Political Influencers on Social Media: An Introduction

Abstract

Influencers are omnipresent on social media platforms. They occupy important digital real estate across a range of topical domains including beauty, fashion, and gaming. While researchers have contributed important work on the respective role that authenticity plays for influencers’ success and have described a burgeoning industry within the larger domain of social media entertainment, comparably little is known about what happens when influencers get involved in politics, when they harness their digital clout to promote political causes and social issues, and thereby become political influencers. This introduction to the special issue on political influencers provides a definition of what makes someone a political influencer. It theoretically locates political influencers within the larger field of media and communication scholarship, and delineates the term from other, related concepts such as that of opinion leader. Building on eight contributions focused across more than six countries and nine platforms, the article showcases important strands of current and future research. It provides the foundation for a more systemic understanding of political influencers on social media, situating them within a media ecology complicated by a diverse array of traditional and nontraditional actors, tactics, and dynamics. The article concludes with recommendations for future research.

Introduction

When people surf endless streams of algorithmically recommended, expertly customized feeds catering to their deepest desires, they encounter content from friends and family intermingled with material placed by advertisers. Such is the nature of digital media ecologies in capitalist societies. But social media feeds also include a crucial, third category that may fall somewhere in-between—content produced by social media influencers.

Influencers are social media users that have a following on a social media platform precisely because of their topical expertise and the authentic relationships that they nurture with audience members. They enjoy and carefully maintain—often, though not always, in a professional capacity—credibility and authenticity through how and which content they choose to present. Influencers leverage their social clout to promote causes that can include product advertisements for brands and enterprises, but they may also decide to support social and political tenets. Influencers’ activities in advertising (i.e., when an influencer shares content with their audience in exchange for payment) has dramatically shifted the industry. Influencer marketing now constitutes an important part of online advertising ecologies (Childers & Boatwright, 2021) in which influencers are simultaneously “sellers, buyers, and commodities” (Stoldt et al., 2019, p. 2).

Influencers are at the forefront of exploring new platform affordances, of testing the limits of a platforms’ community guidelines and terms of service, and of engaging other users in novel ways. While social media platforms have received more regulatory attention from governments as a result of the techlash (users forfeiting their trust in platforms as responsible stewards of user data and safety), alleged political bias, as well as wellbeing effects of harmful social media content on audiences, governments, including in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, the European Union, or the United States, have also expressed concern in the subject matter (Markay, 2022; Michaelsen et al., 2022; Olaigbe, 2022; Oxenford, 2022; UK House of Commons Digital Culture Media and Sport Committee, 2022). Issues raised by governments have primarily focused on disclosure—whether someone has been paid for their work—but also questions of user safety, particularly of children and young people being exposed to influencer content or working as influencers themselves.

When it comes to politics, things get more complicated. When influencers talk politics, they engage in a “grey area between market and democracy” (de Gregorio & Goanta, 2022, p. 225). Riedl et al. (2021) attest to a “lack of systematic empirical evidence” (p. 5) regarding political influencers—a gap this special issue seeks to close.

In many polities, political speech enjoys higher protections than commercial speech, making the regulation of political influencer activities more difficult than those of influencers who “only” promote commercial causes such as brands, products, and the likes. As de Gregorio and Goanta (2022) argue, political speech may enjoy special protections but

if this speech comes from persons who monetize content for a living, and are paid to review, advertise, or endorse brands, it can be seen as commercial speech which can be limited by mandatory rules belonging to consumer protection regimes (p. 225)

When political candidates attempt to reach specific populations, they often utilize influencers to promote their causes (Glazer & Wells, 2019; Wong, 2020). However, the boundaries around who counts as a political influencer are nebulous. Some have described journalists as political influencers when they post opinionated takes on political questions on social media (Peres-Neto, 2022; Schwemmer & Ziewiecki, 2018). Others have described politicians who are particularly savvy on social media as political influencers (de Gregorio & Goanta, 2022). And yet others have shown how the styles of certain populist leaders are akin to that of social media influencers (Gandini et al., 2022). Importantly, the category of political influencers includes social media users who do not come from an institutional background and whose notoriety and fame is platform-built.

These different conceptual approaches point to a set of dimensions that lie at the core of defining what makes a political influencer—politics, platforms, and influence. It stands to reason that political influencers are not the only individuals who can “influence” politics or political communication. That being said, political influencers’ ability to navigate the complex dynamics of their respective platform(s) makes them an ideal case for studying the changing political media ecology.

