Anyone who uses social media will recognize that one chronic oversharer who posts cryptic quotes about self-worth on their Instagram Stories or vague captions hinting that karma will be coming for some unsuspecting someone. Academic researchers have called this attention-seeking behavior “sadfishing” – the act of posting on social media for sympathetic comments and reactions. The term was first coined by journalist Rebecca Reid in 2019 when it turned out that Kendall Jenner‘s vulnerable tale of her “debilitating” struggle with acne turned out to be a part of a disingenuous marketing ploy for her Proactiv partnership.
Reid has since wrestled with creating the term, noting in a tweet that a term that was initially meant to criticize “celebrities deliberately withholding information for their own gain” is now being used to dissuade people from being vulnerable online. “Lots of us sadfish sometimes, and that’s okay,” she added . “Attention seeking is a perfectly legitimate thing.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting attention.” Behavioral specialist and researcher Cara Petrofes has since defined “sadfishing” as the “a tendency of social media users to publish exaggerations of their emotional states to generate sympathy,” a departure from Reid’s use of the term to skewer celebrity culture. She and her fellow researchers explored the social media phenomenon in a 2021 paper published in the Journal of American College Health , intrigued by its pre.
