The next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Martin Riedl, whose interest is in the ethics of disclosure by political influencers, with particular focus on the United States. Here, regulations for influencers are highly idiosyncratic; influencers do play a substantial role as a pathway towards news, especially for younger users, and are seen as helping to unpack current political issues.
Political influencers are defined here very broadly, and include influencers driven both by personal, political, and monetary motivations. Such influencers are sometimes also directly supported by political lobby and funding groups, and this is legal at least in the US context; there are no disclosure requirements for such financial support here, and this has been described by some as ‘the new dark money’.
This project explored this through a cross-sectional survey of some 900 US social media users in February 2025, to examine their support for disclosures about paid support for political influencers. It found that more conservative attitudes were negatively correlated with support for disclosure rules (as conservative respondents assumed this would have a chilling effect on freedom of expression); consuming more influencer content was also negatively correlated with such support; valuing authenticity was positively related to support for disclosure; and perceptions of the appropriateness of paid political influence activity was negatively related to support for disclosure.
Views towards the ethics of disclosure are thus directly affected by partisanship (and age), and by content consumption – which indicates a normalisation of influencer activities at least amongst heavy consumers. For such consumers, it does not matter whether there is disclosure or not.
