Grief hypejacking: Influencers, #ThoughtsAndPrayers, and the commodification of grief on Instagram

Abstract

At the intersection of the attention economy of human vision on social media, the tyranny of machine vision on platform algorithms, and the emergence of hashtag publics as an immediate reaction to various global events, this article takes interest in the phenomenon of “grief hypejacking,” where users bandwagon on high-visibility hashtags and public tributes on Instagram to generate mourning content with the specific intention to misappropriate such temporarily trending public channels of collective grief for self-publicity. Against the backdrop of saturation fatigue and slacktivism through the rhetoric of #ThoughtsAndPrayers on social media, this study traces the behaviors of ordinary Instagram users and highly prolific influencers to understand how they hijack grief-related hashtags on Instagram through a variety of semiotic and textual strategies that problematizes digital mortality and the value of collective mourning. Specifically, the article uncovers an insidious shift from “public grieving” to “publicity grieving,” and brings together theories on micro-celebrity in celebrity studies, brandjacking in business studies, and grief publics in internet studies to examine the commodification of grief on social media.

Keywords:

• Grief
• instagram
• influencers
• mourning
• thoughts and prayers

Notes

1 Public grieving occurs when “users sincerely partake in a global expression, narrative, and dialogue of a grief event through the use of high-visibility trending hashtags or by partaking in highly visible networks of grief” (Abidin 2018a, 169).

2 Publicity grieving occurs when “users opportunistically harness the attention currency of high-visibility trending hashtags or public tributes to promote their (self-)brand or wares” (Abidin 2018a, 169).

3 Coordinated action that is stealthily disguised to give the impression of organic, unsolicited, widespread sentiment.

4 See Najafabadi (2017) for a study on intentional spoilage of hashtags meant for political discussion – nuclear negotiations with Iran – to deflect public attention on important issues.

5 Screenshot in Lay (2015b).

6 The grief hypejacking in which influencers participate, while seemingly easy to emulate, actually requires a nuanced understanding of boundary markers and subversive play in order to remain under the radar, avoiding public backlash.