For the official version of record, see here:
Kelly, A. (2025). On the Interface of Influencers and Antagonists: Conceptualising the Role of Audience Antagonism in the Mediation of Reactionary Politics. Media Theory, 9(2), 133–164. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i2.1274

On the Interface of Influencers and Antagonists: Conceptualising the Role of Audience Antagonism in the Mediation of Reactionary Politics

ANTHONY KELLY
University College Dublin, IRELAND

Abstract

This article considers the constitutive role of audience antagonism in the mediation of reactionary politics. Reactionary political influencers are now instrumental in the cultivation of toxic online environments typified by the platforming of racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQIA+ content. As institutional and regulatory frameworks increasingly seek to grapple with the platformised ecosystem within which these influencers operate, the focus of interventions remains largely on content creators. However, the social media audiences of reactionary influencers also position themselves as active contributors both in and against the mediation of reactionary politics, navigating complex alignments of assent and dissent in their engagement. Taking Andrew Tate and Chaya Raichik (aka Libs of TikTok) as case studies, this article examines a variety of antagonisms typifying audience engagement with reactionary influencers, arguing that attention to these audience antagonisms presents new opportunities for conceptualising the social, political, and economic embeddedness of reactionary influencer online content.

Keywords

Social media influencers, reactionary digital politics, fannish positionalities, platform economies, antagonism

Introduction

In March 2024, the American social media influencer Chaya Raichik, under her moniker Libs of TikTok, posted several times in support of an Alaskan gym-goer who had been banned by her gym after posting a video of a transgender woman in the female changing rooms. Soon thereafter, the gym chain involved began receiving bomb threats at multiple locations across the United States (Rodriguez, 2024). This was not an isolated incident. Although Raichik has always strenuously denied any link between her posts and violent interventions by followers, analysis conducted by Media Matters for America, a progressive media monitoring organisation based in the US, identified at least 48 instances of harassment or threats of violence against organisations, events, and individuals that were targeted by one of Raichik’s posts (Tirrell and Gogarty, 2024). In highlighting the complex and frequently inscrutable embeddedness of audiences in the mediation—and propagation—of exclusionary ideologies, such events also exemplify two concurrent trends animating the current convergence of political communication and political economy, each with far-reaching implications for how we might think about contemporary audiences.

First, political influencers are transforming political campaigning and communication (Riedl, Lukito and Woolley, 2023). This transformation of paid political speech is intimately enmeshed in the emergence of novel mechanisms of media ownership, financing, and control, particularly forms of digital patronage that see content creators derive substantial income from their fans and followers (Bonifacio, Hair and Wohn, 2023). Research in this space has problematised the monetisation of political speech in a “grey area between market and democracy” (De Gregorio and Goanta, 2022: 225), as well as the impact of new institutional and regulatory frameworks seeking to facilitate the governance of social media influencers across several jurisdictions (Abidin, Xu and Hutchinson, 2025). Thus far, regulatory and policy interventions have largely tended to focus on audiences as passive consumers requiring protection rather than as active participants in platform media ecosystems.

Second, these transformations increasingly intersect with the mediation of reactionary politics, which seeks the reversal of social progress, as well as the related propagation of toxic online environments characterised by the platforming of racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQIA+ content in which antagonism (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001) plays a defining role. These spaces are ever more dependent on both the participatory affordances of digital media and the feelings of connection and intimacy that ideological entrepreneurs seek to cultivate with their followers (Finlayson, 2023). But they are also spaces where perhaps little can be taken at face value and where ambivalence and ambiguity (Phillips and Milner, 2018) speak to a new centrality of transgression of democratic norms that defines both illiberal publicity (Bennett and Kneuer, 2024) and reactionary anti-publics (Tuters et al., 2024). It is these spaces of reaction—what Finlayson (2023) terms reactionary digital politics—to which I direct my attention in this article.

While participatory affordances have enabled new forms of reactionary politics, they also notably facilitate the active engagement of audiences. Below-the-line comments are “the most common form of participation in online journalism” (Frischlich, Boberg and Quandt, 2019: 2014), enabling multiple mechanisms for transgressing norms of honesty and civility in online discourse. Indeed, specific platform affordances can in some cases mean that audiences are more likely to read below-the-line comments before reading the article to which the comments are responding (Williams and Hsieh, 2021). This is important because exposure to toxicity in below-the-line comments is highly impactful, even potentially contributing to increasing the toxicity of subsequent comments (Kim et al., 2021). Further, insofar as incivility in online comments has the capacity to affect how audiences perceive the credibility of media sources, its prevalence has led to claims of a “toxic atmosphere effect” linked to the disruption of audience expectations regarding standards of communication (Masullo, Tenenboim and Lu, 2023). The implications of toxicity in user-generated comments are pronounced.

In that regard, current trajectories in the study of participatory audiences indicate that audience antagonism may be at the very core of participatory media infrastructures. Content creators, for instance, are frequently subjected to the weaponisation of the very intimacy they labour to foster with their followers (Glatt, 2023). Partisan media figures, too, are likely to be exposed to aggressive attempts by their audiences to define the partisan character of their content (Kelly, 2023). In the context of participatory affordances, influencer audiences increasingly have both the capacity and compunction to hold influencers accountable for their words and actions (Arnesson, 2024). Calls for narrative and ideological fidelity are also typical of reactionary fandoms (Jurg, Tuters and Picone, 2024), with the audiences of reactionary influencers also rewarding or even demanding the delivery of more extreme content (Lewis, 2018). These studies serve to highlight how the relations we term digitally intimate (Dobson, Carah and Robards, 2018) are routinely constituted through practices of audience antagonism.

