Influencers can make ideas visible, but they can also trap them inside social bubbles. Real change happens when an idea leaves the bubble and becomes part of everyday life.
Influencers have become one of the newest forms of propaganda and marketing in the 21st century. Want to spread an idea, sell a product, or launch a social movement? The common advice is simple: find someone with a big audience and get them to promote it.
Of course, using famous people to shape public opinion isn’t new. Celebrities have been used in advertising for decades, long before social media turned everyone’s personality into a potential platform. Part of what makes this strategy effective is the “halo effect,” a cognitive bias where our positive impression of someone in one area spills over into unrelated areas. Taylor Swift recommends a new drink? If you like her music, you’re suddenly more likely to trust her taste in beverages too.
Many social media users don’t just follow influencers for entertainment; they begin to absorb their preferences, routines, opinions, and values. Over time, this can turn into a new kind of social identity. We don’t just buy the product or try the habit — we start modeling ourselves after the personality and tribe attached to it.
But this is also where influencer-driven change begins to run into trouble. When a behavior becomes too closely attached to a personality or tribe, people outside that circle may reject it before they ever consider whether it has value.
A new study called “The Influence Paradox” helps explain this problem. Popular people with a lot of connections aren’t always better at spreading ideas to the broader culture. When an idea comes from one personality or one tight-knit group, outsiders may dismiss it as a “them” thing. But when the same idea starts showing up across multiple circles of trust — friends, coworkers, family members, neighbors, and ordinary people — it begins to feel more normal. Real change doesn’t just happen because a behavior becomes visible. It happens when a behavior starts to feel socially available and reinforced from different directions.
In the study, the researchers looked at how health behaviors spread through real social networks in villages in Honduras. The basic idea was simple: if you want a new behavior to spread, should you start with the most connected people in the village? The surprising answer was, not always. For easy behaviors that don’t require much convincing, like getting residents to take a multivitamin, one popular person may be enough to get the word out. But for behaviors that require more trust or reassurance, like adding chlorine to drinking water, people often need to see the behavior accepted in more than one place before they adopt it. It isn’t enough for the idea to come from one corner of the village. It becomes more believable when it is reinforced from multiple corners.
Influencers can introduce a new idea, but culture decides whether it becomes a norm. Real change doesn’t happen just because one visible personality tells people what to do. It happens when a behavior becomes reinforced across multiple social circles that intersect with our daily lives.
Without an ecosystem of reinforcement, influencer-driven change can get wrapped up in narrow social identities. We begin to associate certain habits with certain groups: “That’s a tech-bro thing,” “That’s a left-wing activist thing,” or “That’s a TikTok trend.” Once an idea becomes too closely attached to a specific tribe, people stop judging it on its own terms. They judge the identity that comes with it. We may reject the behavior not because it lacks value, but because we don’t want to be mistaken for the kind of person who does it.
Instead of changing the world, influencers create silos for themselves, where they are held in high regard by a select group of people, but have little to no influence outside of their bubbles.
Different influencer silos may even become antagonistic toward each other. Instead of working together toward a shared goal, people become more invested in defending their favorite internet personality and attacking rival influencers. Activism gets reduced to online gossip and drama.
Celebrities and influencers can still play a role in facilitating social change, but only as one node in a larger and more powerful network. A lot of celebrity activism piggybacks on efforts that already have support from broader political, corporate, and social institutions. They can become amplifiers of the status quo just as easily as they can become agents of change. Ultimately, celebrity influence depends on the network it plugs into.
Real, long-lasting social change is not just about visibility and attention. It is about widespread normalization. A new behavior has to become woven into multiple aspects of everyday life: talked about among friends, practiced by families, repeated in workplaces, supported by institutions, and reinforced by the surrounding culture. An influencer may help introduce the idea, but the idea only becomes powerful when it no longer depends on the influencer. It has to leave the silo and become part of the social world.
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Steven Handel
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