Donald Trump’s appearances on the podcasts of Joe Rogan and Theo Von, among others, were seen by many as a key part of securing his second term in office.
But while Trump was speculating about alien life on Mars with Rogan, he had a team of acolytes appearing on dozens, if not hundreds, of much smaller niche podcasts hosted by right-wing content creators who typically don’t talk about politics.
This is how, just six days before the election, Kash Patel, the man now struggling to run the FBI, ended up appearing on the Deplorable Discussions livestream, a fringe, QAnon-infused show hosted on a platform called Pilled.
“The Deep State exists,” Patel told the audience. “It’s a Democratic-Republican uniparty swamp monster machine.”
At the time, there was no hard evidence behind an idea the Trump campaign appeared to understand instinctively: Social media creators, especially those who do not typically speak about politics, have an extraordinary ability to sway their audiences.
Now we have that evidence.
A new report, shared exclusively with WIRED and published today by researchers from Columbia and Harvard, is a first-of-its-kind study designed to measure the impact influencers and online creators can have on their audiences.
The study was conducted with 4,716 Americans aged between 18 and 45, most of whom were randomly assigned a list of progressive content creators to follow. Over the course of five months, from August to December 2024, these creators produced nonpartisan content designed to educate followers rather than explicitly advocate for a specific political viewpoint.
The results showed that exposure to these progressive-minded creators not only increased general political knowledge, but also shifted followers’ policy and partisan views to the left.
In contrast, a placebo group that was not assigned any creators to follow but was allowed to scroll social media as normal “showed significant rightward movement,” which researchers said was related to the right-leaning nature of social media networks.
For the study’s authors, and experts who have reviewed the research, the findings confirm that not only are influencers now potentially more powerful than traditional media, but content creators who rarely share political content may be the most powerful of all.
“The research concretizes what a lot of people have been hypothesizing, which is that content creators are a powerful force in politics, and they are absolutely going to play a big role in the 2026 midterms, and they will play an even bigger role in the 2028 elections,” says Samuel Woolley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies digital propaganda and who reviewed the research.
The Politics Paradox
As well as trying to prove that social media influencers can shape public opinion, the researchers also wanted to find out if those creators were more or less influential when their content is more overtly political.
To do this, the researchers randomly assigned the study’s participants a list of creators to follow, with some being assigned creators who mainly post about political issues, while others were assigned creators who are predominantly apolitical in their output.