The Influencers Aren't Coming to Save Us

Anyone peddling an "Amazon Storefront" should automatically be disqualified as being someone you trust.

I am a self-appointed Reddit anthropologist deeply embedded in one of the darker corners of the internet, r/NYCInfluencerSnark. A community of full-time haters painstakingly critiquing each and every move made by some of the biggest players in the TikTok influencing world, most of whom call New York (well, at least below 14th street) home. The forum is unapologetically and abjectly cruel in a truly awe-inspiring way.

Growing up, good internet citizenship was a tremendous part of my childhood education. From an early age, I was taught that the world wide web was a bottomless pit teeming with pedophiles who wanted my home address, “African Kings” who desperately needed my mom’s credit card information, and worst of all, cyberbullies.¹

It was as though the adults in my life had (accurately) determined that the internet was a wild, uncontrollable thing and any attempts to shelter my peers and me from it would be futile. The best they could do was arm us with as many tools possible to protect ourselves- a kind of duck-and-cover approach to the looming nuclear threat that was the social media boom. So now, as I am well past my elementary and middle school years, the existence of a place online where bullying is not only sanctioned, but encouraged, egged on, and upvoted is a kind of strange and sickly voyeuristic thing I cannot help but observe.

Points of discussion on the r/NYCInfluencerSnark docket are influencers who come across to redditors as “ungrateful” for their sudden and seemingly effortless success, fashion faux pas, and the hot button issue of the moment is who is or isn’t receiving Ozempic injections and who is lying about it.

Another key tenet of the sub is the total bastardization and misappropriation of both social justice and therapeutic language. This isn’t specific or unique to influencer snark pages- the internet is riddled with the tendency to throw words like “trauma”, “gaslighting”, and “harm” around in instances where they do not necessarily belong, and I’ve noticed that trend reflected on this page. There seems to be a shared sentiment that the purpose of the meanness of the page is a kind of “punching up” and therefore, acceptable. Members of the page often demand the influencers be held “accountable”- a term that would perhaps be better put to use towards our politicians, our police, and other institutional stakeholders to speak truth to power- what troubles me is that I think many members of the page truly believe they are doing just that.

The bodies and eating habits of TikTokers are also one of the most discussed topics on the subreddit. The official rules of the page actually include a “no body-shaming/body snark” clause, but the actual qualifiers for what is or is not body-shaming are murky. The kind of body-shaming that takes place on the subreddit takes on a different form than what we might expect- the shape and size of influencers’ bodies are not merely commented on, they’re pathologized. This is very clearly an act of projection from the audience, many of whom I have to suspect are suffering from body dysmorphia themselves, who accuse influencers of “body-checking²” or promoting overly restrictive dietary habits and disordered eating in their “What I Eat in a Day” videos. This is where my intrigue in the relationship between influencer and audience was piqued- apparently, it is not the responsibility of the viewer to manage their own triggers and preserve a healthy body image, that responsibility lies upon the Influencer.³

This begs my question: what is it about a beautiful woman on the internet forking in heaps of money as she drones dead-eyed into her phone camera about matching workout sets that could possibly lead anyone to the expectation that she should be a good person? Why has she been elected to serve as our guide of personal ethics, healthy self-worth, and good relationships with our inner and outer selves? Why was the expectation created that the famous-for-being-famous crowd should be anything more than that?

To be fair, the Influencer does share more than just fashion and makeup advice with her audience- she shares her very soul. She laughs, she cries, she tells embarrassing stories about hookups gone wrong, loved ones she’s lost, triumphs and failures. She wants “to be completely transparent with you guys” and show that people like her “have bad days too”.

Oh, and she sells a lot of stuff. Like, a lot of stuff. In the middle of a tearful story, she might reach for a box of Kleenex without failing to mention the paper tissues she’s about to blow her gorgeous snot into can be found on her Amazon storefront- the ubiquitous link aggregation service where through the TikToker’s profile, she can drive even more traffic to the formidable e-commerce platform that already ships out around 1.6 million packages each day that God sends, and shave a little commission off the top in the process.

These two goals- connecting authentically with an audience and convincing them that they are incomplete beings without a twelve-step skincare routine- exist in direct opposition to each other. I believe that is why the vitriol hurled at these women is so constant and so vicious. People do not like to feel used, and more so, they don’t like to feel betrayed. The audience members have developed deep parasocial relationships with the Influencer and ergo feel a kind of ownership of her language and behavior. They would like her to act in accordance with the version of her they understand to be genuine and true, and become frustrated children when something she says or does upsets them. This could be anything from an actual social transgression that most people would acknowledge as such, or this could just be a thin woman posing in a way they, informed by their own trauma and poor self-image, interpret as her showing off how thin she is.

They are latently aware of the money-making element, but they can’t seem to really get it. Like any other business in the beauty and fashion world, the Influencer’s survival and her very reason to exist are critically dependent upon making women feel less than, and providing them with solutions that can only be achieved monetarily.