Broadening the perspective on digital intimacies to include this focus on dissensus and dissent, this article argues the antagonistic practices of reactionary influencer social media audiences play a constitutive role in the performance of reactionary (anti-)‌publicity, even while being leveraged in the interests of monetising attention and engagement. Reactionary influencer online content may be a site of transgression of norms of public engagement and political participation within a space that is key to the transformation of political communication as a social practice. However, fundamentally linked to these practices is how the social media audiences of reactionary influencers position themselves as stakeholders in this space and, in the process, directly participate in the propagation—and sedimentation—of new forms of anti-pluralism, illiberalism, and reactionism.

Empirically, this article draws on the findings of an ongoing research project¹ focusing on the antagonistic practices of the social media audiences of reactionary political influencers. The project employs a blend of computational and qualitative techniques² to examine how audiences use below-the-line comment fields to position themselves in relation to reactionary influencer online content, taking two prominent reactionary influencers as case studies: Andrew Tate (aka AndrewTateSpeech) and Chaya Raichik (aka Libs of TikTok). Both Tate and Raichik have in recent years been linked to a variety of controversies, legal and otherwise. Both have been deplatformed on several occasions, whether for violation of community guidelines or for more explicitly hateful conduct. But both nonetheless attract significant audiences of loyal and engaged followers, as well as the attention of anti-fans and haters.

Drawing on these two project case studies, each characterised by their own distinct mobilisations of audience labour, this article focuses on the generative role of audience antagonism in the reactionary influencer ecosystem. It does so through an examination of conceptualisations of sex and gender as forms of social commentary, understandings of content creation as a mode of political action, positionings of audiences and influencers within the context of platform economies, and tensions between (dis-)connection and (in-)visibility in the monetisation of reaction. These constitutive antagonisms, it will be argued, are marked by a dialectic of assent and dissent that highlights the complexity of audience positionalities in relation to reactionary influencers, their content, and their audiences. An examination of these positionalities, it is here argued, can lead to new ways of thinking about the social, political, and economic embeddedness of reactionary influencer online content.

Platforming reactionary politics: two case studies

Reactionary politics can be defined as an ideological constellation that aims to reverse social progress, particularly for disadvantaged groups. In this sense, reactionary politics can be seen as oriented towards the consolidation and/or restoration of systemic hierarchies (Newth, Brown and Mondon, 2025)—linked by some authors to status threat (Parker and Lavine, 2025). Finlayson (2023) conceptualises reactionary digital politics as the mobilisation of participatory media forms in the interest of rejecting liberal democratic ideals. A key feature for Finlayson is how the participatory affordances of digital media, specifically, enable new configurations of reactionary politics. Mondon (2024) notably distinguishes between liberal and illiberal articulations of reactionary politics, highlighting how liberalism has always integrated certain illiberal tendencies. This is a position that resonates with Warner’s (2002) theorisation of liberal publicity but which is also confounded by the discursive engineering that typifies strategic publicity at the contemporary intersection of marketing and politics (Graan, 2022).

Reactionary politics is fundamentally manifold in its formations, encompassing agendas from immigration and integration to LGBTQIA+ rights and the definition of sex and gender (Amery and Mondon, 2025). What is shared, however, is the rejection of political claims to equality (Finlayson, 2023). Looking at the systems and actors that are driving their growth, Mondon’s (2024) work highlights the role of those in discursive power, particularly those who enjoy privileged positions within the political and media “mainstream”. Finlayson (2023) likewise highlights the role of ideological entrepreneurs, whose charismatic authority draws on forms of aspirational brand-building that mobilise reactionary discourses in relation to the political economies of platform media. Both approaches resonate further with Graan’s (2022: 315) analysis of the world-making efforts of discursive engineering, particularly with respect to how it operates “within the commercialized, brand-populated, marketing publics of neoliberal capital”.

And yet, research shows that attempts to engineer public discourse can and do operate in both top-down and bottom-up modes, disrupting analyses of power in these spaces. Lewis (2018), for example, reminds us that reactionary influence in the context of participatory media is multi-directional, including from audience to influencer. This may even lead to what Jurg et al. (2024) have termed audience capture. Reaction in this sense can be seen to entail the engagement of multiple stakeholders, among them influencer audiences. Participatory affordances mean audience contributions are embedded in the circulation of media content and, as such, are a meaningful feature of its semiotic form. By shaping what these media look like, these contributions also give discursive shape to the mediation of reactionary politics, even when in tension with manifestations of institutional power that typify hybrid media (Chadwick, 2017)³.

Insofar as digital platforms have played a defining role in shaping the performative and rhetorical forms of reactionary digital politics (Finlayson, 2023), the two present case studies⁴ were selected not only for their specific reliance on fan labour but also their particular forms of immersion in contemporary platform media ecosystems.

Andrew Tate is a British-American social media influencer known for his misogynistic “manosphere” content as well as for ongoing criminal charges related to accusations of human trafficking, rape, and sexual assault. Notable for his explicit rejection of liberal democratic institutions, Tate has recently begun to align explicitly with US President Donald Trump, both during the 2024 US presidential election campaign and in its aftermath. Tate and his content have repeatedly been removed from various mainstream platforms. However, he also hosts content on proprietary “learning” platforms, such as Hustler’s University and The Real World. Although Tate is now once again active on Twitter/X, a focus is placed on Tate’s presence on the alt-tech video-sharing platform Rumble for the purposes of this research.

