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The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) (2019) explicated there are four dimensions of poverty, and they include (1) resources, (2) opportunities and choice, (3) power and voice and (4) human security (e.g. violence issues and concerns). Contrastingly, Ellis (1984) postulated dimensions of poverty are social, economic, legal and political poverty. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2015) stated poverty is not always about income, indicating ‘income poverty’. Deprivation factors can be broad, but reported poor health, inadequate living standards and lack of education are dimensions of poverty (OECD, 2015). Also, according to the World Bank, the world's extremely poor are people who live on less than $1.90 USD per day (Beck et al., 2020). The $1.90 amount is at 2011 purchasing power parity levels. Additionally, the $1.90USD amount has decreased significantly over the last decades (Beck et al., 2020). Nevertheless, entrepreneurship, UN SDGs and technology can be strategies for sustainable alleviation of poverty and pandemic global economic recovery, in the 21st century.

Influencer transgressions can disappoint their followers. However, there is a lack of clarity about the effects of a false allegation on an influencer–follower relationship. Drawing from cognitive dissonance and moral reasoning theory, the current study aims to examine how this relationship is shaped across three time periods (before the allegation is leveled, after the allegation is leveled, and when the allegation is found to be baseless).

We study comments posted by followers of two falsely alleged social media influencers (SMI) on their YouTube and Instagram channels. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) followed by netnography is used for thematic analysis. LDA is a social media topic modeling method that processes a statistically representative set of words to explain the tone and tenor of qualitative conversations. A sentiment analysis of the comments is done using SentiStrength.

When an allegation is leveled initially, the response from followers is overwhelmingly negative toward the influencer owing to moral coupling. However, when the allegations are proven to be false, the followers return to a positive opinion of the influencer, owing to feelings of dissonance and guilt.

The study contributes to the fields of influencer marketing, cognitive dissonance and moral reasoning. It highlights how endorsers can take advantage of the positive sentiment that arises once an accused SMI’s transgression is proven false.

This study introduces the concept of “Sentiment Reversal,” which is exhibited in the social media space. In this phenomenon, sentiments move from negative to positive toward the falsely accused SMI as they are vindicated of the previous charge.