“I want to be honest...but how much can I share?”:Sustainable Influencing and Experiences of Moral Residue

Abstract

Transparency is the cornerstone of social media influencing. Research has explored how influencers disclose commercial interests, yet little is known about influencers’ self-disclosure of private consumption. Building on the transparency management and moral hypocrisy literatures, this paper explores how sustainable influencers navigate moral dilemmas as they communicate about sustainability. Through interviews and analysis of media articles, we find that sustainable fashion influencers experience persistent emotional baggage, which we frame as moral residue as well as moral hypocrisy, in navigating three moral dilemmas: (anti)consumption; (non)promotion; and (non)commercialization. To reconcile this, sustainable fashion influencers engage in transparency management, choosing between strategies of confessing, concealing, and/or conning. These strategies may inadvertently lock sustainable influencers in perpetual cycles of moral residue and moral hypocrisy. In explicating the process and potential outcomes of managing transparency around moral dilemmas, we provide an intrapersonal view of moral hypocrisy and offer implications for theory and practice