Influencer or preacher?

Influencers are modern-day preachers

The televangelists of the 1980s and 1990s were the first modern influencers, leveraging the reach of cable television networks in the same way that influencers are leveraging the reach of social media today. Strong words and impressive visuals always impress the audience ... for fame and money, the televangelists had wild fund raisings accompanied by constant begging, the influencers count the viewers and the click-throughs. They both understand how to turn a belief into truth with enough followers to affirm that belief without challenge. The more followers one has, the stronger the belief will be. But televangelists were another level: they were so good, people were begging to hand money to them, while most influencers are generally satisfied with you clicking on something that will earn them money from advertisers. Televangelists, like Benny Hinn (look him up), or "the top 10 influencers of lies and scams" (entertaining search results) all follow the same model: outlandish claims appealing to greed or gullibility.

Are influencers getting a bad rap?

Well, labeling oneself as an "influencer" is saying: "I want to influence people", which, before the social media era, would be called trendsetters or preachers. While there are always good people everywhere wanting to do the right thing, including on social media, achieving influencer status with millions of followers is not going to happen with boring facts. It takes much bigger and brighter carrots to excite a crowd. So, the bigger the influencer is, the more skeptical you ought to be about the claims and beliefs they are influencing you with.

Common lies and scams

The most common claims without any basis of fact or truth are about health, fitness, diets, and getting rich! That last one is possibly the most common: click my buttons because I am rich and you are not. Fitness and diets are not far behind, for exactly the same reason: I am fit and you are not. Follow me, admire me, help me get famous so I can make more money. But it is not always only about money, it can get far more nefarious, going down the road of cultish behavior where the benefit to the influencer is not so obvious, and most likely devious.

Politics and disinformation

In the early days of social media influencers, politics was not a popular theme, it was there, but not in the forefront along with miracle cures, trendy fashion, and healthy food, because monetisation was limited to audience growth, without brands and products marketing readily available. It was also somewhat still honest with flags from both the right and the left, although leaning heavily to the far left with much ideology.

Much has changed in the last decade. First monetisation opportunities have become attractive with both state and non-state "bad actors" investing heavily in social media disinformation. Rather than having an overt presence on social media under their flags or labels, subvert influence is far more effective, using both social media influencers and large botnets (networks of automated social media accounts). What we commonly call "fake news". But what we identify as fake news is rarely professionally produced, it is amateurish and easy to identify as such. Far more insidious is "disinformation" which is generated by professionals whose full-time jobs is to create and disseminate information that looks as credible as possible to the average viewer. That is what has led to the polarization of the social media audience; with people going down either the left or the right rabbit hole depending on their personal beliefs, social or cultural influence, or religious affiliation. Once engaged, tunnel vision blinds them from anything not compatible with the information they are being fed with.

While social media disinformation occurs everywhere in the world, it has become so prominent in US politics that anything being reported in mainstream media is subject to scrutiny and suspicion across the political spectrum regardless of the leaning of the content. Furthermore, as all the major social media channels are controlled by a small handful of people who have an outsized influence on American politics (TikTok remains the exception for now), there is little doubt that the algorithms driving those platforms are not objectively neutral. While the bias effect is subtle, it is palpable in the disproportion of certain types of content that are made more visible than others. It is said that the disproportion is a business choice of promoting content that is more financially rewarding.

Then it gets scary

There are so many bots dishing out disinformation and prompting discussions, that they end up arguing with each other. Bots arguing with bots. Yes, it is funny, but when you think about it more, it gets really scary. Bots can write disinformation so much better than the average Joe. When Joe gets into a political argument, be it with a bot or another Joe, his post is going to be raw, fake news mostly. Fake news is easier to spot than disinformation. So, the post from Joe will have less effect than the reply from a bot. Consequently, as the bots argue with each other at a more refined level of lies, the whole discussion looks more real than if it was just Joe arguing with another Joe. And viewers are more likely to repost a bot with bot argument, than a Joe with Joe argument.

Thinking about that setup: create two botnets to specifically argue with each other, making one botnet a little stronger and more credible than the other, leading people to believe that one, the one that is configured to make you believe whatever it is contracted for ... that could be a business model ... maybe it already is? Scary stuff.

When in doubt

Use your critical thinking to assess claims, to check beliefs against facts, to identify their motivation. In all fairness, no one should be spending an hour checking something they read casually in 2 minutes. Unless it is important to you, or you are following that influencer and it is time to do a reality check to keep it or unfollow. Is this influencer worth your time? Are you learning something useful to you, or gaining credible knowledge? As written earlier, there are good, bad, and deceitful influencers. Identify, check, and filter out the good ones.