Giandomenico Di Domenico

So you have political influencers, right or left leaning.

You have...

fashion influencers, you have gaming influencers, and that's based on your tastes.

You might find yourself being very attached to one of them because you share ideas, you share worldviews, you share perspectives, and it's very easy.

At the end of the day, you watch

Influencers videos, most of the time you are online, on YouTube, for example, or even other platforms like Instagram or TikTok.

So you might be watching influencers videos, you know, many times during one day.

And it's like, you know, having a chat with a friend.

But the only difference is that this chat is just one-sided.

So these relationships are just one-sided.

But yeah, they feel like they're real relationship.

That's why people tend to blindly follow them, you know, with everything they say or they share.

Yeah, well, they know that they have very strong and cohesive kind of communities around them.

And they use different tricks and rhetorics and discourses, like the one you said, misinformation, legitimation, to legitimize their points of view.

Um, so they, I mean, the effort is, is already, is already done.

I mean, the effort for an influencer is, you know, starting to build the community, but if they have traction at the end, you know, when they are very popular, uh, they can do, they can get away with whatever basically they want.

And they can use also some kind of technical tricks to make misinformation more relevant, like pinning comments or cleaning comments from outsiders of the community.

Not all of that, because some outsiders are good and needed to make the community work and make the community stronger.

So they have an army of people that work and fight for them.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's hard.