9 Paul Farhi, “‘False Flag’ Planted at a Pizza Place? It’s Just One More Conspiracy to Digest,” Washington Post, December 5, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/false-flag-planted-at-a-pizza-place-its-just-one-more-conspiracy-to-digest/2016/12/05/fc154b1e-bb09-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html. This was an ironic accusation, because in November 2016 Posobiec had himself been involved in an effort in which a hooded protestor held up an offensive sign—“Rape Melania”—at a Trump rally in an attempt to malign anti-Trump protestors. The phrase trended on Twitter, with Trump and Clinton supporters alike expressing outrage, and garnered widespread press coverage across the political spectrum until leaked texts covered in the media exposed Posobiec’s involvement in January 2017. Joseph Bernstein, “Inside The Alt-Right’s Campaign to Smear Trump Protesters as Anarchists,” BuzzFeed News, January 11, 2017, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article /josephbernstein/inside-the-alt-rights-campaign-to-smear-trump-protesters-as#.bmwXWKz23.
10 The anonymous “Q” of QAnon began communicating in October 2017, and the influence of the group spread from there. Edward Tian, “The QAnon Timeline: Four Years, 5,000 Drops and Countless Failed Prophecies,” Bellingcat, January 29, 2012, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/29/the-qanon-timeline.
11 Contrera, “A QAnon Con.”
12 Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__), “Pizzagate/QAnon people have Wayfair trending today. They falsely claim price glitches on storage boxes prove that the company is trafficking children…,” Twitter, July 10, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20200711192428/https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1281616606012092419.
13 Chris Armenta, “Case 5:20-Cv-07502,” Digital Commons, October 26, 2020, https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3345&context=historical; Polly, “@99freemind Twitter Account,” Internet Archive, January 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20201125235053/twitter.com/99freemind.
14 According to Nick Hayes in Influencer Marketing: Who Really Influences Your Customers?, agencies began working on word-of-mouth marketing projects for large corporations in the mid-2000s as an alternative to relying on more traditional, expensive advertising and PR campaigns. Around this time, marketers like Hayes began to rank and target influencers and strategize about how best to use them. Nick Hayes, Influencer Marketing: Who Really Influences Your Customers? 1st ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015).
15 According to the OED, the term influencer can be traced back centuries under its definition of “one who or that which influences,” The earliest example of influencer as a marketing term comes in 1968 and is defined as “a person who has the ability to influence other people’s decisions about the purchase of particular goods or services,” The Internet-era influencer, “a well-known or prominent person who uses the Internet or social media to promote or generate interest in products, often for payments,” first appears in 2007. “Influencer, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, last modified September 2022, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/95522; “influencer, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, April 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2106254973.
16 Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media Inc., 2004).
17 Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Ig, 2005), 61.
18 Clive Thompson, “Is the Tipping Point Toast?,” Fast Company, February 1, 2008, https://www.fastcompany.com/641124/tipping-point-toast.
19 Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for conversations that helped to define this difference.
20 In his 1962 book The Image, Boorstin’s definition reads, “The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness” (Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America [New York: Random House, 1992], 78). One of Kim Kardashian’s gifts—indeed, a gift shared by many successful influencers—was that she had the power to create a media spectacle that would be covered by media simply because it was a spectacle, and she was famous. One example involved breathless coverage of Kim “breaking the internet” because she showed skin on a magazine cover. A lot of people talked about it, and media talked about the people talking about it.
21 Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience,” New Media & Society, July 7, 2010, http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/06/22/1461444810365313.
22 Brian Solis, “The Rise of Digital Influence, by Brian Solis,” SlideShare, March 20, 2012, https://www.slideshare.net/Altimeter/the-rise-of-digital-influence; Brian Solis, “Report: The Rise of Digital Influence and How to Measure It,” Brian Solis, March 21, 2012, https://www.briansolis.com/2012/03/report-the-rise-of-digital-influence.
