Special Series: "The Politicization of Influencers: Influencer Propaganda in Asia" | Jian Xu and Florian Schneider, Introduction: The Politicization of Influencers: Influencer Propaganda in Asia
Introduction
Since the 2020s, the politicization of influencers has become a prominent global trend. Social media influencers have increasingly engaged with electoral politics, social advocacy, soft power initiatives, and public debates, reshaping contemporary political communication as emerging political actors, with or without connections to traditional political players, such as governments and politicians. This development exemplifies what Arnesson and Reinikainen (2024: 7) conceptualize as “influencer politics,” referring to “how the core ideas of influencer culture — authenticity, intimacy, commercialism, and self-branding — shape the ways in which politics are expressed and understood in this context, as well as opening up space for new ways of connecting with the public.”
Against this broader global trend, particularly amid intensified scrutiny since 2021 of China’s and Russia’s alleged use of influencers to target liberal democracies, Jian Xu and Florian Schneider (2025) introduced the concept of “influencer propaganda” as a specific configuration of influencer politics. We define influencer propaganda as ‘various persuasive, strategic communicative actions by social media influencers that promote political and ideological agendas through popular content and emotional appeals, with the intent to affect behavior and belief among their followers’. Importantly, we challenge the conventional dichotomy between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ propaganda practices, arguing that influencer propaganda is not the exclusive domain of authoritarian states but a global phenomenon with shared characteristics across political systems. Drawing on China as a case study, we demonstrate the complexity and diversity of influencer propaganda, encompassing not only top-down, state-orchestrated propaganda campaigns and “propagandists-turned-influencers,” but also profit-driven influencers who convey political information and ideologies in serious or light-hearted ways, frequently or sporadically. We also highlight the collaborations and complicities among the Party, digital platforms, and influencers in the production and circulation of propagandistic content.
As a sequel to our earlier article, this special series advocates a broader and more mundane application of the concept of “influencer propaganda” in the study of influencer politics across different political systems. Propaganda is inherently political. In the digital era, it is no longer confined to top-down or overt ideological persuasion. Instead, it has become increasingly participatory, personalized, affective, and embedded in everyday life. This shift requires scholars to attend critically to the “lifestyle politics” (Bennett, 1998) of influencers. In other words, studying influencer propaganda should not be limited to analyzing propaganda by influencers in the classic sense of propaganda studies, but should also encompass the propagandistic effects produced through everyday influencer practices and performances—such as digital vigilantism, knowledge production, patriotism, and pop videos—which are examined in four commentaries in this series focusing on the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and India. This approach moves beyond a state-centric understanding of propaganda by capturing subtle forms of political persuasion embedded in routine and seemingly apolitical influencer activities. It also extends our earlier argument for treating propaganda as a relatively neutral analytical category that can be applied across both liberal-democratic and authoritarian societies. Moreover, this perspective calls for an interdisciplinary engagement that brings propaganda studies into dialogue with platform studies, influencer studies, and research on everyday cultural politics.
The commentaries included in this special series aim to demonstrate this expanded understanding of “influencer propaganda” by examining diverse Asian contexts beyond our earlier China-focused analysis.
Commentaries in the Special Series
We start our explorations in the Philippines, where public outrage over the privileges of the elites has led to populist online activism against “nepo babies,” so the children of the wealthy and influential. As Cabbuag shows, this outrage informs a form of digital vigilantism that can be seen as part of influencer propaganda. To address public issues like corruption, in this case in the context of a flood control scandal, two strategies stand out that content creators use to mobilize public sentiment and demand accountability: so-called “dogshows,” which are humorous memetic jabs at the elites, and ‘call-out videos’, which identify targets of public discontent. By relating the complex issue of digital vigilantism with influencer activism, Cabbuag expands the concept of influencer propaganda by suggesting it can be used “for the right thing”—to promote social justice and good governance. The discussion highlights how influencers use moral-affective content and the attention economy to transition from being perceived as mere “fake news peddlers” to active participants in digital activism.
The second contribution examines South Korea, where “knowledge influencers” leverage their preexisting symbolic capital and pedagogical authority to disseminate political propaganda. By focusing on a particular “star lecturer” who became an icon for his outspoken, often angry rants, Park is able to show how this particular knowledge influencer was able to use his fame to launch a career in politics. The core argument is that figures such as these convert the trust and authenticity built in educational settings into political legitimacy, in this case for far-right narratives during a time of crisis. As Park demonstrates, the case illustrates how influencer propaganda functions through the mediatization of politics, where visibility and emotional resonance become more important than institutional verification. By addressing precarious demographics like the “2030 generation” (so: people in their 20s and 30s), these influencers become “primary definers” of political reality, showing how educational influence can be weaponized in politics.
