Won't Somebody Think of the Influencers?
The rush to crack down on the young people making money on TikTok misses the real causes and possible effects of the social media influencer boom.
Young people are told to find their calling. Twenty-six-year-old Tamar Ciment believes hers is getting Gen Z off social media. In her perfect world, zoomers would trade their entire smartphone for a '90s-era Nokia. "Lock it in a drawer. Throw it out the window. Whatever you need to get it out of your field of vision," she urges. "The internet is a modern hellscape of constant information, distraction, and over-stimulation."
Ciment, echoing popular concerns of pundits, politicians, and parents, believes this is the advice her generation—disoriented and unmoored in the wake of COVID-19—needs to hear. Toward the end of 2020, she found a medium to effectively deliver this message to her intended audience.
"Why are you still on your phone," Ciment's appeal begins. "You could be doing so many more important things with your time…like starting a business!" She pauses to look up from a prop phone and smirks at the 400,000 TikTok followers watching from behind the camera of her real one. "Is this an ad? Yes, it is!" Over the next 20 seconds, Ciment becomes a spokesperson for a mid-sized business development platform that has paid her to recite these words until the video seamlessly loops back to Ciment asking us all once again: "Why are you still on your phone?"
@tamarciment what are you waiting for? get to it! @Tailor Brands #llc #tailorbrands ♬ Jazzy and astringent hip hop(1090694)—KAMIYAMA
Ciment is a social media content creator—an influencer, though she generally avoids that term—who has found paradoxical popularity by telling young people to spend less time looking at their screens. Her videos are captivating, even those that are clearly ads for products on which she contends her audience, occasionally in the millions, might better spend their time. Her clips are usually filmed inside her tight Manhattan bedroom in stark, vibrant lighting and almost always end with the exact same shot on which they begin, producing hypnotic never-ending loops of social media self-help. If you don't deliberately scroll to the next post, you might end up watching the same one forever.
"I definitely see the irony," Ciment says when asked how she squares her words urging viewers to spend less time on social media with her own beguiling use of the medium. "If I hung up a flier that said 'get off your phone', everyone on their phones would miss it." For Ciment, as for millions of others of her generation, apps such as TikTok and Instagram are, for better or worse, where they can most dependably find their customers, whatever their vocation or trade. Ciment, a marketing professional by training, is in the business of cultivating a more present society.
She enjoys her work, finds it meaningful, and makes a healthy living from it—a trifecta of contentment that every professional seeks but few truly find. On TikTok "I realized I had free rein over the stories I wanted to tell," she says. "I started to take content creation a lot more seriously, viewing it as a career path, rather than a hobby. It felt like a chance to do what I love without any strings attached."
According to a 2019 report by Morning Consult, 86 percent of young people in America would become professional social media creators if given the option. The same poll found that 12 percent of Gen Z Americans (approximately 8 million people aged 12–27) already consider themselves influencers. While some of those surveyed likely employ a low bar when qualifying themselves among this supposedly privileged class of online content-makers, such exaggerations only highlight that vast numbers of teens and 20-somethings see the influencer lifestyle as aspirational.
And it's not just the young who are spellbound. The grown-ups at Goldman Sachs say the economics around influencing will be worth nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027, double the $250 billion at which it's valued today. With the ascendance of a new generation of digital-native millionaires—and arguably a couple of billionaires—social media has become synonymous not just with fun and fame but with prosperity and professional freedom.
Despite this, or perhaps in part due to it, Congress passed a bill that will ban TikTok—the world's fifth-largest social media service and the one on which Gen Z has most notably found its home—in the United States if the site does not decouple from its Chinese-owned parent company, potentially shuttering a platform used by 170 million Americans.
