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Under the unfluence — a viral fightback begins

Spot the trend: the vastly popular polka-dot Zara dress
Spot the trend: the vastly popular polka-dot Zara dress

The concept of an “unfluencer” seems a mistake, or at the very least a misspelling. Yet Newton’s third law applies to social media too: for every influencer there is an equal and opposite unfluencer, with 200,000 followers who love to hate them.

Opposites attract

Journalist Marisa Meltzer defined the unfluencer, and rise thereof, in the August issue of New York Magazine and on The Cut. “Meet the unfluencer”, she wrote, “the person who makes me want to do the opposite of whatever she’s doing and throw out whatever I already own that she has posted about”.

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The unfluencer is the person who turned you off the Zara Dress by posting a picture with the caption “the dress caters for all types, even this clapped-out old thing” while sprawled in it across a vintage car at a Polo tournament. You love the Zara Dress, you’re only human — but they have made it mainstream. They are the bête noires who have posted so many pictures of #inspo vegan meals against a sunset background, complete with statistics about the meat industry’s carbon footprint, that you started hate-Googling the nearest steak restaurant.

Thinking fast and low

Herein lies the unfluencer’s genius: controversy begets clicks. Take, for instance, the influencer Tiffany Mitchell, who has more than 211,000 followers on Instagram. She was deftly able to turn a motorcycle accident that left her shaken and with minor scrapes into an inspiring Instagram post musing on second chances, thanks to a professional photographer friend who was riding with her and documented the episode. She told BuzzFeed News she “would never turn a very important personal story like this into a brand campaign”, and insisted the fact that one photo featured a Smartwater bottle was happenstance.

Double trouble

A lot of people sent Mitchell well-wishes and flooded her comments with warm thoughts; yet the remarks then became mixed with more critical and cynical observations. As Meltzer observed: “One woman’s influencer is another woman’s unfluencer” — but essentially you’re doubling your audience. It’s the same chimera campaigning that fuels sales of #MAGA merch, driven by irony as often as loyalty. You love to see it, or you hate to see it. But one way or another, you see it.

Rocking the bottom

Why would anyone want to be hated, you may well ask. That they need never meet their invisible army of trolls is moot; the unfluencer may be inured to criticism (see: POTUS, Piers Morgan), or they may be deeply wounded by the keyboard warriors. There’s greater merit in flipping the mirror — why do <we> hate. “The unfluencer makes me dig into my psyche as well as my old analyst did, and she does it all for free,” concludes Meltzer. “I should credit her in the end for allowing me to better understand myself.”

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