The remainder of this article provides a definition of political influencers within a larger conceptual framework on politics, platforms, and influence. It discusses existing research in the field, as well as theoretical work that influencer research often builds on. It then introduces the articles compiled in this special issue, before discussing future research avenues.

Defining Political Influencers: Politics, Platforms, and Influence

Building on our prior work, we define political influencers as content creators that endorse a political position, social cause, or candidate through media that they produce and/or share on a given social media platform. Political influencers may do so with the purpose of exerting political influence over their audience members, to perform allyship for a political or social cause (Wellman, 2022), to access monetary or other gains, or combinations thereof. Political influencers can be distinguished from influencers in other content domains “in their willingness to associate their online influence with political and social causes” (Goodwin et al., 2023, p. 1616). The term political influencer encompasses both those who exclusively focus on political or social issues in their social media activities and those who temporarily, or in a more limited manner, promote political or social causes through their accounts. In other words, whether someone is a political influencer is highly contextual and may depend on the issue at hand, discourse dynamics, or geographical or temporal context. Our definition encompasses those who operate professionally as influencers and whose primary income source stems from influencer activities, as well as those for whom influencer work is a side job or who do not monetize their online activities at all. Influencers may choose to use professional services such as influencer management tools and agencies (Bishop, 2021), or “sharing apps, engagement pods and other platforms to organize and coordinate” (Goodwin et al., 2023, p. 1627). While influencers are keen on conveying authenticity in their activities, it is important to note that our definition also extends to activities that may be automated, since automated influencer activities are still ultimately driven by human activities.

When contemplating which actors fall into the definitional purview, political influencers can include (1) politicians who act as influencers on social media (de Gregorio & Goanta, 2022; Esteve Del Valle & Borge Bravo, 2018; Gandini et al., 2022), (2) political influencers who act as opinion leaders (de Gregorio & Goanta, 2022), (3) influencers who become politicians (de Gregorio & Goanta, 2022), as well as (4) journalists who act as political influencers (Peres-Neto, 2022; Schwemmer & Ziewiecki, 2018). Some researchers have distinguished influencers based on the size of their following, by drawing up categories such as “nano,” “micro,” “mid-tier,” or “mid-level,” “mega,” and “macro” (Childers & Boatwright, 2021; Duffy, 2020; Goanta & de Gregorio, 2021). We find those classification schemes helpful insofar as they allow comparisons between influencers within a singular platform; when utilizing them, however, it is imperative to also reflect on a specific platform’s culture, user base, and affordances.

Our primary focus in this special issue is on political influencers who act as opinion leaders, though our conceptual definition is sufficiently comprehensive to also include the other categories. We purposely define political influencers broadly to provide avenues for future research to explore specificities and idiosyncrasies of subdomains of the larger field. Central to our definition of political influencers are three dimensions: Those of politics, of platforms, and of influence.

Politics

What is and what is not political has been a core concern of the field of political communication (Mutz, 2001). Following the study by Bakardjieva (2015), one proposed conceptualization of the political is whether a statement or act presupposes a binary between friend/enemy concerning the issue. If disagreement exists, and groupings into friends and enemies toward a person, cause, or issue are possible, one could argue that something is “political.” We build on the study by Mouffe (2005) who writes that,

nowadays the political is played out in the moral register. In other words, it still consists in a we/they discrimination, but the we/they, instead of being defined with political categories, is now established in moral terms. In place of a struggle between “right and left” we are faced with a struggle between “right and wrong” (p. 5).

Even a more generous notion of the political as discourse and actions related to public life relies on the “binary nature of civil society” (Alexander, 2006, p. 184) wherein motives, relationships, and institutions can be morally expressed as either good or bad. The binary necessitates both the good and bad—people position their politics based on both their allies and their enemies. This underlying cultural structure is expressed in a multitude of ways, from expressions of sentiment (i.e., positive or negative) to signifiers that are imbued with a positive or negative sentiment based on that political community (an example of this is term “liberal” in the United States as referring to both being economically liberal and to the modern liberal political party, i.e., Democrats). As such, our use of the term political in the concept “political influencer” encompasses both boilerplate political categories such as “left” and “right,” or “liberal” and “conservative,” as well normative and moral evaluations of “right” and “wrong.” Influencers who endorse a cause or candidate rely on these civic binaries to promote the “goodness” of their perspective—whether speaking on behalf of a political candidate or advocating for a sociopolitical issue—or criticize the “badness” of the opposing position. This is inclusive of both electoral campaigning, both official and unofficial, as well as content production and communicative actions regarding social justice issues such as abortion, racism, environmental causes, or support for LGBTQIA rights.