National security is the primary defense offered by those supporting the ban, as the app ostensibly gives China's Communist government access to the private data of millions of Americans. But wrapped up in this highly specific case of data anxiety is an additional concern over what apps like TikTok might be doing to the young ones of this nation: that social media platforms "are attention-fracking America's youth," as Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D–Mass.) colorfully put it. Yet amidst all the scrutiny from our elected officials, few have thought to ask about the millions who see these apps as a golden ticket to the American dream. Because if Auchincloss gets his way, his ally Ciment would be out of a job.
The Rise of Influencer Culture
From coast to coast and border to border, enterprising Americans are using social media apps "to enhance their reach, build community, and form small businesses," says Besidone Amoruwa, an Instagram executive who works with influencers to maximize the monetization of their follower counts. From this influencers-as-a-business perspective, sites like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok "are the creators' storefronts," she believes. Banning them would be akin to zoning a main street of the internet against commercial use, impeding entrepreneurially-minded young people not just from direct income but also opportunities to build their talents and trademarks for even larger venues.
"I started [on social media] because I really wanted to be a filmmaker," says Colorado native Jake Roper, whose pop-science YouTube channel, VSauce3, has garnered over 500 million views and won him an Emmy. Before this, "I was working with ad agencies and doing commercials, but it wasn't on my own terms. On YouTube, I had complete control. If I wanted something made, I just had to make it."
The freedom to create sans guardrails and gatekeepers is a critical part of what attracts creatively ambitious young people to social media. Roper is now represented by a top Hollywood talent agency and is in discussions with a movie studio to direct his first feature film, thanks to the clout he earned on social media. Entertainment is famously an insider's game, but on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, "there are no judges that tell you who's going to be famous, who's going to get a TV show, who's going to be with Capitol Records," says Roper. "The audience decides."
For those the audience selects, the returns can be immense, with top influencers pocketing up to a million dollars per post, seemingly earned just by snapping a bikini pic at the beach or swinging their hips in a precise, sultry manner. With such lucrative rewards collected for such apparently facile effort, the allure is undeniable, especially when the traditional alternatives seem so bleak. Why burden yourself with anxiety over whether a hollow fixed-income job will ever be enough to afford you a house when a cannabis company might recruit you to live in a West Hollywood mansion and play video games all day? Conventional American dream be damned—kids these days are shooting for the epicurean moon.
One might gently inform their local youngster that such ambitions are highly aspirational and that the odds of fulfilling them are astronomically against them. This is just the 21st-century version of a 90s kid's foiled hopes of becoming Michael Jordan, conveniently ignoring their 5'7″ height and lanky physique.
But on their surface, the facts appear to favor the youth's ambitions. One in five members of Gen Z say they personally know a working influencer. Today, America's most popular TikTokkers come from unremarkable places like Norwalk, Connecticut, and Lafayette, Louisiana, and seem to lack exceptional qualifying abilities. Other than their looks, often angelic but almost always bolstered by filters and touch-ups, the influencers who rise to the top are what NBC reporter Kat Tenbarge has called "oppressively average." Which is to say, they are just like everyone else.
This perception of easy access is goosed by the perception that many young people trip and fall into online fame by sheer accident. Take Brittany Tomlinson, known across the internet as "kombucha girl." In late 2019, the 22-year-old Texan uploaded a video to TikTok, intended only for close friends, of herself tasting kombucha for the first time, displaying a rapid series of confused facial expressions as she struggles to determine her feelings for the canned drink.
@brittany_broski Me trying Kombucha for the first time #foryoupage #foryou #fyp #AllBrandNew ♬ original sound—Brittany
The hilarious video quickly garnered over 60 million views. Six months later, Brittany appeared in a Super Bowl commercial for Sabra hummus, making the same befuddled face as she ate a chocolate-dipped strawberry before the eyes of 100 million football fans. Today, she is one of TikTok's most recognizable stars.