Chaya Raichik is an American social media influencer known for her anti-LGBTQIA+ invective as well as for her involvement in political mobilisations at state and national level in the US, including a controversial advisory role on Arkansas’ state Education Library Media Advisory Committee. Raichik created content anonymously as Libs of TikTok before her identity was publicly revealed by Washinton Post journalist Taylor Lorenz in April 2022—an event characterised by Raichik as “doxxing” (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2025). As discussed above, the targets of Raichik’s posts have in recent years consistently been the subject of violent harassment. Like Tate, Raichik was deplatformed by Twitter before ultimately returning in 2022. It is Raichik’s presence on Twitter/X that is the focus of this case study.

The dynamic of deplatforming and replatforming dominating Tate and Raichik’s online presence shapes not only the kinds of relationships audiences can build with these influencers but also how they can be analysed by researchers. Increasingly, this also happens in the context of a marked shift in data availability that makes reliably accessing social media content as research data difficult (Failla and Rossetti, 2024). The discussion that follows is thus by no means intended to be taken as an exhaustive treatment of the topic but is rather designed to demonstrate the value of centring audience positionalities in examinations of how reactionary politics gets platformed. In what follows, this article will address some of the distinct points of convergence and divergence in how this is achieved across the two case studies. In so doing, this article (re)centres the complicity and collusion (Silverstone, 2002) of audiences in the propagation of reactionary (digital) politics.

Conceptualisations of sex and gender as social commentary

The two case studies are characterised by points of thematic convergence and contrast that speak to some of the plurality of viewpoints reactionary media, perhaps contradictorily, represent. In the context of the current research, one of the most prominent points of divergence is in conflicting conceptualisations of sex/gender malleability. Rigid binaries of male and female, articulated as immutable biological facts, are challenged by the existence and public visibility of transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, and gender diverse identities (Thorne et al., 2019). In the context of this visibility, LGBTQIA+ rights are deeply politicised, becoming the subject of a transnational backlash oriented towards the furthering of illiberal norms (Velasco, 2023), with transgender identities now the target of particular ire and vitriol. The distinction is, in this sense, a site of significant contestation, featuring prominently in the rhetorics of many far-right politicians and commentators in the context of so-called “culture wars” (Montiel-McCann, 2023). This transformation is likewise distinctly evident among reactionary influencers and their followers.

For example, the talk of Andrew Tate and his followers is typified by the central notion of “doing the work” required to achieve an idealised vision of masculinity. A key feature of this perspective is a prominent focus on developing and advancing one’s physical and mental prowess. Comments enjoin other users to “go to the gym” in order to “transform yourself”. Masculinity is here modelled as something that is attainable through perseverance: being an “alpha male” is achievable through “hard work, dedication, and motivation”. But it is an ideal that must be worked at. It is the very act of striving and persevering towards personal development and self-improvement that comes to define constructions and mobilisations of masculinity, particularly in the North American context (Garrison, 2023). Tate’s followers assert that male destiny is to be “kings, not cucks”⁵—a form of sexually charged insult that can be used to police dissenting male voices in online discourse (Green, 2019).

By contrast, when it comes to the talk of Raichik and her followers, the central framing is that of immutable sex differences. In this perspective, sex is seen as determined by one’s biology, with gender denounced as mere “ideology” that is being pushed on “mentally vulnerable children” in the name of “diversity”. Followers, like Raichik, frame the process of gender transitioning as a form of “mutilation” that “doesn’t change who you are”. Sex, in this sense, is framed simultaneously in terms of human nature—expressive of a presumed underlying natural order—and as something that is to be understood as inherent and, above all, God-given. Whether or not one believes in God, however, biology is understood to say, “there are 2 sexes”.  Still, for Tate and his followers, although the focus is on masculinity as a process, the imperative to be a man likewise emerges from rigidly defined biological factors, even if there is always the risk of failing to actualise or realise their dictates. Audience antagonism is here largely expressed as support for the exclusionary rhetoric of influencers.

In practice, the very meaning of the term “sex” is something that can be manipulated to more closely reflect how people think about gender (Ridgeway and Saperstein, 2024). What is clear here, even in the context of these competing constructions of sex and gender, is the extent to which sex/gender beliefs can be mobilised and, more specifically, monetised within the reactionary influencer ecosystem. Despite these aspects of contrast and misalignment between the case studies, there is a palpable convergence with respect to how content orients towards specifically sexed and gendered targets of affect—and, more pointedly, outrage. Although the figures may differ between the case studies, the process of articulating in-group and out-group boundaries nevertheless mobilises constructions of sex and gender for related purposes of soliciting audience attention and inducing audience engagement.

In that regard, the Tate case study content is notably marked by frequent reference to devalued figures of masculinity, including “simps”, “cucks”, and “DNGs” (i.e., dorks, nerds, and geeks), speaking to a deeply hierarchised social space populated by an array of social types either to be emulated or avoided. Ging (2019) has traced the specifically hybrid character of masculine identities within the context of online anti-feminism, demonstrating the performativity and strategic context-dependence of assumed forms of masculinity. There are nevertheless risks associated with navigating and performing gendered subjectivity within this hierarchy (Trott, 2022), including the ever-present threat of not quite getting these gender performances right. There are also those who are interpellated into positions of greater and lesser stature within a sexual marketplace (Menzie, 2022), whether the higher-status Chads and Stacys or the lower-status normies and incels (Baele, Brace and Coan, 2021). This speaks to status tensions that undergird instances of extremism and political violence (Lounela and Murphy, 2024), but it also underlines the competition at play in establishing a (heterosexual) masculine ideal that must be worked towards.