Platforms

Political influencers utilize social media platforms to promote political or social causes. Their success is tethered to understanding how algorithms may support or suppress one’s own content (Duffy & Meisner, 2022). By platform, we refer to “(re-)programmable digital infrastructures that facilitate and shape personalised interactions among end-users and complementors, organised through the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, monetisation, and circulation of data” (van Dijck et al., 2019, p. 3). In other words, platforms are infrastructures that influencers use to engage with their audiences. Two platforms particularly popular with influencers—and more broadly associated with influencer culture—are TikTok and Instagram (Abidin, 2020; Cotter, 2019). Important to note, however, is that influencers operate across a range of platform domains and may also migrate between platforms (Wellman, 2020). Platforms are built to encourage influencer behavior, as their commercial models typically depend on increasing engagement (Lewis, 2018). Yet, at the same time, the ways in which platform governance—the modes in which platforms regulate user content—structures visibility of creators like influencers leads to systematic disadvantages of people of marginalized identities (Duffy & Meisner, 2022).

As a social space for communication, platforms can help shape politics and political communication. Platform politics (Gillespie, 2010) and government regulations (Harris, 2019; Schaffer, 2022) prescribe how political influencers should disclose their activities, for example, by using certain hashtags or text disclaimers in their posts so that it is easily discernible for others that something was paid for. Platforms typically prescribe the ways in which political advertising is permitted, or they may (more or less successfully) attempt to ban it altogether (Mozilla Foundation, 2021). In some cases, platforms’ terms of service and community guidelines do not specify rules on influencers, making it difficult to know what is and what is not acceptable.

Influence

Communication scholars have primarily explored influencers through the conceptual prism of opinion leadership (Casero-Ripollés, 2020; Childers & Boatwright, 2021; Dubois & Gaffney, 2014; Esteve Del Valle & Borge Bravo, 2018; Peres-Neto, 2022; Schmuck et al., 2022). Building on the classic theories of the two-step flow of communication and of opinion leaders (Katz, 1957; Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955), influencers are often understood as similar to opinion leaders who exert influence over the opinion of others by relaying information, and who act as powerful intermediaries between audiences and the primary emitters of information (in classic models, the primary emitters have been media, though influencer economies and contemporary media ecologies have shifted toward a potential variety of primary emitters). While the literature on opinion leadership and on social media influencers is deeply interwoven, one main difference between the two is that traditional celebrities/opinion leaders gain their social clout outside a social media platform, whereas for an influencer, fame is a product of direct entanglement with a platform (Schmuck et al., 2022). In other words, a social media influencer is tethered to a platform’s infrastructure. Their influence is platformed, meaning that it is captured through platforms’ proprietary metrics and on terms put forth by platforms. A platform may decide to let an influencer stay on its properties despite minor or major rule violations, but it can also decide to permanently suspend an influencer at any point (Jhaver et al., 2021; Rogers, 2020).

Opinion leadership literature typically seeks to understand who exerts influence in information diffusion processes. Dubois and Gaffney (2014) point out that the metrics by which one chooses to assess influence have a critical impact on what type of influence can be measured. Based on their work, they argue that important metrics could encompass “interaction within a network,” “having some following,” as well as one’s “structural position” within the respective field of influence (Dubois & Gaffney, 2014, p. 1274). Bakshy et al. (2011) point out that an influencer is someone who has “some combination of desirable attributes—whether personal attributes like credibility, expertise, or enthusiasm, or network attributes such as connectivity or centrality—that allows them to influence a disproportionately large number of others” (p. 65). But despite rigid interest and significant research energy spent in the domain of influencer culture, comparably little research has explored precisely what influence means. Metrics such as how many followers an account has, content diffusion cascades, or dollar amounts that a post might earn, are often used as proxy metrics in the context of influencers (Bakshy et al., 2011). Meanwhile, studies that measure the effects of engaging with influencer content are scarce, though some rare exceptions exist.