This perception of easy success, however, rests on the fallacy of survivorship bias, magnified a thousandfold by algorithms that push the happiest, prettiest, and most triumphant content creators to the tops of our feeds. "The reality is that the path is not that simple—it requires a ton of unseen work, and most people who try it don't make it," says Emily Hund, a media researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the influencer labor force. Influencers are incentivized to display their most lavish and breezy moments and hide their long stretches of exhaustion and disappointment. The result is a picturesque reflection of a lifestyle that obscures its bleakest aspects. "The influencer path seems like it provides autonomy and the security of relying only on yourself. So it is appealing," says Hund.
The Dark Side of Digital Fame
Legions of young people come to social media seeking fame for the sake of fame. This is not a new phenomenon. The reality television boom of the 2000s put scores of the unremarkable on the celebrity map. But since its rise in the late aughts, social media has offered aspirants a uniquely level playing field to wage a Darwinian contest for relevance—one that taps into some of our most primal human urges. "Prestige status is like a mild opium poppy that evolved to help us navigate tribes consisting of a hundred people or fewer," says Heather Berlin, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine. "But in the modern world, that poppy is concentrated and refined into the black tar heroin known as fame."
In 2024, still enveloped within the contrails of COVID-19, young people are increasingly likely to be living, learning, and working from the isolation of home, removed from opportunities for watercooler interactions with classmates and colleagues that, while often banal and occasionally harrowing, can also engender a sense of rapport, belonging, and stature. If the real world is no longer a place where young adults reliably find their sense of connection and purpose, they may be impelled to look for immoderate, synthetic sources of recognition elsewhere—such as TikTok. Berlin mentioned clinical patients who report seeking validation online when they fail to find it in the analog world: "They feel insecure when their basic human need for approval and acceptance is not satisfied."
Just as our drives for food, shelter, health, and security are the underlying factors compelling most of us to spend the lion's share of our days engaged in perfunctory, mind-numbing activity—a practice 23rd-century historians will remember pityingly as "employment"—a similar resolve for status may be part of what tempts young people toward careers as influencers. We encourage and reward nascent adults when they work hard to fulfill their basic primordial urges, be it wealth, safety, sex, or freedom. Especially in America, we even tend to cheer them on when they pursue these goals immoderately. So why fault them for using the tools at their disposal to chase another human need: recognition?
Maybe because that chase can take them into some dark places. Consider the case of internet celebrity Nick Perry: in 2014, the slender 22-year-old began a YouTube channel with the intent of vlogging about his vegan diet. Those early videos didn't get much traction, so he changed up his brand and started uploading clips of himself engaged in "mukbang," an online trend that has participants eating large, often sickening amounts of food in front of a camera. Nick soon got into the habit of ordering entire menus worth of take-out and guzzling it all in one sitting.
The entertainment value was undeniable. Perry's total view count quickly ballooned to over 2.5 billion—but predictably, that wasn't the only thing that grew. By 2020, the formerly scrawny 5'6″ young man weighed over 350 lbs. He became reliant on an electric wheelchair for mobility and proudly announced to his audience that he had also become impotent. Social media gave Perry the opportunity to become a millionaire by eating french fries and hot dogs—what Europeans likely imagine when they hear about "the American dream." But on these apps, salaries are paid out in attention. Only the most sensational and vulgar earn a living.
The Problem is Us
Who is to blame when an influencer falls into an attention-seeking black hole? Many would implicate the platforms for cultivating an environment in which a tragic-comedy like Nick Perry's could unfurl. But as conniving as Mark Zuckerberg or communist China's equivalent tech bros may appear, they and their multi-billion dollar social apps did not put the cravings for attention and acceptance inside us. We were born with them, and some, inevitably, have overindulged. Michael Gruen, co-founder of the influencer management company Talent X Entertainment, puts it sharply: "These conglomerates are at the mercy of the market. No one wants to admit the problem is us."
