Influencers: Politics Where We Do Not Expect It

This article was first published on Conférence, the Sciences Po blog, on 13 May 2026, and is republished here under its CC BY-ND licence, without the introductory paragraph and otherwise unchanged. A French version is available there.

A Recipe, Then Politics

You open an app for a break. Maybe you are between meetings, waiting for the bus, or just tired. You follow a creator who posts about food. Somewhere between the ingredient list and the plating shot, she mentions where the food came from, why certain products are getting harder to find, or what new packaging rules might mean for small producers. You did not come for politics. You got politics anyway.

A creator, while doing what she normally does, raises an issue with a public dimension. Her audience, which followed her for cooking content, encounters politics through her. The same thing happens elsewhere. Fitness creators mention public health policy. Travel bloggers discuss climate rules, visa restrictions, or local protests. Parenting accounts touch on school funding or childcare access. In each case, politics enters through a side door. The creator was not primarily a political voice. The audience was not primarily looking for news. Influencers have not replaced journalists, parties, or civic institutions, but they have become part of the wider environment through which political information appears.

Politics Through the Side Door

Political communication used to be easier to locate. It came from newspapers, television news, parties, campaigns, unions, civic organizations, and state institutions. These channels still matter, and citizens who actively seek political information can still find them. But political information now also moves through spaces built for other purposes: entertainment, lifestyle, consumption, identity, humor, and routine.

Most people are not actively searching for politics most of the time. When a public issue arrives wrapped in a recipe, a joke, or a personal reflection, people encounter it without having decided to enter politics. That does not make the encounter deep, but it does make it possible.

The shift is not only about where political information appears. It is also about the conditions under which people receive it. A campaign message announces itself as political. A news alert asks to be read as public information. A creator’s post works differently. It begins from a relationship that already exists, around interests that may have little to do with politics at all.

Why Familiar Creators Matter

What makes these encounters different from seeing a political advertisement or a party post is the relationship around the message. Many creators appear regularly in their followers’ lives. They share preferences, routines, mistakes, moods, and fragments of domestic space. Over time, followers develop what communication researchers call a parasocial relationship: a one-sided but meaningful sense of knowing a media figure. You have watched this person cook, travel, parent, train, decorate, complain, celebrate, and explain. You know their tone. You know their taste. You think you know what kind of person they are.

Creators often work hard to be perceived as approachable and similar. Followers may experience them as people who understand the same routines and frustrations. When such a person takes an issue seriously, the issue may feel less distant. Politics as usually packaged can seem formal, abstract, and adversarial. Through a familiar creator, it may appear closer to everyday life.

That familiarity does not automatically produce political influence. But it can change the first step in the process: attention. A person who might scroll past a campaign post may keep watching when a creator they already follow raises a public issue. The topic arrives through a relationship that is already warm. In a crowded media environment, that first threshold matters. Influencers can make a public issue feel relevant, graspable, or less alien before a citizen has made any deliberate choice to engage.

What the Evidence Shows

The key distinction is between encountering politics and being informed by it. Influencers are reliable at delivering the first. They are uneven at delivering the second. The research points away from both the optimistic story, where influencers effortlessly bring the disengaged into democratic life, and the pessimistic one, where followers absorb whatever a trusted creator says.

What influencers can do is translate. They locate abstract issues in everyday situations. That can make politics feel more comprehensible. It can also simplify too much. When complex issues are reduced to a few vivid claims, followers gain a point of entry, but they may encounter a thinner version of the issue. Studies of lifestyle and entertainment influencers confirm this pattern: political content can arouse interest beyond the creator’s main topic, especially when audiences perceive the creator as similar, trustworthy, or credible. At the same time, effects on political knowledge, participation, and durable interest are often limited.

Recent evidence from Instagram adds another qualification. Political references by entertainment figures appear to be sporadic but persistent. They do not dominate entertainment spaces, but they recur, covering a wide range of issues, from civil rights and public health to climate, crime, and international affairs. Yet political posts often receive less engagement than non-political posts. Politics enters these spaces, but audiences do not automatically reward it.

Influence, where it occurs, is selective, uneven, and shaped by context: the creator, the issue, the platform, the audience, and the prior relationship between them. Exposure may create curiosity, but it may also pass by as background noise. It may make politics feel more accessible, while also blurring the line between explanation, opinion, advocacy, and performance.

The Risk of Blurred Authority

Political actors have noticed the route through creators. The White House has briefed TikTok creators about the war in Ukraine, recognizing that many people encounter information about international affairs through platforms and personalities rather than official statements. Investigations have described Kremlin – and RT – linked efforts to work through foreign influencers to promote favorable narratives about Russia. A democratic government briefing creators and an authoritarian state covertly funding them are not morally equivalent. The first is transparent about its aims; the second is not. But they point to the same structural fact: political messages now travel through creator networks, and political actors benefit from exactly the ambiguity these networks create.

That is why the strongest risk is blurred authority. When political information comes through a creator, it is not always clear what kind of speaker the audience is hearing. Is this an informed citizen, an entertainer, an activist, an expert, a brand partner, or a hired gun? These roles imply different standards of accuracy and accountability. On social media, they often appear in the same format, with the same intimacy, confidence, and visual style.

Audiences are not passive. They judge creators. They notice consistency, expertise, sincerity, and credibility. But the burden placed on them is heavy. A confident video can make a claim feel clear before the viewer has any way to assess whether it is accurate. A familiar face can make information feel trustworthy before the viewer knows what kind of authority stands behind it. That makes politics easier to encounter, but often harder to judge.

The Everyday Feed

Back to the recipe. The creator is still talking about ingredients, but now those ingredients point outward: to packaging rules, supply chains, working conditions, prices, climate, or regulation. Maybe you look something up later. Maybe you do not. Maybe you just keep cooking.

That modest uncertainty is the point. Politics is no longer only where citizens go looking for it. It also appears in the ordinary streams of digital life, carried by people their audiences know for other reasons. The recipe will keep appearing in the feed. So will the politics that travels with it.