In exploring the effects of engaging with political influencer content, Schmuck et al. (2022) develop the concept of “perceived simplification of politics,” suggesting that people may perceive politics to be “overly simple and easy to solve,” (p. 742). This, in turn, might lead to more political cynicism, but also more political interest. The so-called “Rezo effect” in Germany describes how a German YouTube influencer by the name Rezo attacked the German conservative party CDU in a video; other influencers released similar videos, creating a bandwagon effect, which has been associated with an increase in votes for the Green party among a young voter segment in the country (Allgaier, 2020). Researchers have also shown how political influencers can play important roles in political education and literacy (Riedl et al., 2021; Schmuck et al., 2022). Another study pertaining to the effects of engaging with influencer content shows that following influencers who discuss politics can impact subsequent political online participation (Dekoninck & Schmuck, 2022). Abidin (2018) introduces six metrics that are helpful in assessing internet celebrity: Scale (i.e., in relation to traditional forms of fame), platform (social vs traditional, single-platform vs multi-platform), audience(s) (niche vs mainstream), nature (hobby vs profession), practice (degree of intimacy, privacy, and so on), and impact (intimate spaces vs broad appeal across traditional and new media). These dimensions are conceptually useful when assessing political influencers.

Why We Should All Care About Political Influencers

As we have argued elsewhere, social media engender that “any person can theoretically build an audience and grow their influence” (Goodwin et al., 2023, p. 1614). We want to emphasize the importance of the word “theoretically” here, in a similar manner to what Zizi Papacharissi has pointed out in an interview:

The focus on the digital emphasizes that everyone is potentially a storyteller, and thus an influencer—someone with the potential to frame others’ points of view. The operative word here is potential. These technologies promise; they do not guarantee. (Papacharissi et al., 2017, p. 1070)

The notion that theoretically everyone has the potential to become an influencer aligns with the “inherent neoliberal self-commodification” (Lewis, 2020, p. 203) that digital platforms promote. Meanwhile, influencer scholarship has showcased how the dynamics that shape influencer industries are more similar than different from other domains of the entertainment industry. Marketing generally operates within “preexisting gendered and racial scripts and their attendant grammars of exclusion” (Banet-Weiser, 2012, p. 89). People with marginalized identities are structurally disadvantaged as influencers (Duffy & Meisner, 2022). The domains that influencers operate in are highly gendered: “while female content creators dominate fashion, beauty, and parenting, the genres of comedy, technology, and gaming are populated by male creators” (Duffy, 2020, p. 1).

While the influencer space comes with the illusory appeal of a “confusing, under-regulated, and messy Wild West” (Bishop, 2021, p. 3), burgeoning industries have sprung up and brought to the fore influencer intermediary companies that intersect between influencers and brands (Stoldt et al., 2019). The field of influencer industries is quickly professionalizing, with companies providing influencer management tools that can, “present analytics data and make algorithmic calculations designed to support marketers in selecting appropriate influencers for advertising campaigns, through subjective calculations about influencers’ brand safety and risk [emphasis in original]” (Bishop, 2021, p. 1).

Political influencer scholarship may still be in its infancy, but it is able to draw on a comprehensive body of work that can be traced back to work on camgirls by Theresa Senft (2008), and various aspects of influencer culture by Crystal Abidin (2018) who describes how professional influencer agencies have been operating as early as 2007 in Singapore. The antecedent term to “influencer” is that of “microcelebrity,” a notion Senft (2008) describes as

a new style of online performance that involves people “amping up” their popularity over the Web using technologies like video, blogs and social networking sites. Micro-celebrity sometimes looks like conventional celebrity, but the two aren’t the same. (p. 25)

Core strands of research on influencers writ large engage with questions of authenticity (Abidin, 2018; Pooley, 2010; Syvertsen & Enli, 2020) and credibility (Bakshy et al., 2011; Riedl et al., 2021; Wellman, 2022). Duffy (2020) has described influencers as “a subset of digital content creators defined by their significant online following, distinctive brand persona, and patterned relationships with commercial sponsors” (p. 1). The UK government defines an influencer as “an individual content creator who builds trusting relationships with audiences and creates both commercial and non-commercial social media content across topics and genres” (UK House of Commons Digital Culture Media and Sport Committee, 2022, p. 4). A report issued by the European Union understands as influencer “a content creator with a commercial intent, who builds trust and authenticity-based relationships with their audience (mainly on social media platforms) and engages online with commercial actors through different business models for monetisation purposes” (Michaelsen et al., 2022, p. 9).