Likewise, Raichik’s content similarly foregrounds a range of figures of derision and revulsion in the form of “groomers”, “pedos”, drag queens, and trans people (specifically, trans women), in the process centring queer identities as a threat to cisgender heterosexuality, while simultaneously linking LGBTQIA+ communities and identities to paedophilia and child molestation (Anti-Defamation League, 2022). Followers provide a significant degree of uptake, for example decrying the implications of “groomers posing as educators” sharing “sexually explicit material” in classrooms and demanding “cameras in classrooms” to “check what they’re doing with your kids”. Such assertions are at once antagonistic, in the sense of their targeting of minorities, and resonant, in the sense of their explicit alignment with both Raichik and the broader reactionary agenda her content supports.

In this sense, these perspectives on sex and gender may dominate user-generated responses to both Tate and Raichik, but they also align more broadly with wider sociocultural contexts, as well as forms of ideological mobilisation that bridge the online and the offline. For example, anti-LGBTQIA+ and, more specifically, anti-trans rhetorics that have become increasingly commonplace in online environments leave those targeted at risk of harassment, violence, and even murder (Brightman et al., 2024). These risks are distinctly intersectional in character, with the risk of homicide further magnified for transgender women of colour (Lenning, Brightman and Buist, 2021). That is not to say there is no pushback on these stances among the user-generated responses in the data. In the case of the Raichik case study, however, this tends to come from engaged haters rather than from fans. This is a topic that is discussed further below.

What these practices set in stark relief is the reality that certain forms of gender and sexual visibility are welcomed and/or normalised within a material and discursive process of establishing frameworks of both hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 2005) and hegemonic femininity (Schippers, 2007). This applies patently to the imagery of alpha masculinity embodying a capacity for violence and heterosexual relations of sexual dominance—images that are deeply embedded in broader moralising discourses that situate masculine utility in terms of economic productivity, including how this intersects with regimens of health and fitness (King et al., 2021). Such articulations of productivity are themselves shaded by moralising narratives that intersect with what has been termed the “stoic industrial complex” (Hammo, 2023). But it also applies equally to images of (predominantly) white, heterosexual, and cisgender social relations in which sexuality (as identity and practice) is restricted to its function as a mechanism of human reproduction.

The dualisms that these trends work to rearticulate go beyond the specific context of this research. They also intersect significantly with the mobilisation of gender and sexuality encapsulated by the racialised figure of the tradwife, defined by Tebaldi  (2024: 84–85) as “a conventionally attractive and feminine woman emphasizing female submission as both a practice and a moral object”, generally in the context of social media content creation that serves to enregister gendered alignments with tradition, nation, and race. This further underlines the lucrative character of exclusionary constructions of gender as well as race within the influencer ecosystem. Indeed, similar rhetorics of self-improvement also characterise hegemonic femininity in female-oriented “red pill” spaces within the manosphere (Pieters and Trottier, 2024), stressing how the labour of maintaining structures of dominance is a pursuit in which many engage. Audiences are invited into the shared articulation of these antagonisms, both implicitly and explicitly, through the structuration of digital intimacies in the influencer ecosystem.

In this sense, antagonistic conceptualisations of sex and gender are not only mobilised by content creators; they are rather in turn “refracted” (Abidin, 2021) and mirrored in the contributions of influencer audiences—in what Deem (2019) terms “affective economies of transgression”. As audiences engage with representations of oppositionality—and thereby transgress liberal norms of public engagement—they navigate stances of assent and dissent. This can entail replicating the hostility of influencers by themselves participating in discursive acts of exclusion and ostracisation. However, the tensions they manifest in that process work to illuminate some key differences in how reactionary objects are articulated. At the same time, they also serve to highlight how patterns of inclusion and exclusion can vary markedly across contexts. These antagonisms are further revealed in competing ideas about the specifically political role played by content creators and their audiences.

Understandings of content creation as a political
practice

In the context of the reactionary constructions of sex and gender outlined above, content creation and engagement are articulated as forms of meaningful and essential political action. This is in keeping with research showing how media choice was articulated as a political act in the context of American conservative media during the 2016 US presidential election (Kelly, 2020), where perspectives on the political import of media use were shown to be coupled with an audience positioning that foregrounded consumer entitlement to define the partisan content of media (Kelly, 2023). Media landscapes and information ecosystems have transformed dramatically over the intervening years. People now rely heavily on social media influencers for news and political information, particularly among younger audiences (Harff and Schmuck, 2024)⁶.

But these transformations also intersect with existing inequalities. For example, a recent report on news use across five social media platforms found two thirds of US news influencers to be men, monetising engagement by “offering subscriptions to additional content, soliciting donations and selling merchandise” (Stocking et al., 2024: 38). As with the partisan commentators of cable television and mainstream and alternative media, however, audiences are now invested in content creators as charismatic leaders (Kissas, 2020) who assume their authority through the mobilisation of persuasive rhetoric (Finlayson, 2022). Indeed, the partisan commentators of “conservative” media have actively participated in the mainstreaming of reactionary content, such as portrayals of political opponents as a “fundamental threat to society” (DiMaggio, 2021: 87).

