Celebrity Endorsements of Online Gambling in the Philippines: A Discursive Study

Abstract

This study examined how Reddit users constructed meanings around celebrity endorsements of online gambling in the Philippines. Using a social constructionist discourse-analytic approach, it analyzed 407 comments from one selected Reddit thread as a discursive episode in which users debated celebrity influence, gambling-related harm, personal choice, commercial work, and institutional responsibility. The analysis focused on discursive strategies, broader Discourses, subject positions, micro-outcomes, discursive constellations, and the episode-level outcome produced through their interaction. The findings show that celebrity-endorsed online gambling was constructed as a contested object of public meaning-making. Commenters used seven discursive strategy groups to assign, resist, soften, or redirect responsibility. These strategies drew on broader Discourses of Public Moral Responsibility, Social Protection, Self-Governance, Market Rationality, Institutionalized Gambling, and Institutional Responsibility. The Discourses aligned into two competing constellations. The Civic Responsibility Constellation connected celebrity influence with ethical obligation, public welfare, and protection from harm, while the Neoliberal Constellation made endorsement and gambling understandable through paid work, personal choice, legal market participation, and regulatory recognition. Although civic criticism kept harm, vulnerability, celebrity influence, and public responsibility visible, it did not displace the stronger Neoliberal Constellation, whose assumptions were supported by existing legal, commercial, and government-recognized institutional practices. The episode-level outcome was therefore the continued normalization of celebrity-endorsed online gambling despite sustained civic criticism. From a Development Communication perspective, the findings show that communicative resistance may remain limited without institutional support capable of sustaining alternative Discourses.