Darragh Worland:

Social media influencers hold an increasing amount of sway over the public. Well, why is that? What makes them so, well, influential, especially to young people?

Emily Hund:

Their expertise is their authenticity. It’s the thing that keeps this industry growing and thriving and changing. These people are able to construct themselves, construct their public personas as someone who’s credible, someone who’s believable because they’re authentic.

Darragh Worland:

That’s author Emily Hund. Besides writing the book The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media, she’s also a research affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. And I’m Darragh Worland, your host for Is That a Fact? Hund is here to talk about how influencers came to dominate our social media feeds and how much we can trust the authenticity they’ve staked their livelihoods on.

How did social media influencers come to be?

Emily Hund:

There were a lot of different things going on in the first decade of the 21st century that enabled influencers, as we now understand them, to begin to really gain traction. The internet had become a sort of commercial space that, you know, many people were using, and there were platforms like Blogger and WordPress that enabled more and more people to create their own websites, their own blogs, and publish their own ideas online in a way that hadn’t been possible on the internet before then. These sorts of platforms made it possible for more people to start sort of representing themselves online and communicating to the public in that way. And then we also had, obviously, the rise of social media, the launch of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. The early and mid-2000s was a really robust time for this new type of platform that enabled this sort of new way of communicating online and using the internet.

And there was so much excitement and optimism around these platforms too. You know, there was all this big talk about how these platforms were going to connect to the world and they were going to enable everyone to have a voice and they were going to democratize everything, especially democratize culture. There was also, of course, an ongoing sort of crisis in journalism, which motivated a lot of writers and aspiring journalists and established journalists in some cases to start blogging, start creating their own content online in hopes of gaining a wider audience. And, at the same time, the advertisers who fund our entertainment industries, they were looking for better return on their investment. As newspapers and print media were struggling in this time, advertisers saw that these people who were creating digital content could offer really specific niche audiences, really easily-measured results, and so advertisers were really interested and they started putting their money in this space.

And then the biggest thing is the economic crisis in the late 2000s, the Great Recession. This was a moment where millions and millions of people lost their jobs. The sort of security that I think many people felt in their planned career paths was shattered and, pair that with this optimism at the time with these new social media platforms that were saying ‘come here, create content, find your audience, have a voice’ … that was really alluring in this moment when a lot of people were disenfranchised and had lost their incomes. And so that drew even more people to the space. And in that moment, in those first years, during and after the recession, is when we see the influencer industry really start to gain traction and become a sort of recognizable entity that we still are dealing with today.

Darragh Worland:

Can you describe briefly the spectrum of influencers that we might encounter on social media today?

Emily Hund:

Name your topic, and I think you will find an influencer working in that area. The space has expanded to such a degree that it’s really hard to put a net around it. Ten [or] 15 years ago, when I started researching this space, it was a lot smaller. We had the sort of blogger journalistic sort of column. We had the so-called “mommy bloggers,” people who were creating content around parenting and motherhood and things like that. And we had fashion bloggers, obviously, which grew to become a huge juggernaut and then beauty travel, these kinds of things. And then over time the industry shifted a lot, over the course of the 2010s. It became more financially lucrative to not sort of put yourself in a column and to say, ‘oh, I’m a lifestyle influencer’ because then, at the time when Instagram was king and you’re trying to make money off of these visual posts, rather than just saying ‘I’m a fashion blogger and making money off my outfit, I’m going to be a lifestyle influencer and I’m going to make money off my outfit, the food I’m eating, the dishes on my table, the leash I’m using for my dog,’ all of that.

Darragh Worland:

Does that mean you can then partner with more brands across more areas?

