Influencers are nothing new – but it’s now easier to become one by creating content about anything and still be popular. While successful influencers rarely build themselves up by commenting on political topics, the political divisions across the West make it impossible for many influencers to ignore political topics.
This leads to problems for politicians who get into political conflicts with an influencer. Even in a functioning democracy, influencers can easily reach more people than a whole political party with astounding success. While politicians have both sympathisers and haters, influencers can have a huge following without any meaningful number of haters. They are not public figures who have a constituency like politicians, so they rarely get the pushback politicians experience daily. Any politician has the chance to get into a public fight with an influencer. Here are four ways to manage it.
Four ways to manage a political conflict with an influencer
1) Stay quiet and let it go. Sometimes, the best response is no response. There is rarely a response that could help the politician – instead, it will keep the conflict in the public eye, contribute to a few more negative posts or videos about the politician, and just simply remind the influencer’s followers that politicians are all bad. So avoid the unnecessary, keep your head low, and hope that they switch to the next set of unrelated topics.
2) Try to appear on their channel and make your case in a sympathetic way. If the damage from the conflict is too high, or you are too close to an election, staying quiet may not be an option. But making your case on the party’s or on the politician’s own channels will never work – they don’t follow it, and it just feels like political propaganda, regardless of the content. Instead, try to contact the influencer and offer to appear on one of their channels to make your case, or even hold a respectful debate with them. The goal here is not to win, but to present a sympathetic and authentic side.This approach helps regain lost sympathy and show that you share more common ground than differences.
3) Fight back. If the influencer is on the opposite political side, fighting back might be worth it. A public argument could emphasise their views that you strongly disagree with and could even make you sympathetic in the eyes of some of their followers. While publicly fighting with non-politicians can easily become embarrassing for politicians, if they communicate like they fight for a cause they believe in, it could get the politician noticed. This mostly applies to lower-level politicians – no party leader or prime ministerial candidate should get into these kinds of online fights.
4) Use other influencers to fight back. If the decision has been made to fight back in public, a good strategy is to try to rally other influencers who are on your side. Let’s pick a topic, like LGBTQ+-rights: if the politician gets into a fight with an influencer with homophobic remarks, it should be easy to find allies on the channels that particular influencer is active on. The key for the politician is not to make it about themselves: even if they were personally attacked initially, emphasise that you are fighting for a cause, fighting for the rights of others, the rights of those attacked. Not just because it works better in public – but because simply it is the right thing to do.
Master your digital diplomacy
Navigating conflicts with influencers requires tact and strategy. Politicians can choose from silence, collaboration, direct engagement, or alliance building with other influencers, each method offering unique advantages. The key is to understand the digital landscape and adapt swiftly to maintain a positive and impactful public presence.