Did Covid ruin influencer gossip?
The days of pandemic party call-outs are almost behind us. What’s left isn’t that interesting.
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Today's post is brought to you by a serious lack of interesting gossip in today’s r/Blogsnark thread. —Kate
As Covid shut down the world last March, it seemed like influencers were the last to know. Naomi Davis fled New York City in an RV, Arielle Charnas took her active case of Covid-19 to the Hamptons, and a whole new genre of snark was born. r/Blogsnark, created in 2015 to gossip about the meaningless annoyances of some of Instagram’s most notorious creators, became overridden with meticulous documentation of more serious offenses: influencers traveling, attending large gatherings, and otherwise violating the loosely set restrictions in the United States. Dedicated and sometimes person-specific callout accounts appeared on Instagram and TikTok. Some creators were even charged with misdemeanors for hosting parties. Now, as swiftly as the discourse arrived, it has all but disappeared.
This is good news. We're no longer up in arms because Covid has significantly declined in the U.S. with 35 percent of the country fully vaccinated. And there are only so many times you can lament a certain influencer not wearing a mask before you’re just yelling at clouds. They’re never going to wear one. As frustrating as it is, there are creators who did not listen to guidance and did not do their part during the pandemic who are going to come out on the other side of this unchanged.
But gossip may be changed forever. As I conduct my morning r/blogsnark scroll and see it shift back to complaints about influencer vocal tics and sponsored products that seem off brand, I just want to reply “WHO CARES?”
This is on me, because the whole point of r/blogsnark is to be petty. But now that we know influencer offenses can and have amounted to putting vulnerable people at risk of catching a deadly disease, I just can’t muster the same anger at, say, the fact that they drink soda every day.
I feel like the parent who has decided to let their kid eat sugary snacks or watch what they want. Sure, let the influencer do a sponsored post for a vacuum they’ve “always loved,” even though a few months ago they did a sponsored post for a different vacuum. Let them do their skincare routine on Instagram Stories even though they’re using a filter that already smooths away their blemishes. Let them look at their reflection instead of the camera when they’re talking. Who! Cares!
I do care about finding community in the niche areas of online culture, and becoming a buzzkill about snark means I’m losing a huge part of that. But the internet has a way of shifting and molding to cultural changes IRL, and new communities are always forming. If the biggest controversy of the day is that an influencer touches her hair a lot, given everything that’s happened this past year, I guess I should count myself lucky.