The purpose of this paper is to examine how a public, negative incident (public disgrace) affects the general sentiment of Instagram influencers with respect to an influencer’s following size. The proposed theoretical model, a quasi-experiment, consists of the sentiment score as the dependent variable, timing of the incident (pre or post), following size (high or moderate), and whether the influencer faced the incident or not as the independent variables. The approach is to identify the sentiments for the comments scraped per influencer analyzed and assess if there is a significant difference in average comment sentiment between following sizes. After a difference in differences analysis, the results indicate that an influencer with a high following is more adversely affected by a public, negative incident than an influencer with a moderate following. Both managerial and commercial implications for Instagram influencer marketing are provided. The findings demonstrate that influencers who face public, negative incidents can have significant repercussions for the brands involved.