Your most engaged audience might hate you
How the internet turned shared opposition into a form of social belonging
Some of the most vocal fans aren’t fans at all. They’re anti-fans.
New data from CivicScience found that more than half of American adults regularly consume media specifically to root against, criticize, or mock someone or something—for example, a person, a program, or a team. One in five do it very frequently.
On the surface, this looks like cynicism at scale. And maybe it is. But I think there’s more going on.
We’ve always told ourselves the same story about how communities like fandoms form: people love something deeply, then find each other through that shared admiration. Think Swifties, sneakerheads, or Deadheads.
But opposition works as a binding agent too—and sometimes an even stickier one.
Reality TV figured this out years ago. Entire franchises like Real Housewives are engineered around characters viewers love to collectively dunk on. Influencer culture industrialized the model with entire ecosystems (commentary channels, drama accounts, reaction creators) built around “can you believe this person?”
Look past the negativity though, and you’ll see something eerily familiar: the core mechanics of community: inside jokes, shared language, recurring rituals, tribal signaling, a collective sense of “our people.”
The sports data makes the pattern especially easy to spot. According to the CivicScience poll, NBA fans hate-watch at nearly double the rate of the general population, and NHL fans aren’t far behind. Sports has always understood something the rest of internet culture is only now catching up to: rivalries are community infrastructure. The stronger the fan identity, the stronger the opposition culture around it.
In other words: You do not need to love something to build community around it. What that means: Some of the most culturally dominant entities today may be powered as much by anti-fans as real fans.
For brands, this creates a seductive illusion. Yes, people are talking about you. But attention isn’t the same as belonging.
People will absolutely gather around what they collectively oppose. But that doesn’t mean they’ll protect it, advocate for it, or stay when it matters.
Ask yourself: are people emotionally invested in your success, or just emotionally activated by your existence?
Until next time,
Sara