Social media influencers’ transgressions – A multimodal critical discourse analysis of canceling strategies in threaded discussion on body shaming

Transgressions triggered by social media influencers’ inappropriate statements lead to social media hypes. The online public arena in Romania was dominated by a ‘stretch mark’ scandal when a famous influencer (George Buhnici) body shamed women. His controversial remarks urged a wave of outrage in the digitalized environment. Applying a sociocultural approach to character assassination and a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we aimed at identifying how the social media influencer (SMI) was represented in the online users’ comments and how the commenters discursively represented themselves. The main findings showed that name calling, ridicule, social identity denial, and disgracing were the four main character attack strategies present in the cancelation supporters’ representation of the influencer as the ‘other’. In their attempt to protect the body shamer (the influencer) from losing his social capital, cancelation resisters employed minimizing, bolstering, transcendence (freedom of speech), and attacking the accuser (the canceler) as main strategies to represent the influencer as ‘one of us’. Online users adopted three main roles in their discursive self-representation: delegitimators of collective Us, experiencers, and social advisers. In the end, the study provides a threefold relationship framework for the cancelation process triggered by social media influencers’ transgressions.