Within a context where media are viewed as political phenomena and mechanisms of political mobilisation, reactionary influencer online content is presented as strategically embedded within—or indeed in opposition to—broader political movements. A mix of clearly defined opponents and more floating figures of opposition animate these political and partisan alignments. Alongside “wokism”, or the “woke agenda”, the Raichik case study also features prominent and explicit opposition to liberals and Democrats, while being vocally pro-Trump. Followers speak of a Democratic Party that has become so radicalised “as to become evil”, while likewise claiming that grooming and sexualising children “is what liberals do”. In this context, the so-called “trans agenda” is likewise presented in stark terms as a “threat to humanity”. Engagement with these articulations of political opposition serves to embed audiences within a broader ideological formation rooted in reactionary antagonisms, critically situating their participation as a political practice.

This engagement in explicitly partisan politics is in keeping with Raichik’s repeated directives to her followers that they should actively be participating in political mobilisation at local, state, and national levels. Raichik herself was named an advisor to the Oklahoma State Department of Education (Murphy, 2024), even while her posts have been linked to bomb threats at Oklahoma schools (Ingram, 2024)—a link Raichik denies. The Tate case study, by contrast, often foregrounds more intangible or inchoate opponents. Although figures of opposition frequently intersect with specific political parties, the primary foil is rather the so-called “Matrix”—a “gynocentric social order”—structuring male misfortune (Lucy, 2024) and designed to stifle, emasculate, and immiserate men. Comments decry there is “a war going on” between the forces of “good and evil” and from which “no man” is safe. References to “the Matrix” thus position followers in relation both to Tate and a conspicuously gendered social order.

As with constructions of sex and gender, media—including channels and platforms—can themselves be presented in expressly antagonistic terms as loci and motors of political agency. For example, Andrew Tate’s followers replicate claims about a “Matrix-controlled” mainstream media or indeed a “feminist mainstream Matrix” that seeks to “take out masculine role models” like Tate. Such positioning against the agenda and influence of a so-called “mainstream” media is a key feature of reactionary media meta-discourse (Figenschou and Ihlebæk, 2019), strengthening the status of this content as a space of anti-pluralist antagonism. These different articulations are bound up in distinct political movements and agendas—all of which are being leveraged in the monetisation of reactionary influencer online content. But they are also implicated in the articulation by audiences of their own status as influencer media stakeholders, both implicitly and explicitly, as well as the role(s) they play in propagating these spaces of reactionism.

Positionings of audiences and influencers in platform economies

In this space of marked hybridity, audience attention and engagement serve not only as resources that are leveraged by influencers (Duffy and Pooley, 2019) but also as a minefield of antagonistic fannish positionalities, as audiences wrestle with the imagined economic prospects presented by a platformised influencer ecosystem. Such fan antagonism increasingly intersects with the articulation of reactionary politics (Stanfill, 2024), as well as in the co-optation of toxic rhetoric that has become emblematic of a contemporary reordering of participatory culture (Driessen, Jones and Litherland, 2024). All of this happens in a platformised influencer ecosystem where toxicity is not only recommended via algorithmic systems (Baker, Ging and Andreasen, 2024) but is rather also monetised by numerous platform media stakeholders, including influencers operating within the context of what Massanari (2017) terms “toxic technocultures”.

Under these conditions, where toxicity is not merely an organising “vibe” (Brown et al., 2024) but is rather deployed as a discursive strategy, audience tensions animate user-generated commentary. Tate’s content, for example, frequently foments religious and racial tensions among his fans and followers—often centring on conflict between users either identifying with or criticising Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. Comments position “fears about Islam” as “definitely rational”, with many responses focusing on Tate’s conversion to Islam, through which he “became the enemy of Europe” and “all Christians worldwide”. These tensions are also mapped onto other contemporary or historical conflicts, particularly the current Israel-Palestine conflict⁷. Expressions such as “free Palestine” and claims “the Matrix” is merely “another word” for Zionism are met with retorts postulating that “what Hamas is doing is terrorism”. Antisemitic and Islamophobic tropes are commonplace. Rumble’s below-the-line comment field thus serves as a site of conflict between Tate’s followers, with tensions animating audience positionings in relation to Tate and each other.

Whereas the Tate case study demonstrates significant audience antagonisms that are mobilised in the context of a predominantly positive engagement with Tate himself, the Libs of TikTok case study reveals a much more prominent conflict between fan and anti-fan positionings with respect to Raichik. This conflict is characterised by markedly antagonistic engagements between users rooted in a refusal of the ideological positions promoted by Raichik and her fans. One specific case of fan resistance is with respect to the targeting of identifiable individuals, which has frequently included public servants such as teachers, librarians, or nurses who may have simply posted on social media in support of issues related to LGBTQIA+ communities, but this example is exceptional. The Raichik case study is, rather, notable for the dearth of fan pushback on her stances and viewpoints, being typified instead by the antagonistic responses of haters and anti-fans.

In this case, for example, drilling down through multiple levels of replies on Twitter/X reveals significant conflict, even while demonstrating that users are tuned into the contributions of others. Several factors are at play here that have a relevance with respect to how these findings can be leveraged for conceptual purposes. They may indicate real, tangible differences in how audiences align with (or against) the influencers they choose to engage with. They may also be a function of how research methodologies can help to reveal distinctions in patterns of interaction across contexts, particularly in the case of comparison between alt-tech and more mainstream platforms, as is the case here. But they likewise indicate differences with respect to platform vernaculars, i.e., sets of communication practices that are formalised into generic systems and structures in dialogue with the affordances of particular platforms (Gibbs et al., 2015), which account for cross-platform variations in how users speak and interact⁸.

