SUNN Post Exclusive
On April 30, TikTok influencer Kate Mackz uploaded a video in which she interviewed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, following her on a tour of the White House’s West Wing. Mackz, who boasts nearly 800,000 followers on the platform, is a New York City-based content creator with a specific focus on fitness. Her most popular series is one in which she stages run-ins with other influencers or high-profile personalities and asks if they’d like to join her for an impromptu run, interviewing them as they jog.
In the introduction of the now-infamous video, Leavitt declines Mackz’s usual invitation to go for a run, but instead offers her a personal White House tour. The video, still live on Mackz’s TikTok account, drew immediate backlash.
Of course, posting what some could see as a glorified advertisement for the Trump administration is bound to be a controversial choice, but it would probably be unfair to call Mackz a Trump supporter — in October of 2024, leading up to the presidential election, Mackz filmed a similar video with Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz (although Walz, unlike Leavitt, opted to jog along). In fact, the video featuring Walz remains pinned on Mackz’s page as one of the first three videos to appear to users visiting her account, while the Leavitt video has already been buried by more recent content. But, for many followers, Mackz’s willingness to play nice with Trump’s White House indicated a tacit endorsement of the administration’s laundry list of inexcusable behaviors.
The Kate Mackz controversy pulled into focus a bigger question: should we, as social media users, support influencers whose political decision-making doesn’t align with our own? For many left-leaning viewers, the immediate and resounding answer to this question is ‘No.’ But in practice, this partisan commitment can be unexpectedly hard to uphold.
When it comes to somebody like Kate Mackz, it’s relatively easy to jump ship at the first sign of trouble. Many of Mackz’s left-leaning fans simply unfollowed her after the Leavitt video, a moderate enough reaction.
What’s trickier is navigating the murky waters of influencers who know better than to publicly endorse the Trump administration, understanding the public backlash they’d face, but secretly harbor right-wing tendencies. Undercover conservatives lurk around every corner of the internet, and, often, social media users can miss them hiding in plain sight.
There exists a particular school of thought, both on and offline, that a person’s political affiliations are immediately obvious through the way they look or act, on or offline. There may be some truth to this — fashion and makeup trends do tend to manifest differently among members of different parties. Behavior and cultural customs can vary by region, often informing political patterns.
However, these patterns are not all-encompassing. The assumption that a staunchly left-leaning viewer could never stray into the world of Trump-supporting influencers is both ridiculous and dangerous.
As much as Trump-hating social media users may enjoy poking fun at “Republican makeup” or “Republican fashion,” they must acknowledge the potential for a person with wildly different political views to still look, dress and behave like them, at least online. Creating artificial distance between themselves and people whose politics they consider morally reprehensible merely renders young, impressionable users more susceptible to a simplistic understanding of partisan divisions.
Writing off Republicans or Trump supporters as unattractive, stylistically incompetent, or personally revolting succeeds only in promoting the belief that party affiliations are unchangeable, people with bad politics are unsaveable and, in fact, that their outfits and makeup looks are so disgusting that they probably aren’t worth saving anyway. Plus, it leads viewers to miss the fact that many of their own favorite social media superstars may swing unexpectedly far right.
This is one reason — of an almost infinite number — that social media users must approach influencers with an amount of healthy skepticism. It is nearly always the case that the seemingly all-encompassing view an influencer offers of their life online is only a fraction of the real story.
Whether starving and physically abusing their children behind the scenes or hiding their own domestic abuse, social media personalities continue to prove they’re capable of obscuring aspects of their actual lives while still offering what seem like authentic accounts of their day-to-day. Though a perceptive viewer may be able to dig deep enough to make an educated guess about an influencer’s politics (particularly if they turn up public voter registration or campaign donation records), the fact of the matter is that influencers only share what they want their viewers to see.
For some watchers, the answer to this uncertainty is to limit their content consumption to influencers who explicitly state their political affiliations and actively advocate for relevant political issues. Realistically, though, this is a challenging (and perhaps unnecessary) standard to uphold. By design, social media platforms consistently push viewers to discover new content creators in ways that slowly pull and push party lines. Ascertaining each creator’s politics before indulging in any of their content is essentially impossible.
More effective than limiting one’s influencer sphere to influencers you believe you can trust is accepting that there is no such thing as an influencer you can trust.
Influencers wield the dangerous power to rob audiences of personal autonomy. At their least sinister, influencers are tastemakers — they influence viewers on personal style or healthy habits, encouraging positive lifestyle changes or offering useful advice. When taken appropriately, an influencer’s recommendations should carry little more weight than a recommendation from a real-life acquaintance. More cynically, influencers are capable of fundamentally altering the decision-making process of their audience, pushing them to do, say and think things they otherwise wouldn’t — a privilege rife for abuse. Because an influencer’s intentions are generally impossible to fully illuminate, the task of skirting harmful influence falls upon their audience members.
The responsibility we each have when engaging content online is more than just observational. If a user is so susceptible to influence that merely consuming the content of a conservative creator puts them at risk for osmosing conservative values or ideas, they are interacting with social media the wrong way. While distancing themselves from creators they recognize to be conservative may save them from absorbing a handful of specific dangerous views, it will not save them from the countless other malicious influences they will inevitably encounter online. In fact, eliminating obviously conservative creators from their social media intake may inhibit their ability to potentially recognize patterns of behavior in other, less obviously conservative content.
As far as explicitly political content goes, completely shutting out the perspective of a person whose beliefs do not align with your own is short-sighted and undermines your ability to contend with and refute those beliefs. It is possible to accept an influencer’s style tips or lunch recipes without needing also to absorb their personal belief system, and even a limited-view window into their life could offer an enriched understanding of what life can actually look like for a conservative or a Trump supporter.
Of course, I’m not here to insist that you keep up with influencers who have betrayed you before. When it comes to social media, even passive views can translate into immediate income for content creators on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, calling into question the ethics of political voyeurism. On other platforms, like Instagram, high view counts earn influencers access to high-paying sponsorships and brand deals. Consuming content, even without actively engaging with or supporting it, financially rewards its creator. If you simply find it ethically unbearable to put money into their pockets with each view, that is completely understandable.
However, in the case of a right-wing influencer whose content you truly enjoy, contributing a thousandth of a cent to their creator fund with every view may be worth the observational insight they can offer, and sacrificing the entertainment value their posts offer you may not be worth the moral high ground. As long as you’re keeping your influencers at an arm’s length, the risks of watching conservative creators are relatively minimal, and the benefits may be more valuable than you’d expect.