Emily Hund:

Yes. So it provides more opportunity for brand partnerships across different sectors. And it also was really tied up in the technical means of influencing at the time as well. ‘Like to know it’ and ‘reward style’ are one example of what I call in the book ‘technologies of self-commercialization.’ There are these tools that allow people to commercialize their self-presentations on social media. And so how they work is you basically earn a commission off everything that you feature that a follower sells. And so if you’re using ‘like to know it’ or ‘reward style’ links, again, it’s better [to] link everything in the picture and make a commission off of everything rather than just saying ’I do travel, I do beauty.’ And so that kind of pushed everything – that really expanded the industry. And then in more recent years, just the, the shifting cultural and political tides of the last three or four years, in particular, have just expanded the industry even more to the point where there are people, like I said, creating content about any topic that you can name.

Darragh Worland:

Are influencers experts, because the way you’re describing it, you can’t be an expert in all things. So to me, what you’re describing, and I’m sure I follow influencers. I mean, I do, some of them though are more niche, like they maybe focus on a specific topic or you know, parenting for example. But they’re experts. They have credentials. If you are a lifestyle influencer, you can’t be an expert in everything. I would find that confusing as a follower.

Emily Hund:

There are some influencers who are experts, but not all influencers are. Most influencers are not trained experts in the fields that they claim to inhabit.

Darragh Worland:

So what’s the value they bring?

Emily Hund:

Their expertise is their authenticity. So that’s what this all really comes down to. And, and the, it’s the thing that keeps this industry growing and thriving and changing. These people are able to construct themselves, construct their public personas as someone who’s credible, someone who’s believable because they’re authentic. [It] really goes back too to those early years, those formative years of the influencer industry because at that time, in the early 2000s, it was an acute moment of sort of the bonds of social trust breaking in a variety of ways. So the influencer industry kind of emerges riding this high of ‘we’re not like all of them, we’re not like the mainstream media who you can’t trust for XYZ reason. We’re not like any of these established institutions. We are just people who are just like you and we’re just sharing what we know to be true and sharing what we like and things like that.’ So that was really alluring.

I like to point out, too, when we were talking about the early years of the influencer industry, that it’s not like these early influencers were lying in most cases because the reality is they were creating a new industry out of nothing. They, they didn’t know, they couldn’t predict what was what we were going to be living in today. At that time, they really were, for the most part, just using these new platforms, figuring things out, sharing what they knew to be true, sharing their expertise when relevant. And then when advertisers came knocking, then they were able to monetize and then things just exploded from there. So it’s not like it was all a lie because it really wasn’t. But once that first generation of influencers establish[ed] themselves, sort of proved that this could be a career, something you could make money on, you can sustain yourself by creating content and working with advertisers directly, then we had an influx of people coming to social media with that express goal in mind. And as the space became saturated, authenticity sort of gets disconnected from the actual lived experience of the creator and become something that needs to be cultivated and communicated in predictable, easily digestible ways so that the influencer can gain more visibility and rise to the top.

Darragh Worland:

How aware do you think most people are that influencers are paid to endorse products and that these are paid partnerships that they’re doing?

Emily Hund:

For a long time, I think people weren’t that aware of the fact that influencers were paid or how they were getting paid. I think awareness has been growing in the last several years, but it’s still not at the level of detail that I would like for the public to have. [W]e see, if you’re scrolling through your Instagram or TikTok feed, you see influencers, you might see that they’ve tagged a brand or they’ve said ‘hashtag partnership’ or whatever … then you might understand, okay, they’re, they’re working with this brand in some way, but there is a huge complex enterprise behind this content that we see in our feeds and it’s not as simple as a brand approaching an influencer or an influencer approaching a brand and saying, ‘Hey, let’s have an exchange of services here.’

