EOTC #2- Online Influencers

With the internet taking over in the last decade, a new world of things has opened up. With a whole new world of communication, one of the biggest things that have been dominating is online influencers. There are various online influencers, most famously on Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, and Facebook. Some types of online influencers are bloggers, journalists, activists, and a vast group of “social media sensations.” There are five types of influencers, Mega (more than one million followers), Macro (500k followers), Mid-tir (50k followers), Micro (10k followers), and lastly Nano- influencers (1k followers).

Online influencers are meant to reach large audiences of people who can convince them of whatever opinion they are trying to convince you of. They can also try to sell you something or learn more about you for their gain. Online influencers started with “mommy bloggers.” They create blogs and share their everyday life and tips and tricks for your children; a massive wave of mommy bloggers make millions a year. Another big way that online influencers have started is Tiktok. Today, there are a million online influencers on Tiktok, but their identity has changed. Now influencers only care about making money and usually will try to steal your data to target you better. Once they have you data they can then start targeting you. Influencers will sell/promote products to their followers without telling them they are being paid to do so. Influencers will trick their followers into believing that they really use their products in their everyday life, but really just lie about it to make more money. This colossal wave of Tiktok influencers skyrocketed at the start of COVID-19 because everyone was spending all their time sitting at him. They found this a perfect opportunity to take advantage of people.

I will mainly focus on political influencers because this is a media law and literacy class, but recently political influencers have been the next “big wave” of influencers. With online influencers, an increasing amount of information is always trying to spread. Political influencers try to spread mass media and influence your opinions through popular social media platforms. Some viewers might not even know they are influencers, yet they still get heavily influenced politically without knowing it. The best type of influencers are the ones who seem the most “real” They are trying to help people understand why their opinions are better, while not saying that yours are wrong. Some ways that these influencers influence people is by providing a board overview and personal content. The more personal an influencer is, the more the followers trust them. By viewers thinking that they know this influencer on a deeper personal level, they are inclined to listen to them, which is just another way they manipulate you.

An example is issues about the LGBTQ+ community. A political influencer takes advantage of these situations to explore the people who follow them. They try to manipulate people into thinking they are just influencers and not trying to sway their opinions or votes. One way they trick people is by only talking about politics in every few posts, while all their other posts look like regular social media influencers. Sometimes these influencers will start as everyday influencers, and after gaining a following, they switch to politics. Yet even though some political influencers try to manipulate their followers, many influencers try to post for the betterment of their community. They want their voice to be here, and social media is the fast way to reach large groups of people.

Online influencers have changed one of the ways that society gets information. Even though there are a lot of manipulative influencers that only care about money, there are also the same amount of positive influencers trying to be positive role models to the younger generation. It affects society in everyday life and has changed how people have been influenced over the years since it is mostly on social media platforms that people get heavily influenced. It affects all different types of people. Some are more beneficial than others, but how you can use them to your advantage really matters. Overall, online influencers have affected my generation the most, a positive outcome because of how much more information and opinions we can access.