If you were feeling particularly unkind, you could argue politicians and online influencers are a match made in heaven: both pretend to be something they’re not, impress the easily impressed and get paid for it.
Certainly, there seemed to be a meeting of minds this week when someone on Lindiwe Sisulu’s team thought it would be a good idea to get some minor influencers to hype up the human settlement minister’s budget speech.
This foray into politics by these influencers will have done them no harm whatsoever, since people who are actually influenced by self-proclaimed influencers are entirely immune to facts and context.
The results were too dull for me to recount here, but not everyone was bored stiff. The now former DA MP and Twitter doyenne Phumzile van Damme (who announced her resignation on Thursday evening) took to her favourite social media platform to point out that influencer marketing was neither illegal nor unethical, but “paints the Influencers in a very negative light of them willing to wade into political matters without facts or context”.
I enjoy Van Damme’s online presence, and I suspect she holds all sorts of ANC feet to all sorts of fires, but in this case I must humbly suggest that she is wrong.
This foray into politics by these influencers will have done them no harm whatsoever, since people who are actually influenced by self-proclaimed influencers are entirely immune to facts and context.
I mean, it’s not as if influencers are trying to hide what they are, and if you are persuaded to make choices in life based on the misspelled, punctuation-free tweets of people who have dedicated their youth to being exploited by huge brands in return for relatively small amounts of dosh, then you’re probably not going to be tuning in to complex policy debates.
As for the rest of us, well, we would first have to have an opinion of influencers to think less of them. Telling me an influencer has acted in a way that might, in the right light, be seen as slightly distasteful, is like telling me your business partner’s ex-wife’s oldest daughter’s third child was rude to your former best friend’s former accountant.
Van Damme is right that Sisulu’s rather ham-fisted use of influencers is neither illegal nor unethical. Certainly, if the choice is sending small amounts of cash to young South Africans to publish transparent (and therefore easily avoidable) political pulp, or getting the State Security Agency to send millions to media houses where bought journalists plant much more sophisticated propaganda, it’s a no-brainer.
Still, the sad odour of mediocrity lingers over the whole thing. Hiring influencers with fewer than 100,000 Twitter followers is pretty desperate, but not nearly as desperate as believing that getting random young people to tweet about a budget speech can make it exciting or even interesting.
Worse, it just makes Sisulu and her department look like a B-grade events company, hustling for likes as they waste their client’s money.
Then again, given the track record of this government, perhaps that’s exactly what they are.
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