These variations across the cases are important for what they reveal about the implications of research design and its intersection with the affordances of different platforms. However, they also resonate with ongoing work tracing the shifting dynamics of participatory culture(s) in the context of ongoing crises (Driessen, Jones and Litherland, 2024). This perspective on the vagaries of participation, drawn from the field of fan studies, provides an important framing with respect to the audience as a locus of creativity and as active contributors to a mediated system of cultural production. In that regard, a key focus of the research that forms the basis for this article is how the ontological status of the audience within the influencer ecosystem is contested, often openly and explicitly, by the audiences of reactionary influencers. These prominent reflections and rationalisations with respect to what influencer audiences are as well as what they do intersect directly with the peculiar mobilisations of fan labour that served as selection criteria for inclusion in this research.

Zoning in on his practice of engaging in collaborations with other influencers, Tate’s followers decry quite vocally the opportunities afforded to other content creators, with the streamer Adin Ross⁹ being the primary example of this tendency. This relationship is the subject of significant commentary from Tate’s fans, as is the apparent opportunity presented in the prospect of accessing Ross’ younger male audience¹⁰. Still, Ross is massively derided and denigrated in the data, described alternately as “weak”, “gay”, and a “drug addict”, among other epithets. Despite his collaborations with Tate, Tate’s audiences excoriate Ross for his failure to persistently engage in a fitness regimen; i.e., for failing to engage in the hard work of self-improvement that is essential to the hegemonic ideals embraced by Tate and his followers. Comments on Ross in this way also serve to police other users regarding what is and is not an acceptable way of performing masculinity.

This vitriolic critique resonates distinctly with Arnesson’s (2024) examination of how influencer audiences comment on and critique content collaborations, underlining the empirical and theoretical value of focusing on these more mundane content formats. At the same time, it also intersects directly with aspects of status anxiety and perceived threat that have been shown to motivate manosphere engagement (Renström and Bäck, 2024) and which likewise have been linked with support for reactionary political agendas (Parker and Lavine, 2025). In the case of Tate and Ross, a distinct framing is not merely the critique of collaboration but rather the expressed desire for followers to themselves be provided the opportunities afforded to Tate’s collaborators.

The anticipation of opportunities for followers to have direct, intimate contact with Tate and, by extension, to enjoy a more explicit and embedded form of productive role within the participatory frameworks of reactionary content creation is actively cultivated in Tate’s content. In one example of this, Tate presented the prospect of offering 1,350 of his subscribers the opportunity to work directly with him to each build social media accounts with 100,000 followers, making participants “relevant” and “significant in the world”. Tate’s enjoinment resulted in a flurry of responses from commenters desiring this opportunity. Such activities serve as the basis for the community-building relational labour that Tate leverages as a resource in asserting his position as a figure of authority.

With Libs of TikTok, Raichik explicitly centres fan labour in a way that similarly insinuates the promise of both intimacy and involvement in the policing and patrolling of a rigidly defined sex/gender framework. Many of her posts feature the comment, “Received this from a follower”. It is not merely a case of Raichik highlighting these acts of recycling, however. Rather, her audience firmly engages with this framework for publicly denouncing (perceived) transgressors of the moral order. This goes beyond simple acts of participatory censorship (Luo and Li, 2024)—affording participants an illusion of empowerment (Wang, 2024)—in which audiences position themselves antagonistically as guardians against perceived transgressions; it also extends to the bomb threats targeting schools and hospitals in which Raichik denies her stochastic influence. Audience antagonism, then, can take forms that are inescapably material in their articulation.

(Dis-)connection, (in-)visibility, and the monetisation of reaction

Reactionary digital politics gets constituted through a set of media-related practices in which exclusion gets commercialised, but it is also inextricably linked to wider sets of socioeconomic relations and hierarchies. The outward yearning for wealth, status, and celebrity that typifies audience engagement with Tate, for example, occurs not only in a sociocultural context within which these are extolled as markers of a heteronormative social order rooted in imaginaries of male dominance; it is also embedded in a broader economic context where precarity and deepening inequality serve to reorder public affects towards the very possibility of upward social mobility in ways that can be difficult to predict (Manza and Brooks, 2021).

Alongside a growing body of work focusing on how audiences choose to disengage/disconnect from digital media (Kaun, 2021), there is a concurrent interest in how media users contest their participation in the context of algorithmic and platform power (Kaun and Treré, 2020). In that regard, audience dissatisfaction with creator collaborations is also linked to vitriol and threats of disengagement targeted directly at Tate himself. Threats abound: “I’m going to unsub”. As with media choice being framed as a political act, the corollary of media refusal is likewise articulated as an act that is markedly political. Broadly speaking, a variety of motivations drive acts of media refusal and digital disconnection, including health and sustainability, amongst others factors (Moe and Madsen, 2021). But abstention and non-participation can themselves be political acts (Casemajor et al., 2015).