The third paper focuses on Vietnam. There, Le contends, influencer propaganda operates through “soft alignment” and “performative patriotism,” where influencers voluntarily mirror state-aligned nationalist norms. Le argues that this alignment is driven by algorithmic incentives, audience feedback, and the desire for “symbolic capital” rather than direct state coercion. This expands the understanding of influencer propaganda by placing it in a “grey zone” between personal agency and structural power, where patriotism is aestheticized as a lifestyle choice. By performing “everydayness” and “authenticity,” influencers act as moral entrepreneurs who make ideological persuasion effective precisely because it is perceived as ordinary and apolitical rather than prescriptive.
In the last paper, Mazumdar interrogates the phenomenon of Hindutva pop influencers who promote the ideological message of a Hindu-first nation through short videos on YouTube. Mazumdar argues that while these right-wing pop video artists adopt the ideological agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), they depart from strict cadre-based political disciplining and remain rooted in a bottom-up digital entrepreneurial culture and the everyday politics of fun.
Conclusion
Together, the commentaries break important new ground in our understanding of the influencer propaganda phenomenon. They do this by showing how such activities play out in different socio-political contexts, in this case across Asian societies, but they also expand our understanding by drawing attention to important dynamics within the political activities of influencers. Three observations are particularly worth highlighting here.
The first is the complicated interaction between, on the one hand, the agency of influencers and their followers, and on the other hand the structural incentives and constraints of specific platform environments. As the cases show, influencer propagandists are enmeshed in the opaque workings of their algorithmic media environments, and they are subject to the pressures of the attention economy, but at the same time they leverage the features of that environment to succeed, often in entrepreneurial ways.
The second point is related: influencers are often highly strategic in how they use their status and influence in order to achieve their ends. This is certainly in evidence wherever well-known online personas mobilize their “aura” to be effective, but it is driven home particularly clearly where influencers shift gear from one domain, e.g. education, from which they borrow their social capital as a resource for success, and move into a new domain, in this case: politics. This is an important reminder that influencer propaganda is not solely a digital phenomenon, as much as algorithms and platforms form the backbone of how influencers operate today. Just as importantly is the brick-and-mortar reality in which many influencers engage their core demographics, test their personas and rhetorical strategies, and shore up support, for instance in lecture theaters.
Finally, the contributions remind us that influencer propaganda can be deployed in the service of a broad range of issues. Sometimes these issues align neatly with “left” or “right”-wing politics, in other cases they are related to particular controversies or scandals. How we assess these activities hinges very much on context and political outlook. Some may lean heavily into toxic directions; others, regardless of their ideological backdrop, may be using the tools of the influencer to try and do “the right thing.”
An open question, and one worthy of further exploration, is whether the phenomenon of influencer propaganda is at its core a set of value-neutral activities that can be deployed for all manner of ends, or whether it is inherently connected to aspects of our hypermodern media environment that will always leave a questionable aftertaste: the narcissism of self-media, the commercialism of the platform economies, the asymmetric power dynamics between celebrity and fans, the deceptive para-social relations and the affect they generate. Here, critical scholarship has its work cut out for itself, and few places are as suitable for exploring those complexities as the dynamic media ecologies of Asia.
References:
Arnesson J, Reinikainen H (2024). Influencer politics: An introduction. In: Arnesson J, Reinikainen H (eds) Influencer Politics: Intersection of Personal, Political, and Promotional. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 1–13.
Bennett, W. L. (1998). The UnCivic culture: Communication, identity, and the rise of lifestyle politics. PS: Political Science & Politics, 31(4), 741–761. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096500053270
Xu, J., & Schneider, F. (2025). Influencers as emerging actors in global digital propaganda. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494251351221
Jian Xu is Associate Professor in Communication, Deakin University, Australia. He researches Chinese digital media cultures and politics, celebrity and influencer studies. He is Editor-in-Chief of Communication Research and Practice and series editor of Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies with Bloomsbury. He is the lead editor of The Sage Handbook of Chinese Digital Media and Communication (Sage, 2026).
Florian Schneider is a Chair Professor of Modern China at Leiden University and academic director of the Leiden Asia Centre. His research interests include questions of governance and public administration, political communication, digital media politics in the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Jian Xu and Florian Schneider, “Introduction: The Politicization of Influencers: Influencer Propaganda in Asia,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, March 22, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/RQXV3435.