiate the tensions between the platformization values that constrain them and the social justice values toward which they strive.

BeReal, the latest social media app to gain popularity, explicitly frames itself as a more “authentic” alternative to dominant platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Users can post only once per day, in a random two-minute window controlled by the app. Posts consist of an image that combines photos from a smartphone’s front- and back-facing cameras. While these individual features aren’t novel, the app packages them as an overt response to current cultural frustration with fake-ness. How persuasive is this marketing tactic, especially among a generation that has grown up with social media? To explore this question, we are interviewing young adult BeReal users about how they use the app and to what extent they experience BeReal as a space for authenticity. Our ongoing analysis suggests that while participants find BeReal to offer forms of real-time and spontaneous authenticity, on a deeper level, they question whether social platforms can ever act as vessels for authenticity. These initial findings indicate that young adults may recognize social media claims to authenticity as the marketing tactics they often are.

To achieve success in the industry, wellness influencers must master both authenticity and credibility to ensure longevity. Within internet research, authenticity has been explored extensively as it relates to influencer culture, yet credibility is understudied. Through an analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews with wellness influencers in the United States, supplemented by 378 Instagram images and videos, I apply source credibility theory to the wellness influencer industry on Instagram to evaluate credibility in relation to authenticity. In the findings I detail how these two concepts work together, and sometimes against one another, as influencers attempt to build and maintain their online brands, I also present and explicate the “authoritative share” - a content creation technique employed by wellness influencers to balance their authenticity with credibility presentation on Instagram. This study suggests the boundary between influencer and expert is muddling and future studies may interrogate how the social media landscape is changing based on creators flocking to social media to share their personal and professional lives.

What happens when an influencer’s real life interferes with the expectations created around their branded persona? When, for example, a vegan vlogger who has touted their healthy lifestyle is diagnosed with cancer and must now explain how their diet could not prevent the disease? Or when a pair of #VanLifers ditch their vehicle to move back into a home? What happens when an influencer makes choices to prioritize their circumstances, at the expense of the audience’s demands for entertainment and its expectations of a brand narrative?

In this paper, we perform a rhetorical analysis of the confessional rhetoric of three prominent YouTube travel vloggers, Kara and Nate (US), Eamon and Bec (CA), and Elena and Riley, or Sailing La Vagabonde (AUS), over a period of two years. We consider the role of the confessional in influencer communication as a means of maintaining a constitutive (brand) relationship with an audience and argue that the “confessional” is a reaction to a perceived need to apologize for real life events that interfere with the “authenticity” of an influencer’s brand. We suggest that this perception is created through what we call a “reverse parasocial relationship,” in which the influencer feels beholden to the maintenance of a perceived relationship with an unseen audience. The confessional acts as a re-constitutive rhetoric that allows an influencer to refashion themselves as a credible speaker to an assumed existing audience and realign the realities of their lives with the expectations of their branded personas.

Through the case of the technologically augmented K-pop idol group Mad Monster, this article explores the participatory culture in the supposedly revolutionary proliferation of “humanlike, realistic” digital technologies by drawing on the concept of meta-authenticity, loosely defined as the desire or achievement of authenticity in practices of inauthenticity. I focus on the implications of the social integration of artificial agents and augmentative tools for humans, not to re-establish the human-nonhuman binary but to illuminate the persisting human presence and involvement. Mad Monster’s authenticity was achieved through—not despite—their blatantly “inauthentic” technological augmentations like extreme facial and voice filters. They were co-managed to perform as per “human” authenticity expectations while drawing on the presumption of inauthenticity: by the comedy duo, their fans, existing institutions, and commercial interests—the locus of their authenticity was in collaborative performances. Mad Monster is a case of contemporary meta-authenticity that demands a shift of focus from technological states to collaborative performances around it: how “humanlike” or technologically augmented cyborgs are involved in social spheres matters more than what they are. Their success as “fake but/thus real” AR-filtered, autotuned celebrities also warns of how diverse humans’ crucial contributions can be easily hidden in cyborg phenomena that stress their technological components, and how accountability can be diverted. The revolutionary potential of cyborgs rests not in technical achievements but in the collaborations of the actors involved: questioning, shaking, and breaking the standards.