There are, to begin with, from the user end of the content that you’re seeing, influencers have to present themselves to us in, like I said, patterned recognizable ways in order to remain what’s called ‘brand safe,’ an entity that brands want to engage with – someone that’s not going to cause any controversy or any kind of issue for the brand. And so that means that influencers are presenting themselves in, you know, particular ways. For a long time that meant you can’t say anything about politics, religion. You had to be totally apolitical. It’s like you had no beliefs. Now that has changed particularly, you know, since 2020. Now influencers are sort of expected by their audiences and brands to an extent to sort of share more about their beliefs, but you still have to do it in a way that doesn’t go too far, and where that line is of ‘going too far’ is constantly shifting. People are incentivized to really play it as safe as can be in the way that they present themselves. And even when they’re posting the, what’s called ‘organic content,’ a picture they took or video they made that they just wanted to do, even then, brands are still looking at that. So if you are an influencer or someone who is aspiring to be one, everything that you post has to be looked at through that lens of what’s brand safe and what is also going to keep me relevant in these algorithmically-driven feeds. When there’s no transparency to the user, whether it’s the user like us who might just be scrolling and looking, or the user who’s an influencer who relies on this for their income, they’re constantly trying to create content that fits with what they are perceiving as the current rules. So there’s a lot of shaping that goes on that people are not really aware of. And then there’s even more that I that I can get into of how these deals are made and all of that. But that’s what I would really like the public to have a better understanding of is that this is a complicated media advertising industry that is as complicated and probably more complicated than the advertising relationship with our more traditional media industries.

Darragh Worland:

What you’re describing to me sounds to me, or really describes an incredible tension between authenticity and artifice in this whole social media influencer industry and attention that has grown exponentially over the years. So it emerged with authenticity and the artifice has been growing sort of in opposition to it, as an equal and opposite force over the years. I mean, would you agree with that?

Emily Hund:

Yes and no. It’s kind of interesting because like I said, when we’re, when we’re comparing to those early years, when there was more truth to that authenticity of these people, people who fell into this, that was true. But at the same time, the content that was popular, especially at the dawn of Instagram, we’re thinking like 2012, 2013, which is when the influencer industry starts growing massively year over year, the content that was popular at that time was pretty curated. It was really posed, really heavily edited and so that was an interesting tension at that time, too. And now there it has almost flipped where a lot of the popular content that we’re seeing on Instagram and TikTok is people looking like we look right now, like it’s at your house or your office and you’re not overly posed and you’re not faithful of makeup and all of that.

Darragh Worland:

Pandemic style kind of!

Emily Hund:

Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of content that we see now is much more, quote-unquote ‘authentic,’ but it’s not, it has the appearance of being more authentic because it isn’t as obviously staged as it used to be. But at the same time, the creators of that content are much, much, much savvier and much more hyper-aware of what they are doing and the stakes that sort of govern what, how they are doing it. So there, I guess is a maybe more artifice behind it in, in the, in the strategizing and in the production of this content because the content creators have to be so hyper-aware at all times of what is expected of them by their audiences, by advertisers, and by the algorithms that govern these feeds and that determine who and how many people are seeing their content.

Darragh Worland:

And in your research, how consistent are influencers about disclosing their partnerships, their endorsements, their ads?

Emily Hund:

It’s not super consistent at the individual level. If an influencer is going to disclose that that is how they run their business and they’re going disclose, they’re always going to be doing things above board as much as they can. But if an influencer hasn’t decided that that is how they’re going to do things, then you really don’t know what to expect and that is a huge issue with the influencer industry. It always has been an issue. But again, now the stakes are higher because the industry is so much larger now, and it’s sort of taken over our social media feeds and also the way that cultural producers in other arenas, people who are still working at newspapers and sites of cultural production … it’s changed how people think about content creation more generally. So this industry has no oversight.

The FTC has a really nice disclosures document if you know that it exists, and if you are a person who wants to do everything above board and you seek it out, it’s great. It’s a really helpful document and if you know any influencers who are listening to this, please go find it, Disclosures 101 (https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/1001a-influencer-guide-508_1.pdf) but that’s kind of it. The FTC doesn’t have the resources to go after everyone who’s running afoul of these rules. Your disclosures are supposed to be clear and conspicuous. It should be extremely obvious to the follower when there is a commercial relationship. But there aren’t typically consequences for people who don’t follow this. The FTC has seems to be taking the strategy of we’re going to go after the big fish. When Kim Kardashian messes up, we’re going to get her and then make a public example of her to kind of scare people into following along because they can’t go after everyone.

