How 'influencer creep' altered creative industries and our lives online
The pressure to be vulnerable online is no longer unique to influencers
Influencers are often associated with everything that's wrong with our digital culture, but they've also altered the social media landscape and ushered in a new way to be online — for better or worse.
Millions of people around the world create content every day for social media with the hope of making a living from it — working with brands, engaging in partnerships and creating sponsored content. The global influencer industry, which first started growing around these creators about 15 years ago, has grown to be worth over $13 billion.
But the line between career influencers and other chronically online people who also use social media as a platform to gain visibility has been blurring for some time.
"That is something that has always been kind of alluring about the influencer industry … this idea that you can chart your own course and decide who you're going to be and build a personal brand for yourself, build an audience," Emily Hund, a digital culture researcher, told Spark host Nora Young.
It's defined how everyday people use social media, and reshaped other creative industries.
It's part of what Sophie Bishop, a lecturer in cultural and creative industries at the University of Sheffield, calls "influencer creep": the growing necessity — in all forms of work — to self-document and self-brand on social media.
Bishop recently spoke to artists and craftspeople about this pressure to be online. "It was so shocking, because they were basically saying what influencers have been telling me previously," she told Nora Young.
She says they were spending more of their time working out how "black box" platform algorithms worked and how to maintain their privacy, while also sharing their backstage lives to foster an emotional connection with people who would buy their work.
"They really felt that they had to include their pets, their partners — like, really show that life as artists, in a way that really recalls the way that influencers pieced together this kind of backstage impression of themselves," said Bishop.
Emma Chamberlain, noted American internet personality and the blueprint for influencing, has often been celebrated for being vulnerable and "keeping it real" online.
Hund, author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media, says the influencer industry has redefined authenticity into a construction, shaped by the needs of this commercial industry.
Origins of the industry
Her book looks at the roots of the influencer industry, its rise and evolution over time. It was the result of a perfect storm, she argues, involving the 2008 economic crisis, rise of blogging platforms like Blogger and Wordpress, and the growing popularity of personal-branding practices.
Hund says brands and advertisers took notice of the platforms' early online content creators had built as a new place they could insert themselves and their messaging.
"In the first many years of this industry's existence, being thought of as an influencer was very aspirational. It was something that a lot of people who were toiling away in the industry hoped to become, because it signifies that people are listening to you, your audience is listening to you, brands are paying attention to you," she said.
Hund notes that the burgeoning influencer industry also altered the very social media platforms that gave rise to it. Instagram, which was originally anti-advertisements, changed its tune after growing interest from marketers and advertisers.
And as influencers became synonymous with commercialism, Bishop says, the term influencing also became associated with malevolence and disingenuity.
Over time, public backlash against influencers also led to internal backlash against the term, Hund says, with some forgoing it, to identify themselves as entrepreneurs and content creators.
Power imbalance
Despite the cultural impact of influencers and the traffic they bring to the social media platforms they use, Hund says, there are still very few protections offered to them — particularly in the face of opaque algorithms and uncertainty in the tech industry.
"There's no kind of wellbeing protection. So you don't get sick pay, you don't get maternity leave, you don't get any kind of holiday or vacation pay," said Bishop.
For instance, YouTube can remove monetization from a channel if the creator is inactive for 6 months or more.
"Overnight, there might be a scandal, there might be some new regulation, they might make a change to the algorithm, and everything can be ripped away," said Hund.
The proposed ban of TikTok in the United States is a recent example of this. In March 2023, prominent TikTokkers rallied around the platform during congressional hearings in Washington, D.C.
The industry has also given rise to influencer management tools — digital software powered by machine learning that marketing companies and brands now use to select the online creators and personalities they collaborate with by giving influencers "brand safety scores."
"They also may predict whether that influencer is potentially going to have a scandal, or might be at risk of having a PR crisis," said Bishop. "[It's] interesting to see these very kind of subjective decisions being made visible through the software."
She says these tools have reinforced existing social inequalities in digital spaces and allowed for the surveillance of content creators.
U.K. tabloids, like the Daily Mail, often report on influencers' lives — particularly those of women — commenting on their bodies if they are, for instance, photographed at a beach. Bishop says this sort of press coverage is monitored by these tools and can hurt influencers' scores.
"There's a gender dimension to that, if women are having all of this more negative press attention just because of tabloid culture and the culture of gossip magazines," she said.
Playing catch-up
The emergence of various social media and video sharing platforms in recent years, like OnlyFans and TikTok — where anyone can go viral overnight — has meant new ideas of what an influencer can be.
In 2022, Bishop served as a specialist advisor on a parliamentary inquiry into the social media influencer industry in the U.K. She says the ambiguity of the industry poses challenges for setting standards and regulations as it continues to expand.
The French Parliament recently passed a bill proposing new rules for social media platforms and influencers around transparency regarding edited and sponsored content. It's a response to concerns over these apps' adverse impacts on mental health and the prevalence of scams.
"There is a tendency to hold up huge names like Kim Kardashian, or people like that, when they run afoul. They'll kind of make a public example out of them. But there aren't a lot of resources for enforcing transparency at scale. And so people can — and do — get away with a lot," Hund said.
Bishop and Hund agree that professionalizing the industry, along with more accountability from both the creators and the platforms that host them, are necessary to guide the industry into the future.