‘I will live by my own policies. I will sleep with a clear conscience. I will sleep in peace.’: Calling out pejorative celebrity obituaries as an emergent digilante practice

This paper furthers discourse-driven research on parasocial grieving by shedding light on a previously unexamined type of collective online reaction following celebrity deaths. Contributing to the literature on celebrity mourning online, this study addresses a new avenue of digilante practice involving multiple social media users denouncing obituaries they consider inflammatory. These obituaries are deemed to violate the moral principle of protecting the reputation and memory of the deceased. The study reported here presents a qualitative textual analysis of a dataset of relevant user tweets (1766) posted publicly to X in response to three obituaries of Sinéad O’Connor identified as derogatory to the subject, and hence inflammatory. Twelve rhetorical aims are thus synthesised to detail the enactment of the digilante practice conceptualised as calling out pejorative obituaries in the collective action of restoring the moral order. In addition to the notion of calling out, the related concepts of shaming and cancelling are invoked to capture the nature and purpose of this digilante practice.