The Politician You Trust Most Might Be a Content Creator

How influencers hijacked politics

Photo by NN AI on Adobe Stock

Remember how your parents used to get the news? Depending on how old you are, your parents might have read some of their news on the Internet, but mainly they “consumed” news in a much more limited way than we do now. They might have read one newspaper a day, and perhaps watched one newscast on television at night, and that was it.

The world where we could consume news in finite bits and from largely the same sources as everyone else is gone. Now 24-hour news channels and streamers, social media pundits, and political and other cultural influencers can be accessed any time, all the time.

Influencers are now everywhere in our daily lives. But should we be letting them take over political news reporting and politics as well?

Rise of the Influencers

It has always been in the nature of human beings to influence one another — to affect how others think, what activities they choose, and seemingly hundreds of other daily decisions.

But the word “influencer,” as a noun, was only added to the Oxford-English Dictionary in 2019, and is defined as a “person who exerts influence to guide the actions of others…commonly applied to people who help generate interest in…