https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jan/31/lbcs-maajid-nawazs-fascination-with-conspiracies-raises-alarm.
45 Gurwinder Bhogal, “The Perils of Audience Capture: How Influencers Become Brainwashed by Their Audience,” The Prism (blog), Substack, June 30, 2022. https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture.
46 Maajid Nawaz (@MaajidNawaz), “Titan sub search & oxygen countdown= scam…,” Twitter, June 24, 2023, https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1672698980558307333.
47 Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 106–107.
48 Gurwinder Bhogal defines audience capture, in a very thorough explainer post, as a feedback loop that “involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience.” Bhogal, “The Perils of Audience Capture.”
49 Klein, Doppelganger, 131.
50 Ibid., 106–107.
51 Charli, https://www.charlidamelio.com.
52 X (@x), “Surprise! Today we launched our Creator Ads Revenue Sharing program…,” Twitter, July 14, 2023, https://twitter.com/X/status/1679572360695824384.
53 Taylor Lorenz, “Far-Right Twitter Influencers First on Elon Musk’s Monetization Scheme,” Washington Post, updated July 14, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/13/twitter-creators-payments-right-wing.
54 Zeynep Alkan and Sevilay Ulaş, “Trust in Social Media Influencers and Purchase Intention: An Empirical Analysis,” Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies 13, no. 1 (January 1, 2023): e202301, https://doi.org/10.30935/ojcmt/12783. While there is not much literature on the implications of trust in influencers on political attitude shifts or belief formation, influencers expressing opinions increased the trust toward them, and there is a positive correlation between trust in the influencer and purchasing intent.
55 “For Shopping, Americans Turn to Mobile Phones While Influencers Become a Factor,” Pew Research Center, November 21, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/11/21/for-shopping-phones-are-common-and-influencers-have-become-a-factor-especially-for-young-adults.
56 Supplement to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer: The New Cascade of Influence: Brands in a Feed-First World, Edelman Trust Institute, August 2022, https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2022-08/2022%20Edelman%20Trust%20Barometer%20SUPPLEMENT%20to%20The%20New%20Cascade%20of%20Influence%20FINAL.pdf, 16–17.
57 Paris Martineau, “Inside the Pricey War to Influence Your Instagram Feed,” Wired, November 18, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/pricey-war-influence-your-instagram-feed.
58 Alexandra Sternlicht, “The World’s Most Followed Tiktoker Gets Paid as Much as $750K per Post, but to Reach His Greatest Business Goal Khaby Lame Is Binge-Watching American Cartoons,” Fortune, September 14, 2022, https://fortune.com/2022/09/14/how-khaby-lame-plans-expand-business-that-gets-750k-dollars-for-tiktok-post.
59 Alexandra Sternlicht, “Top Creators 2022,” Forbes, September 6, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandrasternlicht/2022/09/06/top-creators-2022.
60 Carly Porterfield, “Right-Wing Pundits Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder Clash Over $50 Million Media Deal,” Forbes, January 20, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2023/01/20 /right-wing-pundits-ben-shapiro-and-steven-crowder-clash-over-50-million-media-deal.
61 Laurence Scott, “A History of the Influencer, from Shakespeare to Instagram,” New Yorker, April 21, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/a-history-of-the-influencer-from-shakespeare-to-instagram.
62 A case study by Shannon McGregor details how the Trump campaign used influencers to drive online conversations during the 2016 campaign: “The campaign then identified the top 10 percent of users with the highest influence in terms of follower counts and their ability to drive social media conversations. These users were invited to join the campaign’s rapid response team, ‘The Big-League Trump Team.’ As [Gary] Coby, [a digital strategist with the Trump campaign], said, ‘Basically, during the debate we were sending a text out to this small group every three to five minutes. Those pieces of content we sent out, were getting up to 500 percent additional increase in reach [on social media] relative to everything else. Trump had a big footprint, but then we were behind the scenes kind of putting gasoline on all of that.’” More broadly, McGregor’s paper provides a list of ways in which political campaigns in 2016 (notably Sanders, Trump, some quotes from Cruz’s campaign team) were using social media listening to try to find emergent chatter—to pull things up from the crowd. She writes, “Reading social media messages from supporters informed campaign messaging, as well as strategy more broadly.” Shannon C. McGregor, “‘Taking the Temperature of the Room’: How Political Campaigns Use Social Media to Understand and Represent Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 84, no. S1 (July 15, 2020): 236–256.
