Social Media Influencers and Politics

For ages, influencing the masses has been the privilege of the elites. New decentralized and interactive social media have changed all that by empowering people to produce their own content of information to spread influence. In this chapter we apply the theories of influencer identification of Chap.  1 to understand the spread of influence in social media. We focus on the arrival of new influencers in the political arena and study how these new influencers are driving opinion trends, how they contribute to polarization of the masses, and how they spread fake news and misinformation to influence society at large. We also discuss how they can determine nationwide elections. The theories of influencers described in Chapt.  1 have to be fed with enormous amounts of data to be effective. These data are generated continuously in the digital era. We first review the process of data generation and collection from social media. To measure opinion trends, we augment the theory of influencers with artificial intelligence, through machine learning and natural language processing, to learn and predict opinion trends including predicting nationwide elections. We process large amount of data with AI and classify people and influencers according to different topics, trends and political tendencies. At the same, AI can differentiate fake news and misinformation from genuine news. Combining the theory of influence with AI, we will understand the rise of political movements that can bring new political ideas to power, and the influence of misinformation in political campaigns and opinion trends.