The Most Powerful Politics Influencers Barely Post About Politics

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Donald Trump’s appearances on the podcasts of Joe Rogan and Theo Von, among others, were seen by many as a key part of securing his second term in office.

But while Trump was speculating about alien life on Mars with Rogan, he had a team of acolytes appearing on dozens, if not hundreds, of much smaller niche podcasts hosted by right-wing content creators who typically don’t talk about politics.

This is how, just six days before the election, Kash Patel, the man now struggling to run the FBI, ended up appearing on the Deplorable Discussions livestream, a fringe, QAnon-infused show hosted on a platform called Pilled.

“The Deep State exists,” Patel told the audience. “It's a Democratic-Republican uniparty swamp monster machine.”

At the time, there was no hard evidence behind an idea the Trump campaign appeared to understand instinctively: Social media creators, especially those who do not typically speak about politics, have an extraordinary ability to sway their audiences.

Now we have that evidence.

A new report, shared exclusively with WIRED and published today by researchers from Columbia and Harvard, is a first-of-its-kind study designed to measure the impact influencers and online creators can have on their audiences.

The study was conducted with 4,716 Americans aged between 18 and 45, most of whom were randomly assigned a list of progressive content creators to follow. Over the course of five months, from August to December 2024, these creators produced nonpartisan content designed to educate followers rather than explicitly advocate for a specific political viewpoint.

The results showed that exposure to these progressive-minded creators not only increased general political knowledge, but also shifted followers’ policy and partisan views to the left.

In contrast, a placebo group that was not assigned any creators to follow but was allowed to scroll social media as normal “showed significant rightward movement,” which researchers said was related to the right-leaning nature of social media networks.

For the study’s authors, and experts who have reviewed the research, the findings confirm that not only are influencers now potentially more powerful than traditional media, but content creators who rarely share political content may be the most powerful of all.

“The research concretizes what a lot of people have been hypothesizing, which is that content creators are a powerful force in politics, and they are absolutely going to play a big role in the 2026 midterms, and they will play an even bigger role in the 2028 elections,” says Samuel Woolley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies digital propaganda and who reviewed the research.

The Politics Paradox

As well as trying to prove that social media influencers can shape public opinion, the researchers also wanted to find out if those creators were more or less influential when their content is more overtly political.

To do this, the researchers randomly assigned the study’s participants a list of creators to follow, with some being assigned creators who mainly post about political issues, while others were assigned creators who are predominantly apolitical in their output.

The researchers found that exposure to content from both types of creator “produced unusually large and durable effects.” But what was most striking about the results for the report’s authors was that it was the apolitical influencers who had the largest impact on survey and behavioral outcomes of their audience—three times more persuasive than political influencers per video focusing on politics or policy.

The report concludes that the reason for this greater impact is likely down to the type of parasocial relationships that those influencers have built with their audiences, which are reliant on trust and authenticity.

“We find that individual [creators]—who cultivate parasocial connections but often lack expertise or formal authority—can shape political preferences by establishing trust,” the researchers write.

And looking back at the rival campaigns, it is clear to see that the Trump campaign appears to have understood that need for authenticity—or at least the appearance of it.

Early Starts

While Patel was waxing lyrical about the threats posed by the deep state to a bunch of QAnon believers, Democrats were blowing hundreds of millions of dollars courting A-list celebrities to endorse Kamala Harris. And the authors of the study agree that in general, the Trump campaign’s engagement with creators was much better thought out.

“It's fairly clear at this point that Republicans have been much more invested in building these relationships over the couple of years preceding the 2024 election,” says John Marshall, an associate professor of political science at Columbia University and co-author of the new report. “The intuitions which seemed to be borne out by our study are ones which many people had—that these smaller scale influencers, who are more accessible, more relatable, more credible, really had quite a lot of influence. People didn't fully understand just quite how many people were on that part of the internet.”

While the non-partisan messages shared by creators in this study are not the types of messages that campaigns will be seeking to share ahead of next year's mid-terms, there are a lot of lessons that campaigns can learn from the study’s findings, including the fact that building relationships with these creators does not happen overnight.

“If I was in a campaign I would say we should start earlier,” says Nathaniel Lubin, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and co-author of the report. “We should treat this more like an organizing problem, or how to work with creators, rather than an advertising problem where you sort of raise money and then dump it in at the last minute.”

Disclosure Optional

But simply engaging with creators is not enough. The study found that equally as important was figuring out how to get those creators to get your message across, which is not always as straightforward as telling people who to vote for.

“What this research is telling us is that the people who are most compelling, most persuasive when you actually consume their content, are the people who are not constantly producing political stuff—and by implication, the people who are not really bashing you over the head with [messages] like you have to vote Democrat,” says Marshall. “It's telling this broader narrative. It's having something which makes you seem independent.”

Harnessing the influence of social media creators is clearly a tantalizing opportunity for campaigns on both sides of the aisle ahead of next year’s midterms, but there are some concerns about how transparent and ethical these relationships will be.

“This is both exciting but also incredibly concerning, because influencers don't work to the same standards as professional journalists,” says Woolley. “In a lot of my research, what we found is that influencers tend to lack any unified, ethical standards, that they feel more compelled to note when they're paid to do a commercial activity because of standing US law than they do when they're paid to do political activity.”

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