Not long ago, it was common wisdom among social media influencers that they shouldn’t talk politics. There was a widespread belief among their crowd that it was bad for business. If you went left, you lost the right, and vice-versa.
Times have changed. Nearly everywhere you look online, influencers are posting political content. Each day, there are new reports detailing their hot takes on elections, campaigns and the culture wars. It’s become a lucrative business for these creators, as they now like to be called, and a boost for those that pay them for hype.
There are a number of recent and high-profile US examples of political influencers lending their clout, whether paid or unpaid: the Pentagon secretly assigned conservative influencers to promote Pete Hegseth’s so-called “warrior ethos” for the armed forces (a Pentagon spokesperson did not respond to the Washington Post’s question about whether they received a salary). The New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, uses a network of friendly (unpaid) influencers to communicate with gen Z. During his failed run for governor of California, Tom Steyer hired creators to promote his campaign – some did not disclose that they got paid. When the former secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem toured an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon last year, she was accompanied by three conservative influencers; whether they were paid is unclear. Some creators seemingly become parts of the campaigns they endorse; others try hard to give the impression they are far removed.
We’ve been tracking the rise of political influencers in our research for several years now. We’ve noted that many don’t disclose when they are paid to endorse candidates or ideas. The federal regulatory environment in the United States does not provide guardrails requiring disclosure from influencers promoting politics in exchange for payment. While some states have laws mandating transparency from paid political influencers on the books, those are typically limited to local elections. And though there are occasional pushes for federal transparency bills, the gridlock in Washington makes any such attempt unlikely to bear fruit.
A lack of transparency is convenient for influencers capitalizing on politics. It also suits politicians because it helps them appear genuinely popular with the digital “in” crowd. But when this coordination happens secretly, it is a new form of political astroturfing. We’ve also noted that it is computational propaganda, just substituting bots and AI (sometimes – some influencers these days are AI avatars themselves) for coordinated groups of paid creators posting content together. The end goal is to manipulate trending and recommendation algorithms and public opinion in favor of those paying influencers.
Our latest work on this subject is one part a pragmatic attempt to come up with an ethical framework to guide the space, and one part a worrisome empirical finding. For the former, we make a straightforward argument for authentic, autonomous and transparent influencer conduct and disclosure if someone gets paid to promote a political candidate, cause, or campaign. For the latter, one of our research teams, at the University of Tennessee’s Information Integrity Institute, found that to people who consumed more content from political influencers, disclosure mattered less. We hypothesize that those heavy social media users operate from a baseline assumption that all creators get paid in some way – regardless of if it is disclosed or not. It’s not hard to imagine that they’ve become inured to online astroturfing in this era of digital disinformation.
Ethical political influencer conduct, we argue, means that creators must take their responsibility as information purveyors seriously – they should serve as role models rather than spin doctors for people searching for insight on civic and political issues. Creators can and should retain autonomy when they engage with politics. Rather than becoming mouthpieces of campaigns, they should be true to their own beliefs and clear about presentation of opinion versus genuine news. Most of all, influencers should disclose if they got payments or other perks from a campaign. They owe it to their audiences.
We know from survey data that people who prize authenticity among the creators they follow are also more supportive of paid political influencer disclosure requirements. Influencers and political campaigns should take note: being authentic and disclosing payments can and should go hand in hand.
Prior and current election cycles in the United States reveal that the regulatory gap in influencer disclosure only exacerbates the problem. Absent oversight, it’s likely influencers will continue promoting politics in exchange for payment, and often without disclosure. Creators are vital in today’s media ecology in shaping public opinion on political issues, candidates and campaigns – but when they covertly work as paid propagandists, they degrade an already struggling information ecosystem rather than build it up. This might yield short-term financial gain, but it’s a poor long-term approach to business. People are already overwhelmed by AI slop and falsehoods online. If even some influencers continue along this current path, all risk becoming lumped in with these other forms of junk content – they lose the impact of the carefully constructed candor and inventiveness that drew people to them in the first place.
If Congress won’t act to preserve democratic communication and election integrity, what’s left is to directly appeal to those who bankroll political influencer operations or have sway over the online ecology – campaigns, influencer marketing companies, social media platforms, and creators themselves. Some may be willing to change, but others helped to create the current state of affairs in the first place.
That said, influencers who make a good-faith effort to pick up and follow the principles of authenticity, autonomy and acknowledging payment could do a lot to improve the integrity of political communication, especially around elections, crises and other significant events. Such action would help voters understand if those who speak loudest online do so because they genuinely care, or because they are getting paid to do so.
-
Martin J Riedl is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism and Media and a senior fellow at the Information Integrity Institute. He researches political influencers, journalism, and platform governance
-
Samuel C Woolley is the author of Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity and several other books on computational propaganda. He is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh and directs Pitt CTRL