That is a huge flaw in this system. And beyond just the clear and conspicuous disclosures with actual sponsored content, there’s a really muddy, if not non-existent line between the sponsored and the not sponsored, like I talked about before, because these influencers always have to maintain their particular personal brand, even when they’re posting organic content. So that is really muddy, too. Then the user who’s seeing the content might think that, ‘oh, this influencer just felt like doing this, look how much fun they’re having today doing this thing’ or whatever. But it’s still staged to a degree. And so, so there isn’t a lot of oversight. And then of course, too, when we’re talking about influencers who are positioning themselves as credible information providers, you know, not just people who are making, giving you tips about what clothes to buy or trips to go on, there’s enough issues with that, with the more lighter topics.

But when we look at people who are purporting to be journalistic in some way and sharing, purporting to share facts, expertise on … obviously politics and public health are the two big topics of the last couple years, but it, it goes in a variety of directions. These people have no oversight either, and they are not … the public can’t look at them like a journalist because a journalist who works at a news organization has editors. There are multiple eyes who are on that work before it gets published, and that doesn’t exist in the influencer industry. There is also, in the journalism industry, there are also professional codes that people are expected to follow. And of course, there are people who run afoul of these, you know, there are bad actors in any industry, but there are still professional expectations.

Darragh Worland:

Young people, in particular, are increasingly getting their news and information from influencers on TikTok, Instagram, other platforms rather than more traditional news sources. So what are the risks of that?

Emily Hund:

There was some really interesting research that came out recently from Reuters, I believe it was, that said that young people are increasingly getting their information from influencers and trusting them more than traditional journalists. And there’s a lot of potential issues there. It would be great if people working in the news industry could find a way to communicate with these audiences where they are and still uphold the ideals and ethics that they strive for. But along with that, I am concerned that young people who are getting their information this way are losing or not developing the ability to sort of discern different types of information. I haven’t studied this specifically, I don’t have my own research to cite here. It’s just a sort of internal theorizing when, going off of the information that we do have, it’s a very important skill to have to be able to discern not only fact from fiction, but also news from opinion.

And in the influencer space, this gets really muddled because, again, influencers are portraying their personalities in such a way and portraying themselves as these just like authentic providers of information who are just going to turn on the camera and chat to you about whatever’s on their mind. It’s probably a mix of information and editorializing, and sometimes lies, and so that is a real concern for me. Someone that I interviewed for my book, she was one of the last people I interviewed, and she was someone, she was actually in the process of like shutting down her really robust influencing business because she had just grown tired of the self-commercialization, the harassment she faced a number of things. But something she said really stuck with me, which is … she said, in the influencer space, people are allowed to create content without context, and that I thought that was just so beautifully put. [S]he was talking about how people sort of weave their personal narratives together with information, and they sort of just can create this narrative in a video that blends these things together in a way, in such a way that it becomes sort of unrecognizable. What is a fact? And what is this person’s personal experience? And what is this person’s opinion? And what aspect of it is them just sort of performing their personality for us? And in that way it can become really insidious how information sort of can become misinformation. There’s also this sort of blurring of the boundaries. The same interviewee said something like … she was a healthcare provider, so she was talking about that context. [S]omeone [who] is talking about vaccines can just say ‘and, by the way, somebody I know actually had had a vaccine injury, and so that makes me think that vaccines are bad and whatever it is.’ So you can sort of weave these really muddy narratives. And it’s sort of taps into our sort of human desire for connection too when we’re consuming these narratives. So it, it just becomes really difficult. And so that’s my concern.

Darragh Worland:

Also with sponsored content, you have influencers potentially being paid by PR arms of companies to deliver content that is very restricted in what they’re being exposed to for that company. You probably heard about the SHEIN controversy. Whereas if that story, those kinds of stories were being done by journalists, you’d have a very different outcome, right? I don’t know if you want to talk about that specific example or that issue.

