We are all discovering that influencers exist!

So I fired up Ghost to write this post and noticed that the last time I sent a newsletter was Aug 26th. I really thought it had been a month; this is why I don't do this professionally. Since I've last posted, some things happened, we had an election, and now we're in Postmortem Season.

The world does not need a postmortem take from me. However, I did work on Election Day, observing election rumors, because allegations of fraud were rampant everywhere in the weeks leading up to the election. There were strong echoes of 2020 and 2022; voting machines did go down here and there, and election workers did their jobs and addressed the challenges, even as right-wing influencers screamed bloody murder about "The Steal" and the fix being in and all that. Except this time the candidate they were supporting won, so those concerns simply evaporated. "Big if true!" - not worth acknowledging when false.

We did subsequently see some conspiracy theorizing on the left about Elon Musk's Starlink rigging the vote, but that remained largely in the realm of online influencers and the BlueAnon crowd. Encouragingly, though anecdotally, Harris supporters in the replies frequently disparaged the claims. Election officials, Democratic Party political elites, and fact-checking agencies refuted them as well. And the sitting Vice President and President of the United States certainly didn't join in; she conceded defeat, while he invited the victor to the White House.

Political influencers played a role in driving the discourse in both of the examples above, and throughout this entire campaign (and, in fact, quite often these days!) And that's what I wanted to write about today. A lot of subscribers signed up because they read my book or heard a podcast where I talk about the power of influencers, or gripe about how mainstream institutions treat them as a sideshow. So I was very excited to see a new study out this week from Pew, "America's News Influencers: The creators and consumers in the world of news and information on social media," which does a deep dive into this critically important ecosystem as it exists today.

These people with 100k+ followers who pivot from memes to breaking news to conspiracy theories from one post to the next: who are they, anyway? 

Methodology-wise, Pew pulled a sample of 500 news influencers with over 100k followers each, across five major social media sites (FB, Insta, TikTok, X, YT), and did a content analysis of "104,786 posts they produced during three distinct time periods in summer 2024." There were some important events that happened within those time periods: the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump on July 13, the Republican National Convention from July 15-18, President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race July 21, and the Democratic National Convention from Aug. 19-22.

What did they find? Paraphrasing slightly from the report website:

About one-in-five Americans – and four-in-ten under 30 – say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.

News influencers are most likely to be found on X, where 85% have a presence. But many also are on other social media sites, such as Instagram (where 50% have an account) and YouTube (44%).

Slightly more news influencers explicitly identify as Republican, conservative or pro-Donald Trump (27% of news influencers) than Democratic, liberal or pro-Kamala Harris (21%).

A clear majority of news influencers are men (63%).

Most (77%) have no affiliation or background with a news organization.

The demographic data is interesting because influencers thrive within niches; their power lies in tailoring their content to resonate deeply with specific audiences. Pew’s report shows that younger Americans, people of color, and those with lower incomes are turning to influencers for news. These groups often feel overlooked or misrepresented by traditional media, and influencers fill that gap by crafting narratives that align with their identities and values. Alternately, there are conservatives, often men, for whom being anti-mainstream-media is part of their personality; Fox News and talk radio nailed speaking to that group years ago, so this is more of a shift online than a wholly new phenomenon. Nonetheless, whether it’s TikTok creators amplifying LGBTQ+ rights (more there than on any other platform, per the survey) or X influencers doing what they do, the ability to cater to distinct communities isn’t just about visibility—it’s about building trust and shaping realities in a way that feels personal. News influencers don’t just report the facts; they embed it in the fabric of their followers’ lived experiences.

Sometimes, in fact, they may not be reporting facts at all! Pew found that 77% of the news influencers it studied have no background in journalism, and noted some interesting differences in behaviors between them and the others in the sample: it is "much more common for news influencers without a background in the news industry to openly link themselves to certain values or identities in their social media profiles. About one-in-five influencers who have not worked for a news organization (22%) do this, compared with just 2% of those who have worked for a news organization." The differences in this section of the report underscore how behavior within the influencer news landscape is distinct from traditional reporting standards. Also, news influencers are often producing commentary built on traditional news reporting. The two ecosystems are deeply integrated, even as news influencers often frame themselves as some kind of oppositional alternative (ie, the "independent" David vs mainstream "Goliath" marketing ploy).

I did wish Pew had asked more questions about how or why people had selected the influencers they followed. 31% say they feel a personal connection to an influencer; this stat that stuck out to me because theories of parasocial relationships come up often in research on influencers in marketing. It got me curious about how that compares to other influencer areas (dating, parenting, wellness, etc). I would also guess that far, far fewer than 30% would say they feel a "personal connection" to a news organization or outlet?

Taylor Lorenz, who also has been beating the drum on the importance of influencers over the last few years, wrote her own analysis of the Pew report which is worth a read. For those interested in going more in-depth, here are recent pieces by Wired on the relative popularity of the political influencer ecosystem in 2024 (this one illustrates the left has been stressing about losing the influencer battle in postmortems), on the future of the ecosystem post-election, and one by The Washington Post on political influencers being paid by campaigns. Katie Harbath of Anchor Change and I wrote something about that ourselves two weeks ago: "From Vibes to Votes: Social media influencers are transforming political persuasion faster than regulators can keep up."

Anyway, check out the survey if you're interested in how influencers are reshaping politics and news, and thanks for reading. 🙂 I will write again before three months go by; I have some new work coming out soon, on helping users take control of their own social media feeds (and possibly moderation as well) through middleware. I'm very excited about what I've been calling the Great Decentralization, and am working on some studies of how emergent platforms are reshaping the information environment. I've been spending a lot of time on Threads and BlueSky lately (where, at time of this writing, I am suddenly only 1k followers short of my old Twitter follower count, which is just wild to see).

Find me there if you want to chat about this post!