My social media feed has been full of Brooklyn Beckham memes. That is, since January 19, when David and Victoria Beckham’s eldest son posted a series of Instagram stories criticising his parents, their curated public personas and what he described as long-standing slights towards him and his wife, actress Nicola Peltz.
As a researcher of online harms and freedom of speech, I’m less interested in whether the memes are funny than in what Brooklyn Beckham versus brand Beckham tells us about how social media – and public shaming – are changing.
After months of rumours of a rift between the Beckhams and their eldest, in his posts Brooklyn publicly accused his parents of a lifetime of carefully managed media narratives about the family. He alleged that family love hinged upon engaging with “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships”.