Emily Hund:

SHEIN is a massive fast-fashion company based in China that brings thousands of new styles to market every week and so it’s just churning out, churning out, churning out clothing, and it has this massive global reach. It’s at an extremely low price point. We’re talking like five, ten dollars for an item. And it has been accused of having exceedingly poor working conditions for its workers and clothes being poor quality, all these things, and so while it is massively successful in some ways, it also has sort of a bad reputation in many ways as well. And so they organized an influencer trip where they brought a bunch of, I believe they were all US-based, influencers to tour their factories, allegedly, and create content about how everyone’s wrong about SHEIN, that it’s actually an amazing place to work, and it’s great. And then, when all this content went live, of course, there was a huge controversy around it and people saying, ‘this was all staged and these influencers are lying to us,’ or they were taken for a ride and all this. So there was a big controversy around this influencer campaign. And when I looked at this content, I was just thinking these influencers are being taken advantage of and they were overwhelmingly young women who most likely were not trained in investigative journalism, even though some of them likened themselves to investigative journalists and didn’t have experience going on factory tours of major corporations. They most likely didn’t know what to look for. And they were probably just super-excited.

I should have said too, that SHEIN is extremely popular on social media. It’s like a huge, hugely popular brand. So these influencers were probably super-excited when they got this opportunity. And also, when you work as an influencer, you’re not really incentivized to take a moment to reflect or to say ‘no’ to a brand that is waving money at you because you have to constantly hustle for your next paycheck and it’s a lot of work. And so that’s really what I saw when I looked at that content.

Darragh Worland:

What advice do you have for consumers of social media influencer content for vetting that content?

Emily Hund:

It really depends on the type of content that you’re consuming. It should be coming from a professional in some way. So you’re looking for health information, you’re looking for mental health information, dietary advice, all of these sorts of things. I would be really careful to understand who the person is that you’re listening to. What is their education on this topic? What are their credentials? As sort of a baseline [for] ‘should I listen to this person? Are they actually trained and knowledgeable in this field?’ But even if you’re just looking for more lighthearted tips about travel planning or something like that, I would still be really cognizant of the fact that there is a huge, huge, huge enterprise behind this content that you’re seeing. And it, it doesn’t mean that everything is a lie or that you can’t find any information in this way, but it does mean you need to be aware that people are crafting this content in strategic ways, in ways that are different, but still sort of reminiscent of the strategy that goes behind other content that you consume.

You know, a movie doesn’t just get made because someone woke up one day and said, ‘I’m going to make a movie about Barbie.’ It goes through many, many, many iterations. You know, there’s issues with funding and production and people involved and think of all that complexity, and remember that there is that almost that level of complexity behind the scenes here that you’re not seeing. Take everything with a grain of salt and also be mindful of how your time spent with these influencers impacts you. It’s an easy sort of habit to get into of following people, or especially if you followed someone for a long time, it’s like they just become part of your feed. But I think it’s important to be really mindful of how looking at this content makes you feel and if something is making you feel bad about yourself is negatively impacting you, then unfollow, stop looking.

And of course, I have to throw in to be aware that the time that you’re spending on this is making money for the apps that you’re using and that you, in a sense, are working when you’re looking at this. So just keep all that in mind. It doesn’t mean that you can’t find entertainment and fun and information there, but it’s really important to remember that it’s not all fun and games.

Darragh Worland:

Thank you so much for your time today. This has been really enlightening and I think it’s a really important part of being media literate, news literate, to really understand the machinations that go into social media influencing it is such a huge part of our media landscape today, and it’s very subtle in how much it’s infiltrated our lives and young people especially. But all of us really need to understand the ways in which it’s, no pun intended, influencing us.

Emily Hund:

Yes.

Darragh Worland:

So thank you.

Emily Hund:

Well. thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Darragh Worland:

Thanks for listening. Is That a Fact? is a production of the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education nonprofit building a national movement to create a more news literate America. For more, go to newslit.org. I’m your host, Darragh Worland. Our producer is Mike Webb and our theme music is by Aaron Bush. And thanks to our podcast production partner, Rivet360. For more about them, go to rivet360.com.