Similarly, creators faced with pressures to be sensational tend to place blame on the inborn incentives of their chosen careers rather than upon the platforms on which they happen to post. "I don't think there's some nefarious team behind the scenes on sites like TikTok or YouTube with an agenda. When you post something on social media, if it gets a good response, it's self-curating," says Roper, the YouTuber. "That's just what the audience wants, and you have to feed them because that's where your value comes from." In this blazing 21st-century world, online value is often what keeps the lights on. Austin-based writer and comedian Baron Ryan, who works primarily through TikTok and Instagram, describes this pressure in even starker terms: "You're a shark; if you stop moving, you die."
@americanbaron
Incentives of this nature can create friction between keeping one's audience happy and keeping one's self happy. Roper experienced that dynamic brusquely. In 2015, at age 28, doctors discovered a cancerous liposarcoma in his leg. After deliberating with his family, Roper decided to upload a video announcing the diagnosis to his fans, feeling he owed them transparency. The video got over a million views, quickly becoming the most popular upload on his personal channel.
Several months later, he made another video announcing the cancer was no longer life-threatening. That one got only 235,000 views. "I was like, man, I really hope I get cancer again. Because I was never more relevant than when I had cancer," he says facetiously.
"There's something about the acceptance that you feel when you see a big number next to your name," says comedian Karan Menon, whose own name has the number 300,000 next to it on TikTok. "You can't even comprehend what that number means."
@thekaranmenon
The 23-year-old believes his popularity on the app has granted him access to the mainstream comedy world and even helped catch the attention of a Hollywood manager. But just as bigger paychecks at corporate gigs often entail commensurately heavier burdens of responsibility, a sizable follower count on social media often comes with substantial pressures—to perform, to engage, and to satisfy.
For a creator such as Menon, whose TikTok videos largely feature satirical explanations of hot-button civic and international issues, that pressure arrives in the form of audience demands to engage with every contentious political matter of the news cycle—even those he knows nothing about.
"People say, 'Why are you being silent?' Because some of these things are so complex," he explains. "I don't always have something to say. But I'm expected to have something to say all the time. I'm at the mercy of the people I owe my platform to."
We all face trade-offs in our professional lives. More money or more free time? More responsibility or more peace of mind? For those considering whether to pursue careers on social media, the trade-off is whether or not to hand their lives over to millions of strangers in exchange for esteem, clout, and, presumably, influence. As Gen Z Biggie Smalls might've said: Mo' followers, mo' problems. Many young people would take that deal.
What's the Alternative?
Even with thousands of Americans making a full-time living through influencing and millions more hoping to take a crack at it, public institutions have largely failed to codify influencing as a legitimate career. Simple first steps abound, such as pushing the Bureau of Labor Statistics to recognize content creation as an independent category of employment. But what is offered instead are calls for outright prohibitions and tighter restraints on the platforms upon which creators are fighting to make a living.
"This is the country of dreamers," says Gray Fagan, a 27-year-old comedian from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who has nearly 300 million likes across his TikTok videos. "The app has taken my career and expanded it into a professional one. That is a very American ideal, and it seems a little strange to just rip that away."
@graysworld
Menon agrees. Politicians "think of these apps as just apps, but to the people who are chronically on them, it's a lifestyle that you're going to be disrupting," he says. "They're going to feel this immense loss."
"It's like this fear of—and I don't know a better word for this than this word—progress," Roper believes. "It reminds me of when I was a kid and I was really into computers. And my parents were like, 'you're on your computer too much. Stop being on your computer.' And I'm like, huh, had my parents not limited my computer time, would I have gotten good enough at coding that I'd actually be an engineer today?"
Plenty of older adults, including those holding elected office, clearly find it odious that so many young people are hoping to make a living off social media. But those adults offer only band-aids hastily applied to a deep generational wound. A more ideologically challenging and politically arduous task would be to construct a society that offers better alternatives to young people than commodifying their lives via bits of digital content.
