Parents, teachers, books, media, peers, our experiences, and many other things influence what we believe to be true, the way we see the world, and how we conduct ourselves. My mother would likely have said that peers, especially during our formative years, are potentially the worst influence. My father would have said it was religion. Today, I think that it is the people who are called influencers – individuals on traditional as well as social media who have millions of followers that they can influence.
Some influencers are beneficial. I put individuals with credible professional credentials in that category (Dr. Klotman, Dr. Hotez, Niel deGrasse Tyson, etc.) although there are exceptions such as Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladepo, TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz, and other purveyors of misinformation and snake oil.
From what I can tell, the majority of influencers consists of opportunists trafficing in disinformation. These influencers monetize fear, hate, social anxiety, and negativity. Negativity seems to sell particularly well – better than positivity, and invariably better than uncertainty. It seems that many people would rather have absolute certainty based on a lie from a popular influencer than have to cope with factually accurate uncertainty from an actual expert.
I recall that during the worst of the COVID apocalypse, an old friend of mine sent me a link to a Facebook (FB) group that had been established by someone who had attended my high school before I was a student there. This individual had decided to compile the obituaries of members from various cohorts that had graduated from that school. My friend sent me that link because one of my classmates and closest high school friends had recently died.
I followed that FB group for a few weeks until one day I encountered a post there claiming that COVID was just a hoax; I think that tens of thousands were dying of COVID each week, hospitals were overflowing with COVID patients, and the corpses of the dead were being warehoused in refrigerated trucks. This particular post had a link to a YouTube video channel for a 20-something influencer – a young woman who confidently delivered a fact-free diatribe on the COVID hoax. She was not a nurse or a physician or any other kind of authority on public health, infectious disease, or any related field. Still, she was telling her millions of followers that COVID was just a cold that caused serious illness only on the very old who were dying anyway.
I abandoned the FB group after lodging a complaint with the group’s moderator. I really thought that the group was bad for my health.
Since then, many other influencers have pushed politically motivated narratives and conspiracy theories concocted by the likes of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and other malign albeit influential people. These narratives include the so-called great replacement theory, the idea of immigrant crime, claims that immigrants are bringing diseases to our country, false claims that migrants draw social security and Medicare, Q-anon, on and on and on. It’s all bullshit, but when it comes from the mouths of influencers, it becomes gospel in the minds of the anxious, fearful, bigoted, and true believers.
Of course, traditional news programming, whether it is on talk radio, OAN, FOX, Newsmax, MSNBC, PBS, or the BBC consists largely of opinion pieces delivered by nonexperts aka influencers. Such outlets can serve to amplify a particular viewpoint or ethos – for good or for ill. Alas!