The Shared Question: Sincerity as Performance, Not Property
The papers gathered here converge on a single provocation: authenticity, care, and civility online are not fixed dispositions that users either possess or lack, but situated performances assembled in response to platform-specific demands for visibility, engagement, and survival. Whether the object is a micro-influencer’s ethical branding, a Reddit user’s mushroom-emoji spam, or a TikTok creator’s normalized cruelty, each study insists on suspending the question “is this genuine?” in favor of “what work does this performance do, and for whom, under which infrastructural pressures?” This reframing pushes back against binary judgments — sincere/insincere, human/bot, civil/uncivil — that dominate popular and even scholarly discourse about platform behavior.
Care as Branding, Branding as Care
Volpe2026-um anchors this cluster empirically, showing how Italian micro-influencers’ performances of sustainability and community care around second-hand fashion are inseparable from the logistical and algorithmic pressures of constant content production. Rather than treating care-talk as either authentic ethical commitment or cynical marketing, Volpe frames it as a survival strategy under “dual precarity” — unstable creative labour markets compounding unstable platform infrastructures. This intertwining of care and self-branding resonates with Marwick2025-ov’s account of ConspiracyTok creators, who likewise build intimacy and trust with audiences through visible identity markers and a “generous epistemology” that invites viewers into collaborative meaning-making. In both cases, what looks like relational authenticity — care for a niche community, solidarity with marginalized viewers — is also a legitimation tactic that platforms structurally reward, entangling ethical self-presentation with reputational capital-building.
Imitation, Repetition, and the Human/Bot Boundary
Graham2026-fb extends the argument from individual branding to collective, ambiguous participation: Reddit’s “fungi” phenomenon demonstrates that repetitive, bot-like posting is better understood as a spectrum of culturally coded imitation than as a technical fact about automation. Authenticity here is not adjudicated by whether an account is “really” a bot but by community-level norms about freshness, in-group signalling, and playful transgression — a Reddit vernacular quite different from the monetized self-branding logics seen on Instagram or TikTok. Tang2026-gu pushes this destabilization of authorship further into the domain of generative AI, where Chinese “AI slop” creators treat virality itself as an engineerable object through benchmarking, testing, and matrix-account systems. Read alongside Graham, Tang’s paper suggests that the imitation/authenticity anxieties provoked by bots are now being formalized into an industrial mode of production, in which creative labour is redefined around systematized replication rather than spontaneous expression — a limit case of the survival strategies Volpe identifies among human creators.
Incivility and Epistemics as Platform Vernacular
A second axis concerns not care or imitation but harm: how cruelty, incivility, and disinformation become normalized as legitimate participatory styles. Cabbuag2024-me’s study of Filipino “dogshow” TikTok culture shows Gen Z influencers and audiences collaboratively negotiating “legal-but-harmful” humor that blurs entertainment, cyberbullying, and hate speech — incivility here is not simply tolerated but actively performed and validated as a shared cultural practice, amplified by TikTok’s affordances. Marwick2025-ov complicates the picture of platform-native performance further by showing how conspiratorial “evidence” production borrows the aesthetics of journalism and scholarship to construct epistemic legitimacy, simultaneously empowering marginalized standpoints and circulating bias and disinformation. Together these papers argue that what counts as acceptable, credible, or “authentic” knowledge and conduct on a platform is negotiated locally and culturally — through Filipino youth humor norms or ConspiracyTok’s populist epistemology — rather than derived from any universal standard of civility or truth.
A Historical Counterpoint: What Performance Displaced
Farci2017-2a88c00e and Marwick2026-ss supply a comparative and historical baseline against which the platform-specific performances above can be read. Farci’s account of “networked intimacy” on Facebook describes collaborative disclosure practices — showing rather than telling, tagging, liking — that reframed intimacy as a public, community-sustained accomplishment rather than a private confession, prefiguring the entangled sincerity/performance logics seen in later platforms. Marwick’s autoethnographic essay on LiveJournal goes further, arguing that earlier internet infrastructures afforded forms of vulnerability, reciprocity, and semi-private community that contemporary platforms’ surveillance-and-virality architectures actively foreclose. Read against Volpe, Graham, Cabbuag, and Marwick2025-ov, this comparison suggests a diachronic arc: as platforms have shifted from small, filterable social networks toward algorithmically optimized attention markets, the performative labor required to sustain relationships, credibility, or care has intensified and become more strategically legible — not because users have become less sincere, but because the platforms themselves have redefined what sincerity must look like to survive.
Synthesis
Across this set, authenticity emerges not as an essence under threat from platform artifice but as a constantly re-negotiated currency — earned through niche familiarity and emotional resonance (Volpe), through communal tolerance of ambiguous authorship (Graham), through industrialized replication of virality (Tang), through shared cultural permission for cruelty (Cabbuag) or epistemic bricolage (Marwick2025-ov), and haunted by the memory of a less commodified relational mode (Farci, Marwick2026-ss). The throughline is that “performing authenticity” is always platform-specific labour: a survival strategy shaped by the particular affordances, incentives, and vernaculars of the space in which it occurs, rather than a stable moral property of the person performing it.