According to Emily Hund, the University of Pennsylvania media researcher, the Great Recession of 2008 first catalyzed the influencer movement when millions of freshly unemployed Americans began looking for ways to support themselves that were separated from the traditional corporate structures that had just imploded on them. "It was both a material financial break, and an ideological break for a lot of people as well," Hund told Vox. "They started to think, 'Wow, this system is not going to save me, and I have to do something to try and survive."
Soon, new apps provided young hustlers an opportunity to refashion their personal identities into consumable products—a kind of capital that could never be stolen or undermined. This value system has grown ever more lucrative and enviable as the world around it has grown more precarious. Increasingly, a life of influencing seems to be the most winning arrangement of the cards dealt to young Americans. "I do worry that being an influencer seems like the best choice. It is a difficult job, entails a huge amount of personal vulnerability and risk," says Hund. "I think this being the best choice does say something about our society."
The Quest for Connection
It's no coincidence that TikTok proliferated during the pandemic. It was a time of unprecedented restriction when the possibilities of how to spend our days, stimulate ourselves, and find meaning were whittled down to what could be found either between the walls of our homes or the edges of our phones. During this moment of curtailment, the novelty of TikTok provided escape and reprieve. Recording a silly dance video was a way to connect with quarantined friends, and the potential of going viral was enough to motivate a languishing, depressed teenager out of bed.
Things are, thankfully, getting back to normal. And what four years ago was an offering of unparalleled excitement is now a sad imitation of life's potential. Conventional wisdom says that as the world opened back up, young people should have given up the doom-scrolling, selfie-posting, and hip-gyrating that became the central stimulant of their lives during COVID-19, in favor of getting back outside.
Yet these apps, with their seductive opportunities and bottomless pitfalls, have reframed the way an entire generation sees the world and their place in it. "Of course young people want to be social media influencers—they're not dumb," says Ryan, the TikTokker. "House prices aren't coming down anytime soon, and people are getting less and less recognition for their work, wherever they work. So yes, if I was a middle-schooler, I'd want to be an independent artist as well." Why would anyone go back to ordinary life when social media offers higher highs, fatter checks, friendlier friends, and perhaps a truer calling than you could find anywhere in the "real" world?
Comparisons of social media to addictive drugs are imperfect, but the metaphor is multidimensional. Legislation certainly won't loosen young America's collective grip on social media, just as criminalizing a drug doesn't slacken an addict's clutch of the hypodermic needle. "Once people have the need and the craving for it, it doesn't just disappear. The genie's out of the bottle," says Berlin, the neuroscientist.
However, the chance of intermittent drug use leading to consuming addiction decreases when one is in the presence of community and productive activities—meaningful sources of natural stimulus. Lab rats left in isolation will quickly overdose themselves on cocaine water. Rats surrounded by friends and toys tend to ignore the cocaine entirely. Similarly, young people might be falling into the arms of social media not solely because of China and its addictive algorithm but also because their only alternative is to step into a lonely and impoverished future void of purpose. Social media, despite its tendency to hook and consume, offers a light of lasting satisfaction at the end of its tunnel.
While acknowledging it's far from a universal answer, Ciment believes her Orthodox Judaism, and its traditional focus on community, has kept her from pursuing that glow. "If I didn't have religion, I would probably be like, yeah, TikTok is my life, because this is the only thing that has meaning for me," she says. "I would probably be off the deep end. I would attach meaning to anything. People need meaning."
Until we find more stable and fulfilling ways for young people to spend their time, make money, generate dopamine, and self-actualize that won't leave them burnt out and depressed, social media will remain for many of them the best of their imperfect options. And that option perhaps becomes more noble when influencers, alongside their parents and platforms, work to make their jobs less about the highs of attention and more about the rewards of achieving something meaningful.
"Anytime someone messages me saying 'You helped me realize I was in an abusive cycle with my phone, you made me realize that there's more to life than playing Flappy Bird,' those messages provide me with a lot of meaning," says Ciment. "In that way, I would definitely say I'm an influencer."