Indeed, practices of disconnection and refusal, seen through the lens of political (dis‑)alignment, can be understood in terms of acts of consumer activism (Portwood-Stacer, 2013) and political consumerism (Boulianne, Copeland and Koc-Michalska, 2024). In this sense, disconnection is not the only mechanism for the expression of dissatisfaction and distaste in and through media. Rather than disconnect or refuse—i.e., boycott—audiences can choose to stay and antagonise instead, thus revealing how disconnection can be mobilised as both strategy and threat in an ecosystem that affords political speech a monetary value.

At the same time, both audiences and influencers must navigate the vagaries of platform interventions shaping their capacity for participation, whether algorithmically or through content moderation practices. As highlighted above, Tate and Raichik, alongside numerous other reactionary influencers, have repeatedly been deplatformed and replatformed across multiple contexts. It is a dynamic that drives patterns of migration to and from a variety of alt-tech platforms (Rogers, 2020) that serve as spaces within which adherents of reactionary and extremist politics can navigate new forms of mediated belonging (Collins, 2024). In this context, digital platforms, whether mainstream or alternative, are seen as both facilitating and impeding reactionary political agendas.

In addition, followers must simultaneously negotiate the parameters of inclusion and exclusion shaping the possibility of visibility within the context of platform media. Comments highlight that one must pay heed to the steps required to ensure one does not find oneself in “Twitter jail” because of content moderation practices and procedures. Indeed, the capacity to monetise content is subject to the algorithmic management and oversight of platforms (Glatt, 2022), insofar as these algorithms define what gets seen and thus the audiences that can be reached by different creators (Kopf, 2020). Beyond the quandary of ensuring content visibility, even systems for facilitating digital patronage are shaped by these limiting platform dynamics. These systems thus foundationally impact what digitally-mediated antagonism can look like, as well as when, where, how, and by whom it can effectively be monetised.

These grounds are currently shifting, potentially disrupting the monetisation of reaction as it is currently accomplished. In Ireland, for example, implementation of the European Union Digital Services Act has led to the creation of new mechanisms for holding video-sharing platforms to account in protecting users from harmful content (Coimisiún na Meán, 2024). Such interventions have the capacity to redefine the conditions of visibility for certain kinds of toxicity and antagonism in online media—or may at least modify or even abbreviate their lifecycles. A key task for engaged media scholars will be to ensure such interventions accurately reflect and effectively respond to actual media practice.

Audiences in/of reactionary publicity

If politics is the process through which social relations are created, reproduced, and transformed (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001), then reactionary politics can be viewed as a politics oriented towards the articulation of social relations that are predicated on exclusion, reversion, and the rejection of social progress. And yet, as has been seen here, the reactionary right itself is not monolithic. It is, rather, defined not only by differences between communities but also infrastructural variations across platforms. Reactionary digital politics is thus a site of contestation in which competing visions of opposition are in play. For Finlayson (2023), ideological contestation now occurs primarily in digital spaces—within online political fringes populated by a “thriving diversity of reactionary ‘anti-publics’” (Tuters et al., 2024: 5). The examples presented here offer a limited perspective on this multiplicity and, indeed, struggle to define not only the boundaries of belonging but also the parameters of participation in the mediation of social life.

To understand the implications of reactionary influencer online content, examining how audiences articulate the meaning of their media choice(s) is essential. As this article has sought to demonstrate, this is something that is achieved both implicitly and explicitly in the contributions of users below-the-line. The goal here, then, has been not merely to induce a research focus on audiences but rather to advocate for the value of centring audience positionalities in examinations of the platforming of reactionary politics. In so doing, this article has considered the constitutive role played by various kinds of conflict and contestation, particularly in relation to more complicit or convergent forms of alignment, that characterise how audiences relate to reactionary influencers, their content, and each other. This approach can contribute to theorising the participatory ontology of reactionary digital politics, as a space that may be dominated by ideological entrepreneurs and discursive engineers, but which is still transformed by audience participation¹¹. It can equally contribute to the formulation of more robust regulatory and policy interventions seeking to counteract the more pernicious outcomes and impacts of reactionary publicity.

Employing a research framework that is expressly attuned to addressing how media choice encodes complex forms of positionality, this article has demonstrated how audiences may align with exclusionary and anti-pluralist discourses, including anti-trans and homophobic rhetorics, while they position themselves in support of those who espouse them. By supporting and/or replicating these discourses of exclusion, audiences simultaneously position themselves in relation to political conflicts in which digital media are presented as both a locus and motor of political agency. And all of this happens within the context of a platformised influencer ecosystem that derives its potency from fostering the sense that audience engagement is not only the primary route to manifesting digital intimacy with reactionary content creators but is also a viable avenue for the economic liberation of users. Influencers and audiences alike must nevertheless learn to navigate the systems governing the monetisation of reaction.

These are “participatory” media, yes, but to a certain extent only. Influencer fandoms—and anti-fandoms—can indeed seek to position themselves as proponents of reactionary digital politics, sometimes in ways that are at odds with the influencers they choose to engage with. However, this happens in relation to what is infrastructurally enabled by this platformised influencer ecosystem, where power is unevenly distributed. This also happens in relation to the political economy of creator cultures that are imbricated in new orders of neoliberal capital. These new political economic configurations contribute to the very conditions of possibility for the contemporary preponderance of networked misogyny and gender-based toxicity (Bratich and Banet-Weiser, 2019) that intersect in complex ways with novel mechanisms for talking politics. In the context of conceptual models that seek to describe audience attempts to shape media, a consideration of this interplay of political communication and political economy is fundamental.

