Influencer Publics and the Divergent Construction of Social Media Realities

Social media influencers are increasingly supplanting "traditional" news media as trusted sources of information about highly-politicized topics. My dissertation proposes a new unit of analysis to understand these influencers: the influencer public. The influencer public is a space of discourse where hypervisible social media influencers not only frame but create the topics of relevant political discussion through their interactions with each other and their audiences. These influencers work every day with and against their audiences to cultivate attention, which they can then transform into monetary rewards, political power, or simply libidinal enjoyment. The work I share here documents ways which we may represent these influencer publics to ourselves using mixed-methods network analyses, and documents how these influencer publics can create highly divergent informational "realities" for their audiences. This work on influencers stems from CSCW’s focus on the sociotechnical structure of online influence operations, and hopes to extend this literature from an analysis of individual campaigns to an analysis of ongoing environments and meaning-making processes.