Scroll, Judge, Unfollow: How Audiences Navigate Authenticity and Cancellation

This thesis explores how audiences perceive and respond to authenticity and cancel culture within the context of beauty influencer content on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. While authenticity has become a central marker of credibility and commercial viability in influencer culture, it remains a highly contested and performative construct. Similarly, cancel culture functions as a form of digital moral regulation, where audiences collectively hold influencers accountable for perceived violations of authenticity, ethics, or transparency. Despite growing academic attention to influencer strategies and reputational crises, there remains a notable gap in understanding how audiences themselves interpret, negotiate, and react to these dynamics, particularly within feminized digital spaces. To address this gap, this research draws on 11 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with young women aged 20-25 who regularly engage with beauty influencers. Using reflexive thematic analysis, this study identifies key themes related to how participants define and detect authenticity, how they respond to sponsorships and perceived commercialism, and how they engage with or disengage from influencers following moments of controversy. Findings indicate that authenticity is understood as both emotional sincerity and aesthetic consistency yet is often recognized as a carefully constructed performance. Participants described forms of strategic engagement, trust regulation, and disengagement shaped by parasocial relationships, brand alignment, and moral expectations. Notably, responses to cancel culture were highly contextual, shaped by perceived severity of the transgression, influencer response, and broader gendered dynamics of scrutiny. The study contributes to influencer scholarship by centering the audience as an active agent in shaping digital reputations and moral boundaries. It deepens theoretical understandings of authenticity as performativity and cancel culture as participatory moral discourse, offering insights into the emotional, ethical, and cultural dimensions of audience-influencer relations in contemporary digital life.