Much as participatory culture is now recognised to be far from necessarily progressive, underlined by the growing relevance of concepts like reactionary fandoms (e.g., Stanfill, 2024), digital intimacies are likewise far from always harmonious. In addition to the literature on disengagement, then, a continued focus on the actual practices of audiences in relation to media is necessary. Although some may choose to disengage—to digitally disconnect—others may seek the entrenchment of their viewpoints. Many of those who decide to endure are not slow to express their dissatisfaction when they perceive their chosen media to be failing to live up to their expectations. In this sense, antagonism, as described here, can entail both ideological support for anti-pluralism and the contestation of reactionary influencer online content—speaking to the complexity of audience positionalities in relation to reactionary influencers and the stances they champion.

Of course, this is not to deny that a meaningful proportion of audience engagement with reactionary influencers can be massively supportive, even sycophantic. Indeed, the multiple positionalities of audiences is an essential feature of this analysis. However, understanding these dualities of assent and dissent—of consensus and contestation—is essential to moving analysis of the social, political, economic embeddedness of these media forward. The ideas that audiences have about their status as platform media stakeholders may have little to do with their measurable or verifiable power within this hybridised media ecosystem, but those ideas—expressed both implicitly and explicitly through their engagement—can nevertheless tell us a great deal about how audiences conceptualise political and media power, as well as where they do and should reside. Accounting for these perspectives and positionalities is an essential step in tracing how reactionary influencer online content increasingly intersects with the entrenchment of reactionary politics.

A focus on audience antagonism presents an opportunity to assess how schisms and ruptures take shape within the discourses and networks of the reactionary right. In that regard, these spaces are in flux. The recent presidential election in the US serves as a signal of the degree to which reactionary influencer online content now converges with establishment politics. There is a growing imperative to understand how audiences seek to embed themselves in these moments of ideological transition and, in so doing, contribute to the commercialisation of exclusion in the gaps created by the alignment of state and neoliberal capital. In the context of persistent rhetorics seeking to outline the topology of a so-called “cancel culture”, these practices of reactionary publicity serve as a reminder that participation can be leveraged to ensure silence as much as to give voice. Better responding to the challenges of reactionary publicity will mean meaningfully confronting how audiences position themselves in relation to the mediated acts of suppression that define reactionary digital politics.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Brooks DeCillia, Paula Kiel, the anonymous reviewers, and journal editor Simon Dawes for their constructive feedback in preparing this article. Thanks also to Kylie Jarrett and participants from the Media Frictions International Symposium for their comments on an earlier version of this work.

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Notes

¹ This publication has emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland under grant number GOIPD/2023/1351.

² Methods used include topic modelling, sentiment analysis, visual analysis, thematic analysis, and critical discourse analysis.

³ This article seeks to understand and contextualise the discursive form of those contributions rather than quantify their uptake or impact.

⁴ The analysis presented here is grounded in the analysis of 438,685 user-generated responses to the posts of Tate and Raichik over the periods of 01 October 2022 – 31 December 2023 and 01 October 2022 – 30 September 2023, respectively, as well as all posts of Tate and Raichik made to the sampled platforms during that same period. The research approach has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee – Humanities (HREC-HS) within the Office of Research Ethics at University College Dublin under the Research Ethics Reference Number HS-LR-24-226-Kelly.

⁵ Voices of critique with respect to representations of masculinity are indeed relatively common among Tate’s followers, particularly in terms of commentary on content collaborations, discussed below. The overriding form of such critiques, however, is to police the reliance on gender performance as content and to ensure such performances adhere to the standards specified by both Tate and his followers.

⁶ This is a further development in the deinstitutionalisation of journalism highlighted by Picard (2014)—a process in which platforms play an ambiguous role (Nielsen and Fletcher, 2022; Newman et al., 2023).

⁷ Religious tensions are further magnified by Tate’s centring of sex and race discourses, particularly with respect to the notion that white masculinity is under threat. This content resonates directly with “great replacement” conspiracies that posit an intentional substitution of white Europeans by non-white immigrants (Abbas, 2024).

⁸ A further potential distinction with direct relevance to the present analysis is the degree to which a given platform facilitates bot activity and influence operations, computational or otherwise. See, for example, Woolley (2022) on the hybridity of contemporary digital propaganda campaigns.

⁹ Adin Ross is an American streaming personality who initially came to prominence on Twitch and who has frequently engaged in content collaborations with Tate. Notably, Ross interviewed Donald Trump in August 2024, in the lead up to the 2024 US presidential election—the so-called “influencer election” (Lorenz, 2024) that saw Trump re-elected as US president.

¹⁰ Ross was born in 2000, compared to Tate, who was born in 1986.

¹¹ Following the work of Phillips & Milner (2018), Quandt (2018), and Woolley (2022), the fact that below-the-line contributions can likewise be shaded by the same kinds of ambivalence and ambiguity that characterise the strategic manipulations of ideological entrepreneurs is a potential limitation in the approach taken here. Assessing the meaning of media choice can in that regard usefully be augmented using a broader set of audience-centred methodologies, in addition to the centring of below-the-line media.

Anthony Kelly is affiliated with the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland, where he was most recently a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow. He obtained his PhD in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021. His current work, funded primarily by Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland, focuses on reactionary political influencers and the antagonistic practices of their social media audiences.

Email: anthony.kelly@ucd.ie

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 31/12/2024
Date of original decision: 17/04/2025
Revised article submitted: 01/07/2025
Article accepted: 21/07/2025