Deal with it or leave: Discourses and practices of influencers and teenage girls navigating gendered visibility and digital violence

This article explores the imaginaries that influencers and teenage girls construct around gendered visibility and digital violence. To do so, I analyze 300 videos of three of the most popular Spanish influencers reacting to hate speech and harassment. In parallel, I draw on eight focus groups and eight paired interviews to examine the perceptions of girls aged 14 and 15 years regarding these experiences of digital violence, and how such discursive practices shape their everyday online self-presentation. Results show that influencers embody both the privileges and risks associated with hypervisibility of feminine-coded users on social media, modeling strategies for coping with hostility that reinforce the normalization of digital violence. Consequently, the teenage girls perceive online visibility as a vulnerable status for themselves and act accordingly, using self-protection strategies that lead to their invisibility. These findings highlight the need to consider the structural and cultural factors that shape gendered digital experiences.