63 Kate Knibbs, “Mike Bloomberg’s Meme Campaign Is Just the Beginning,” Wired, February 13, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/election-2020-influncers.
64 Benjamin Wofford, “Meet the Lobbyist Next Door,” Wired, July 14, 2022, https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-lobbyist-next-door.
65 Johnatan Reiss and Michelle R. Smith, “Inside One Network Cashing in on Vaccine Disinformation,” AP News, August 14, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/anti-vaccine-bollinger-coronavirus-disinformation-a7b8e1f33990670563b4c469b462c9bf.
66 Anastasia Goodwin and Samuel Woolley, “Political Groups Are Paying Influencers to Spread Partisan Messaging,” Teen Vogue, October 7, 2021, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/tiktok-influencers-political-campaigns.
67 “These Are ‘Not’ Political Ads,” Mozilla Foundation, n.d., https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/tiktok-political-ads.
68 Robert Downen, “Gen Z Influencers Are Being Quietly Recruited to Defend Ken Paxton,” Texas Tribune, August 20, 2023, https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/14/influenceable-texas-politics-ken-paxton.
69 Despite apocryphal stories of gladiators endorsing olive oil in ancient Rome, the earliest documented example comes from Josiah Wedgwood in the 1760s. He aligned his tea sets with British royalty by calling himself “Potter to her Majesty” and from there built his brand. In the late nineteenth century, endorsements from both prominent and everyday people appeared alongside ads for patent medicines, or what we would today call “snake oil.” Many of these testimonials had been paid for, while others were wholly faked. The disrepute of patent medicines cast endorsements in a negative light until they reemerged in the years following World War I, amid a massive rise in media consumption and the advertising industry. For more work on this topic, see Kerry Segrave, Endorsements in Advertising: A Social History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2005), or Peter Suciu, “History of Influencer Marketing Predates Social Media by Centuries—but Is There Enough Transparency in the 21st Century?,” Forbes, December 7, 2020.
70 “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising Federal Acquisition Regulation; Final Rule,” Federal Trade Commission, October 15, 2009, https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/federal_register_notices/guides-concerning-use-endorsements-and-testimonials-advertising-16-cfr-part-255/091015guidesconcerningtestimonials.pdf.
71 Jessica Camille Aguirre, “When Does Mom’s Blog Become an Ad?,” NPR, August 17, 2012, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/08/16/158938607/when-does-moms-blog-become-an-ad. To be clear, the FTC did mandate that celebrities had to disclose engagements if they were “outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.” “FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials,” Federal Trade Commission, June 22, 2017, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2009/10/ftc-publishes-final-guides-governing-endorsements-testimonials.
72 Marisa Taylor, “FTC Not Sure How to Enforce Blogger Disclosure Rules,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2010, https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-10282.
73 Louise Matsakis, “YouTube and Pinterest Influencers Almost Never Disclose Marketing Relationships,” Wired, March 27, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-pinterest-influencers-never-disclose-affiliate-links.
74 “FTC Releases Advertising Disclosures Guidance for Online Influencers,” Federal Trade Commission, November 5, 2019, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/11/ftc-releases-advertising-disclosures-guidance-online-influencers.
75 The FTC has filed and won a handful of high-profile lawsuits in recent years, such as FTC vs. Teami, LLC, a “detoxifying” tea and skincare company that made deceptive health claims and promoted its products with undisclosed celebrity endorsements on social