Jia Tolentino⁴ spoke to this just before TikTok came along and the influencer boom soared to impossible heights in “Always Be Optimizing”, the third essay in her 2019 collection Trick Mirror, writing,

“The psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in an ecosystem that pretends to resist her. . . It is now easy enough to engage women’s skepticism toward ads and magazine covers, images produced by professionals. It is harder for us to suspect images produced by our peers,”.

The Influencer is the obvious answer- she is a professional successfully masquerading as a peer. To look to the Influencer as a beacon of morality demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of who she is and why she does what she does. It’s the same kind of insanity present in expecting M&Ms to provide us with coherent commentary on gender and sexuality.

That said, the backlash to the capitalism of it all is certainly there. In recent weeks, following an incident dubbed “Mascara Gate” where very popular makeup artist and influencer Mikayla Nogueira was accused of misrepresenting L'Oréal's Telescopic Lift mascara, a product she had been paid to promote, by wearing the mascara over false lashes and claiming they were her natural ones.⁵ This in turn created a trend called “De-Influencing” where Tiktok creators shared popular makeup products they felt had been over-hyped on the app. I think this began in good faith by certain creators as a way to urge audiences to slow down the hyper-consumption that TikTok has provoked. Need I remind you, however, that these influencers are businesswomen, and many quickly took the opportunity to hop on the De-Influencing train as a way of cutting through the noise and re-establishing trust in a "buy THIS, not that" kind of way. It served as an quick nod to the fiscal goals of influencing and that you can't trust anyone, but you can trust her.

It would be dishonest for me not to mention that I love watching influencers. Some of the people I follow break the traditional mold and actually offer a skill or special insight that they freely share (@oldloserinbrooklyn and @talialichtstein are two women who I think bring truly great things to the table with their words and are not pushing commerce via their pages). Others I watch merely because they’re entertaining, and I really feel that that’s all they need to be. It does wonders for my mental health to be able to enjoy the bizarre, aspirational quality of the Influencer’s world without assigning her any moral high ground. She cannot disappoint me, because her life and choices have nothing to do with mine.

The fact that so many people, namely the members of the subreddit, cannot make that key separation is a reflection of troubling larger social trends magnified by the internet- the never-ending loop of self-victimization and a sincere belief that if you experience a negative emotion or adverse reaction to another person’s thoughts, opinions, or mere existence, that person is fundamentally bad and had better quickly put out an apology that will, of course, be swiftly rejected, but you’ll demand they make it anyway. I, like many people, bristle at the term “cancel culture” and it feels nauseatingly trite to even bring it up, but we’re all lying to ourselves if we continue to act like we’re not a bit worried by the our collective tendency to quickly throw people under the bus so that we may continue to feel righteous and good ourselves, particularly if there is so much about that person we’re sabotaging that we envy.

I encourage members of r/NYCInfluencerSnark and consumers of TikTok content in general to consider the fact that when an influencer posts a photo of her thighs looking particularly taut, she is probably not trying to piss you, individually, off. If anything she is beholden to the same standards and expectations as you are that reward those thighs in the first place. Put simply: don’t hate the player, hate the game, baby.

And more importantly, understand the fundamentals of this “relationship” that exists between you and this personified brand. It is not my intention to entirely diminish the personhood of the influencers, but in a way, she does not really exist. She exists to her friends and her family and the people who know her, but not to you. She is a brand- a brand with goals, metrics, and ROI all of which you are critically a part of, but you do not have a relationship with her. She wants something from you and she wants it quickly- your finances are finite and your attention more so. You do not know her and she therefore cannot hurt you. If that is a feeling that’s challenging to grapple with, it’s probably time to log off.

1. In terms of high-level offenses of evil, cyberbullying was right up there with the second-most talked-about thing in 2006, which, being an anxious child was very high up on my list of personal priorities: ending radical Islamic terrorism.

2. In medical/therapeutic terms, bodychecking is a habit common among those suffering from body dysmorphia, compulsively looking at your body from different angles to try and get information about what you look like to other people. On Reddit, however, a woman taking a photo of herself in a mirror can be dubbed “bodychecking” even if she has demonstrated no other signs of body dysmorphia or disordered eating.

3. To be clear, I want to acknowledge the very real role social media internet has had in fueling disordered eating and I do think those with large platforms consisting of young and impressionable audiences should exercise caution around these topics. That said, the criteria the r/NYCInfluencerSnark users hold to determine what is “healthy” or “unhealthy” is unusually harsh, uninformed, and constantly changing.

4. You didn’t seriously think I would get through this essay without citing a Jia Tolentino essay, did you? That’s on you.

5. I’m sorry, but does anything articulate my point more clearly than the name “Mascara Gate”? Nixon was “held accountable” and so should this woman who talks about makeup on Tiktok, damn it!