Areas of interest concerning the legality of influencer activities pertain to a range of domains, including “advertising disclosures, dishonest marketing, astroturfing, taxes, contentious content, and abuse on social media” (Abidin, 2018, p. 84). On social issues, Abidin (2018) summarizes important areas of concern as: “sexualization and exploitation, the commercialism of young children in the media, vulnerability and hardship, and the spillover effects of the Influencer industry into other economies in society.” (p. 86) Indeed, sexualization of children is a critical concern that social media companies are unsure of how to tackle. This is exemplified by influencer cases such as that of Bhad Bhabie (“Cash Me Ousside”; Abidin, 2018) or of Jenny Popach (Carville, 2022). Popach’s popularity illustrates difficulties that TikTok faces with its user base, particularly teenagers. When teenagers like Popach post sexualized content, this raises important questions about what the lines of permissibility are in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of TikTok (Carville, 2022).

Political Influencer Scholarship and Contributions in This Special Issue

Few published studies to date have explicitly focused on the issue of political influencers. Lewis (2020) studied alternative information ecologies, particularly those that promote conspiracy theories and more extreme worldviews. She found that political influencers on the right can create funnels to draw others into gradually more extreme spaces and radicalization (Lewis, 2018). Schmuck et al. (2022) explored the potential of political influencers for raising interest in politics among young people and find that indeed a positive effect may be an increased interest in politics, but also a turn to more political cynicism. Similarly, Riedl et al. (2021) described the role political influencers can play as ambassadors of political education and literacy. Dekoninck and Schmuck (2022) found that following influencers who discuss politics can impact subsequent political participation online. De Gregorio and Goanta (2022) described the different ways to categorize political influencers, and the ramifications that political speech has on regulatory efforts. In our own work, we investigated how political organizers and influencers coordinate among each other, explored motivations for influencers to incorporate political topics in their content, and probed questions around disclosure (Goodwin et al., 2023).

The contributions compiled in this special issue illuminate a range of perspectives and aspects pertinent to the topic of political influencers at a time when influencer industries are on the rise, and regulators are developing an appetite for engaging with the issue. The articles in this special issue either focus on a singular platform, or on cross-platform dynamics, encompassing platforms that include Facebook, Instagram, Parler, Telegram, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Weibo, YouTube, as well as Google Docs and podcasts. Geographically, the articles showcase political influencer phenomena connected to locales including Canada, China, Germany, Malawi, Russia, and the United States. Authors utilize a diverse array of innovative quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches to grapple with the issue, including network analysis, digital multimodal walkthroughs, multimodal discourse analysis, semantic mapping, thematic content analysis, case studies, quantitative content analyses, and survey research.

Starbird et al. (2023) explore false narratives of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 US election as a disinformation campaign in which political influencers from established (hyperpartisan) media, alongside politicians and ordinary users, collaborated to further spread falsehoods. The authors present three case studies—Sonoma Ballots, SharpieGate, and Maidengate—which help complicate existing understandings of how false information gets shared, namely not only as a strategic and structured campaign that operates top–down, but also in an improvized, bottom–up manner.

Stewart et al. (2023) show how some political influencers whose work centrally evolves around platforming hatred against others mobilize their followers. The authors present an analysis of Telegram channels of two hate groups—proud boys in the context of the 6 January 2020 insurrection at the United States Capitol, and White Lives Matter during a set of rallies in North America in 2021, and present a novel methodological approach of documenting activities in messaging and chat apps such as Telegram—that of a digital multimodal walkthrough.

Boichak (2023) examines how the Russian Night Wolves biker gang operates as a political influencer on Facebook by promoting the geopolitical goals and ideologies of the Kremlin abroad and targeting (diasporic) populations in places within Russia’s sphere of interest. The study offers insights into prominent narratives and important actors connected to the Night Wolves’ online activities.

Harris et al. (2023) present a case study of Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Piker harnesses his follower power on Twitch to exert so-called ratioing of Twitter accounts. Ratioing refers to how a social media post might receive more retweets or replies than likes, a “ratio” that may insinuate a norm violation in the original post. The study engages three prominent instances of ratioing: Twitter posts of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, the Trinidadian-American rapper Nicki Minaj, and conservative influencers Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder. The study provides important insights into new approaches through which political influencers such as Piker utilize platform affordances toward political ends.

