Our obsession with vapid TikTok, YouTube influencers like MrBeast won't save us | Opinion
While influencers are a component of a thriving capitalist economy, which I support, I fear that they encourage young people to forgo meaningful work for vacuous virality.
The more I learn about social media, the more I think it's a scourge for society, especially for young people. It's both vacuous and ubiquitous.
It's also seemingly addictive. Older teens report being online "almost constantly" or an average of nearly five hours a day, and much of that time is squandered wandering through the toxic wasteland of social media.
Another component of social media that seems increasingly problematic for kids and the rest of society: full-time influencers.
Celebrities aside − their careers are already public − there's a sect of "regular" people who have left or plan to leave traditional jobs to become social media influencers. While influencers are a component of a thriving capitalist economy, which I support, I fear that they encourage young people to forgo meaningful work for vacuous virality. They also promote consumerism, deception and narcissism.
Lure of influencing tempts the young and the gullible
Websites have been created to help would-be influencers determine how many followers they need to earn enough money to "give up the day job." To earn about $34,000 annually, a YouTube influencer would need a minimum of 1,000 subscribers and more than 8 million yearly views.
Because Instagram has over 2 billion active monthly users and YouTube boasts even more, influencers need only a fraction of those audiences to earn a modest living. It's easy to see why someone might be tempted to start a career as a professional influencer.
Yet, most of the top-earning Instagram influencers are Hollywood celebrities or athletes − such as my 11-year-old's favorite soccer star, Lionel Messi. Messi is paid at least $2.5 million per sponsored post on his Instagram page, which has more than 500 million followers.
The vast majority of would-be influencers will never reach anything close to that level of fame or income. But I've noticed on my own Instagram feed that a lot of people are posting videos saying they have quit their jobs to become fulltime content creators.
And I'm not talking about folks like Mark Rober, the quirky and charming former NASA engineer turned YouTube science star whom kids and parents love. I'm talking about folks who went to college and had a steady job only to quit it to become full-time content creators, filming their lives or a specific aspect of their lives like dating or fitness.
A 2019 Harris Poll found that kids in the United States are three times more likely to want to become YouTubers than astronauts. The appeal is understandable − after all, you don't need any real expertise or spend years earning university degrees to post videos on YouTube.
The reality, however, is that very few young people will become anything close to the next MrBeast, the highest-paid influencer on YouTube. MrBeast, whose real name is James "Jimmy" Donaldson, is a 26-year-old social media star who, according to Forbes, made $82 million in 2023.
Donaldson is a college dropout who first started making videos about online games. He has more than 340 million subscribers and a multimillion dollar empire, which includes candy bars that my 11-year-old loves.
According to MrBeast himself, becoming a successful influencer requires a lot of work, which I don't doubt.
Donaldson told Rolling Stone magazine in 2022: "There's a five-year point in my life where I was just relentlessly, unhealthily obsessed with studying virality, studying the YouTube algorithm. I woke up. I would Uber Eats food. And then I would sit on my computer all day just studying ... nonstop with (other YouTubers)."
Yet, it's that commitment to going viral that bothers me, especially when the subjects seem stupid or pointless. MrBeast first skyrocketed to success in 2017 over a viral video of him counting to 100,000.
I realize not every kid can or wants to be the next Elon Musk or George Orwell. And admittedly, MrBeast's net worth and philanthropic efforts far surpass mine. But is becoming rich and famous the only thing that matters now?
Not everything in life must have educational value, but so much of social media is vapid and deceptive that I wonder what it's doing to us as individuals and as a society.
Social media influencers peddle fake lifestyles
A major problem with social media influencers is that much of their content is fake, which means their followers become enamored with lifestyles that aren't real.
Influencers often focus on popular niches: interior design, parenting, dating or fitness. Influencers then parlay their supposed lifestyle choices into brand partnerships as well as selling their own merchandise and crowdfunding from their fans.
There's money to be made by some influencers. Influencer MarketingHub's State of Influencer Marketing Report indicates that the industry is worth $21.1 billion.
But a social media page that shows only the highlight reels of a person's life is as authentic as a Kardashian.
Most adults have lived enough life not to be completely fooled. (Although, I've fallen prey to watching an Instagram post and wondering why my house isn't that clean.)
But I fear that many teenagers and children don't realize just how fake social media influencing is. Surely unrealistic, idealized videos play a role in the increased depression and anxiety that America's young people report experiencing.
A former model, Kaila Uli, said in her own TikTok videos that content creators in Los Angeles rent luxury cars and mansions to sell a supposed lifestyle, even though they aren't actually wealthy. "A lot of creators rent that space once a week, film their content and make it look like they live there," she said.
Even at its best, social media influencing promotes a way of working and living that lacks meaning. It's an online form of navel gazing that disserves both the audiences who consume this content and the people who create it.
The Netflix series "Hype House" features a group of young TikTok and YouTube content creators who lived in a mansion in Los Angeles as they tried to make it as viral stars. The meta nature of the show − about kids trying to create their own "shows" and become famous for being famous − strikes me as banal, even worrisome.
In the 1985 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman wrote, “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images."
Postman wrote that decades before Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to launch Facebook. Today's social media scene is so much worse than Postman could have imagined.
The scent of fame is undoubtedly alluring, and to young people absorbed in social media, the prospect of making a fortune must look just within reach.
But I have to ask: Is that really what you want to do with your one and only life?
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with Paste BN. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.