There are a number of potential avenues for shielding influencers that will, in flip, assist all of us confronting fixed commercialism and misinformation in our feeds. Prioritizing truthful pay and transparency within the business would assist incentivize influencers to share higher high quality merchandise and data. But to even start, authorities businesses, lawmakers, and firm management should perceive that shrugging off the influencer business as a “Wild West”—a time period used repeatedly—serves solely to obscure its issues and permit them to perpetuate. The business’s “lawlessness,” at this level, is a selection—one that may be modified. 

Legislative consideration have to be paid to main platform firms’ lack of transparency and accountability to their customers, in addition to to the imbalance of energy between these firms and those that try to compete with them. The Federal Trade Commission can shore up its guidelines and oversight with extra constant penalties for influencers and types who obfuscate their relationships, so that buyers can clearly establish paid-for content material. 

This possible can’t be so simple as an #advert hashtag, although “clear and conspicuous” disclosure on sponsored content material stays crucial. Influencers promote themselves as consultants, as genuine personalities with an opinion. Increasingly, influencers have been figuring out themselves as “community leaders,” indicating extra constant engagement with a specific perspective and the individuals who subscribe to it. Influencers ought to disclose the character of their work of their bio; doing so would assist customers perceive that simply because one publish just isn’t sponsored doesn’t imply the influencer is “just a regular person.” They are a part of a brand new business of cultural employees shaping our world, as these in older cultural industries like promoting or trend have executed for generations. And like these working in different industries, influencers expertise constraints that form their work. 

Another path for change is labor organizing amongst influencers, however efforts have been restricted. SAG-AFTRA’s influencer contract and the event of the American Influencer Council are two optimistic developments. However, the union contract covers solely video and voiceover work and thus incentivizes influencers to pivot there, even when images or textual content are their specialty. More choices are wanted. Union and commerce teams may help mature the business into one which broadly acknowledges and respects shared skilled requirements and their position in society, as different cultural industries like journalism and promoting do, somewhat than merely “what resonates.” 

A strong commerce group may additionally assist resolve the disconnect between manufacturers’ wishes for inventive expression and environment friendly advertising. Much because the Council of Fashion Designers of America works to assist rising designers, a powerful skilled influencer group can provide assist for early-career creatives and set finest practices for advertising corporations and types, together with assets for continued inner assessments and coverage adjustments to establish factors of inequity and deal with them. Embracing influencers as valued skilled collaborators, contracted below equitable phrases, wouldn’t solely enhance influencers’ work lives however ought to allow and encourage manufacturers to take greater inventive dangers in product improvement and advertising whereas lowering the attraction of doubtful transactional relationships. The influencer business should work extra cohesively internally to discover a method to maintain on to its advantages—entrepreneurialism, connection, network-building, and inventive expression—and scale back its harms.

While (and till) the establishments tasked with fixing these points do one thing, we should cope with a social media panorama that encourages us all to behave extra like influencers daily—to spend extra time scrolling, to publish extra often and “authentically,” to buy or make our personal lives look shoppable. Studying tv within the early 2000s, media scholar Mark Andrejevic famously outlined “the work of being watched”—or the best way media that permit us to place ourselves on the market nonetheless extract worth from us. Even nonprofessional social media customers ought to come to acknowledge the “work” they do to generate revenue for large tech—and vote, advocate for themselves, and use social media with that in thoughts.

Excerpted from The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media © 2023 by Emily Hund. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.