A game of deception and extraction: How influencers embody the logic of social media - ABC Religion & Ethics

Australia Broadcast Center

3 hours ago

If you want to know how something ends, consider how it begins. Social media, we were told, was about connection, a new frontier for community, dialogue and shared experience. But its origin story tells a different truth. These lofty ideals, if they ever existed, were championed by an anti-social Harvard drop-out who launched a site to rate women's appearances side-by-side. From its inception, this technology was less about connection and more about control, comparison and commodification.
We were told that social media would connect us all. It was implied, therefore, that we were deficient in connection — that we needed a new media, a 'social' media, to bring us together. This media would strengthen communities, forge new ties among disparate peoples; they could find and bond with each other in our messy, lonely, world.
If you want someone to buy something or use something, first tell them they are lacking. Social media told us what we lacked was each other . What we were given was a euphemism, an appeal to our longing for each other: used to build systems that monetise our attention, our trust and our behaviour.
If there was ever any semblance of real connection on social media — if, for instance, in 2010, connection meant sharing images of your dinner or updating your status as Roman does in Easy A to 'is having an OK day and bought a coke zero at the gas station, raise the roof' — it no longer exists. In 2025, 'social' media is a marketing machine: if you're online, you're either marketing, being marketed to, or often, both . At the centre of this online circus is the influencer.
Enter … the influencer
These characters, the dramatis personae in this digital narrative, present themselves as relatable, authentic, just-like-you-but-a-bit-better, friends. But peel back the thick, thick layers of performance and what remains is simple: they are salespeople. Their job is to blur the line between personal expression and commercial transaction — to make persuasion look like friendship.
Influencers are the foot soldiers of the algorithms that dictate the plot of these online theatrics. They execute the narrative demands of the platforms that created them — platforms built not for connection and truth, but for squeezing every morsel of attention out of the audience as possible. Out of you .
Influencers form so-called 'parasocial' bonds with their followers. Parasocial bonds are one-sided relationships designed to feel 'authentic', intimate and personal, but which are in reality strategies of marketing co-dependency to convert intrinsic human need into profit. In this light, 'para' might as well stand for para- sitic , given the way this dynamic drains the audience of its most precious resource: time.
These commercial actors, these merchants, surreptitiously deceive their followers by disguising their intent as care and guidance. Influencers convince their followers that they simply aim to help and serve — they just want to help you get your house in order. Whether it's supplements, diet tips, morning routines, Stoicism, lads' holidays to Afghanistan, self-help advice, every post is a sales pitch. The influencer's power lies in their ability to disguise commercial intent as information provision, to blur the line between personal expression and advertising. The result is a highly effective form of trickery: a follower believes they're receiving genuine guidance, when they are in fact being sold something — often underpinned by ulterior motives or undisclosed sponsorships.
History isn't short on charlatans, quacks or snake oil salesmen. But today's influencer is more powerful and more pervasive. They speak over experts. They shape public opinion. And in many cases — vaccine hesitancy being just one example — they're winning.
It's only 'content', after all …
Influencers, many of whom shy away from the term (perhaps because of an awareness of its negative connotations), sometimes prefer to be referred to as 'content creators'. Creators of 'content'. It all seems rather innocuous. It's just content, after all. Content never hurt anyone, did it? Content is merely a benign, ethereal, substance, isn't it? In fact, what exactly is this content, anyway? What is this content that we are being force fed?
Well, advertising, mostly. Advertising a lifestyle, a product, a belief system or an identity, a pursuit or hobby, a charity or a cause. A point of view or an ideology.
We are advertised fake 'transformations', unhealthy diets, quack science on everything from the benefits of saunas and the importance of protein (has anyone else wondered why the cottage cheese is sold out at the moment?) to the unfounded dangers of vaccinating children — as if one of the greatest achievements in modern science is something to be suspicious of.
Influencers are anything but friends. Nor are they neutral acquaintances. They're specialists in online manipulation and the attending offline effects. In fact, many influencers are so talented that they convince their followers that they are experts — and not only experts, but experts willing to convey their expertise pro bono and altruistically. And thanks to their more relatable appeal, influencers can compete, and win, against actual experts — thus spreading inaccurate information or worse.
Influencer Brian 'Liver King' Johnson attends the UFC 276 event at T-Mobile Arena on 2 July 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Jeff Bottari / Zuffa LLC / Getty Images)
The real-world ramifications of this can be disastrous — ranging from genocide to a rise in communicable diseases, to false or misleading 'bro science' about whichever 'wellness' fad is trending.
And when it all goes wrong, an influencer unlike an expert, can throw up their hands and claim they're just a regular person, just giving their opinion — 'do your own research'. There's no real accountability, no check and balance on their power. There's no skin in the game. No concrete consequences for an influencer's negative actions. The result is a system where influence is high, but responsibility is low.
These realities facilitate influencers having a fundamentally insincere relationship with their followers. Take Brian Johnson, otherwise known as 'Liver King', who convinced many of his followers his physique was built on an ancestral lifestyle, and not thousands of dollars' worth of performance enhancing drugs and supplements. He sold an ideal he didn't live by and profited from the deceit. He is but one extreme example in a broad-spectrum dishonesty part of a continuum where influencers blur the line between image and reality, often at the expense of those who trust them.
Smoke and mirrors
This seems to be what 'influencing' is: a game of deception and extraction. Perhaps (para) social media was always destined to become this. A host network for quackery and fakery. A mirror held up to us by a small, always on, aluminosilicate glass device — not to connect us, but to sell us back to ourselves.
It began with comparison, with ranking humans against one another, turning people into objects to be judged on screen, and that cold logic never went away. Today, the same machinery, the unseen architecture dictating so much of these nefarious activities, drives influencers to package their lives as 'content' and compels audiences to 'consume' it in the hopes of filling a chasm that social media itself created.
Cui bono ?
Not the audience, drained of time, attention and trust. Not the public, misled by pseudo-experts with no accountability. The beneficiaries are those who profit from the illusion — platforms that sell our data, advertisers that sell us solutions to problems we didn't have, and influencers who sell themselves as friends.
The only remedy is for users to be more discerning. To reject unsolicited advice masquerading as care. And to ask, seriously and soberly: Do these people really have your best interests at heart?
Samuel Cornell is a PhD candidate in public health at the University of New South Wales. Prior to his academic studies and career, he briefly served in the Royal Navy.