What the Beckham family feud reveals about social media and our love of ‘mess’

By Carolina Are, LSE Fellow in Interdisciplinary Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science

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…

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