The governance of snarking: Anti-fandom as tiny publics

This article examines online celebrity ‘snarking’ communities, otherwise known as anti-fandom spaces or even hate forums. Specifically, we provide an analysis of the governance of these groups and how they develop a collective morality through both articulations with the celebrities’ mediation and with the logics of social justice. Using data collected from a digital ethnography of two popular celebrity snark spaces, we employ Critical Discourse Analysis to track the particular discursive repertoires and vernaculars which characterise snark across multiple platforms. We argue that despite the perceived ‘incivility’ of these online spaces, discourses of care, justice and solidarity often emerge which complicate existing narratives of these groups. Though participation in snarking collectives is often explained in pathologising or individualising narratives of anti-fandom, we demonstrate some of the reflexive work that happens in these spaces which sometimes ignites sociological discussions and frustrations at inequalities. We therefore conceptualise snark through the lens of a ‘tiny public’ that identifies and explores broader race and class injustice in contemporary society. Here, the prevailing discourses about celebrity subjects ‘failing upwards’ betrays an anger at elites who do not suffer the same material consequences at times of crisis; though many of these frustrations are misdirected back at the celebrity subject and manifest in a collective desire to see repercussions for the individual celebrity, rather than collective action aimed at the structures that make this failure possible, visible and even lucrative.