Sehl and Schützeneder (2023) analyze political influencer activities in the context of the 2021 German federal election. They focus on an award for political influencers presented by a conservative political party and examine the activities of political influencers who were nominated to receive the award. Their study illustrates how political influencers can fulfill an important role as stewards of political education and literacy for young users of social media platforms in the run-up to an election.

Nyangulu and Sharra (2023) engage with the notion of political influencers from the perspective of diasporic social media use. Through an ethnographic case study of two diasporic political influencers’ online activities on “Facebook Malawi,” the authors discuss the ways in which these influencers provide a foil to corruption and injustice in government in Malawi from afar through “long-distance nationalism.”

Liang and Lu (2023) dissect Twitter content pertaining to six large China-related political events in English and Chinese languages, with a focus on the roles that different accounts play as initiators who originate new political content, and amplifiers that spread existing content. Specifically, they show how who emanates as a political influencer is highly contingent on the context: Timing and type of event.

Finally, Tang (2023) investigates digital connective action in response to a controversial policy issued by the Chinese Communist Party, which targets the expression of effeminate gender aesthetics among men. By examining how a contentious political issue such as the new policy is discussed by Weibo users, the author demonstrates that who becomes an influencer remains in flux and is issue-specific as well as platform-specific.

Conclusion

This article set out to contour our understanding of what constitutes political influencers, scope scholarship on the topic, and serve as an introduction to the special issue. We define political influencers as content creators that endorse a political position, social cause, or candidate through media that they produce and/or share on a given social media platform. As we show, political influencers must be analyzed through the prisms of politics, platforms, and influence.

Politics refers to the stipulation that political influencers associate their activities with political or social causes publicly, on their social media feeds (Goodwin et al., 2023). While the term “political” provides conceptual flexibility, we conceive of issues, topics, and controversies that allow binary conceptualizations and “we” versus “they” distinctions as political. This encompasses moral categories such as “right” or “wrong” as much as explicitly political categories such as “left” and “right” (Mouffe, 2005). Platforms refer to how the activities of political influencers are deeply intertwined with platforms and their respective politics (Gillespie, 2010). Influencers only succeed when they know how to surf the wave of algorithmic recommendation (Duffy & Meisner, 2022). Their success or demise is dependent on the benevolence of platforms, as much as on influencers conducting themselves in a manner that aligns with the rules that platforms have put forth, and the extent to which platforms police these rules. Influencers are at the whim of platforms, whether they like this or not, and platforms may decide to deplatform an influencer at a moment’s notice (Jhaver et al., 2021). Influence, finally, refers to how we conceive of political influencers as individuals who, very loosely defined, exert influence over an audience. The measurement of influence is variegated—and often carried out through proxies that measure follower counts, information diffusion cascades, or dollar amounts, rather than whether a change in opinion has happened.

Influencers operate within neoliberal platform ecologies, which suggest that anyone can be an influencer. In reality, platforms’ power structures exacerbate dynamics of exclusion and marginalization similar to other domains of society. Influencer industries are professionalizing rapidly and provide brands as well as influencers with intermediary services and toolboxes that mitigate risk for brands (Bishop, 2021). Current debates around influencers typically engage with questions of trust and safety (Abidin, 2018; Carville, 2022), as well as with the difficulties that regulating political speech entails as a category of speech that enjoys particularly strong protections (de Gregorio & Goanta, 2022). This special issue contributes to the study of political influencers by providing a conceptual framework and a rigid and comprehensive, as well as methodologically, theoretically, regionally, and platform-diverse overview of pressing issues in the field.

Future Research

The work presented here establishes a baseline in the domain of political influencer research. Future studies should focus on definitional work on influence and influencers—testing, cataloging, and cartographing metrics that might help in measuring the impact political influencers have. Policy and legal scholars should expand on the difficulties entailed in regulatory approaches that seek to rein in political influencers while retaining the special protections that political speech enjoys. Qualitative researchers would be well-advised to explore the motivational underpinnings of why, when, and under what circumstances individuals become political influencers. Experimental work, alongside multi-wave panel surveys, could explore the effects that consuming political influencer content can have. While the field of social media studies is rife with moral panics that come and go in self-repeating cycles (Carlson, 2020; Marwick, 2008; Moran & Prochaska, 2022), exploring not only the negative effects of influencer culture, but also the potentials of political influencers for literacy and political engagement is important.