The influencer court case shaking up social media

An influencer has filed a US lawsuit, claiming that a rival social-media star has been copying her neutral "vibe".

Sydney Nicole Gifford and Alyssa Sheil are fighting a vicious battle of the beige, and other influencers are "watching closely", said The Independent, because their own incomes are also "tied up with the image they 'sell' online".

'Mental anguish'

Gifford, 24, who has 900,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, met Sheil, 21 (440,00 followers on the same two channels) in Austin, Texas, in 2022, and they agreed to team up – or "collab" – on some content, said the Daily Mail. But, in early 2023, after a dispute over a photo shoot, Sheil blocked Gifford, and then Gifford's followers began to tell her that Sheil's content looked the same as hers.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In a legal complaint filed earlier this year, Gifford accused Sheil of duplicating her "neutral, beige and cream aesthetics" and mimicking everything from her Amazon product recommendations to her poses, outfits, tattoos, "and even her manner of speaking", said The Independent.

Or, to put it in influencer-speak, she accused Sheil of copying her "vibe": a "clean girl" aesthetic, based on a "minimalist wardrobe, organised lifestyle and neutrals galore", said the Daily Mail.

Gifford claims this alleged mimicry has cut into her influencer earnings and that she's owed as much as $150,000 (£117,000) in damages "for mental anguish and lost sales commission from Amazon", said The Independent.

She told US news site The Verge that she hopes her legal action will make all influencers "more mindful", adding that there are "so many instances of other creators" getting their content "completely replicated by people".

But an emotional Sheil, speaking to the same news site, said there are "hundreds of people with the exact same aesthetic", and what Gifford is doing was "coming across very gatekeep-y".

'Owning' the vibe

Experts are divided over how likely it is that Gifford's legal case will succeed. Her "kitchen-sink intellectual property complaint" could hold up in court, Jeanne Fromer, a professor of intellectual property law at New York University, told the The New York Times.

But it's open to question whether Sheil "carefully imitated" Gifford's content as a way to "siphon off some of her sales" or not, said The Verge, and the answer is probably impossible to prove without "combing through" Sheil's browsing history on TikTok, Instagram and Amazon.

The "clean girl aesthetic" is very popular on social media, so it’s "possible to argue" that it's "sheer coincidence" that the two influencers' content is so similar, said The Independent. And, even if it were established that their posts are "too similar for legal comfort", it's still unclear whether US copyright law has actually been breached.

Similar court cases have had "surprising outcomes" in the past, said The New York Times, with courts ruling different ways for different cases. There doesn't seem to be a test for copyright infringement that is "mathematically precise in any way", said Professor Fromer.

The case may not even make it to court, of course. "I suspect there will be discussions," Rose Leda Ehler, of the Los Angeles law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, told the paper, and the two women will "probably figure out or resolve the matter" without a hearing.

But the case still poses an important question for the influencer industry, said The Independent: "what happens when another photogenic, algorithm-friendly aesthetic comes along" and, "when it does, who will own" the vibe?