beatrice gomberg

WASHINGTON — In the 2024 election, hundreds of social media influencers were credentialed for the first time to attend the Democratic and Republican conventions. They have been invited to holiday parties in the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, to political rallies in Texas and to events at the White House by both the Biden and Trump administrations.

The role of influencers is surging as candidates and groups across the political spectrum see their social media feeds and personas as a pathway to younger audiences and harder-to-reach groups of voters.

“You have that sense of authenticity, like a friend is talking to you,” said Emma Briant, a professor at Notre Dame University’s Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society who studies propaganda.

That’s exactly what campaigns are hoping to harness when they partner with influencers, she said.

But the nature of that partnership has come into question in California’s hotly contested gubernatorial race after it emerged that a number of content creators — some with millions of followers, others with only a handful — had taken payments from the campaign of Democratic candidate Tom Steyer and not disclosed that they were paid to create those posts.

Some popular content creators have felt the need to explain themselves to their audience. Others have questioned how common such under-the-table payments might be, since there are no disclosure requirements for paid content at the federal level and few jurisdictions have any rules mandating it.

Some campaign finance advocates are concerned that voters could increasingly be influenced by social media posts that they don’t know are sponsored.

“The problem is that it doesn’t look like an ad,” said Saurav Ghosh, a former enforcement attorney at the Federal Election Commission. “It ends up really getting people at a place where they’re not skeptical and not able to tell the difference between what’s voluntary and where the influencer is acting as a paid spokesperson.”

Ghosh is now the director of campaign finance reform at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which has filed a petition asking the FEC to require disclaimers on paid content created by influencers.

Roughly 1 in 5 Americans said they regularly got news from social media influencers in 2024, according to the Pew Research Center, and that number was nearly double for younger adults between the ages of 18 and 29.

Working with social media creators can be an easy way for candidates to try to boost their image, particularly with a younger audience.

“If they don’t have big personalities, maybe partnering with some influencers who seem cool and fun can make you seem cool and fun also through association,” said Link Lauren, a political influencer and podcaster who served as a communications advisor for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign in 2024.

California is one of the few places that requires disclosure of sponsored social media posts, but the 2023 law that created those rules hadn’t gotten much of a workout before the issue was raised in this contest through a series of dueling complaints with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission. The commission has yet to weigh in on the various accusations.

Under the law, influencers are required to provide disclosure that a post was sponsored and say who paid for it. Political groups are required to notify paid creators of the requirement.

Even if the commission finds that violations have occurred, the penalties are not especially harsh.

Violation of the law carries no civil, criminal or administrative penalties. The FPPC can take alleged violators to court and ask a judge to force compliance. And violations can be penalized with a fine of up to $5,000 per instance.

Influencers reporting influencers

In the gubernatorial race, the issue of compliance was raised, naturally, by a pair of influencers.

Beatrice Gomberg has built up a following of more than 180,000 followers on TikTok, where she posts under the handle antiplasticlady. Her side gig of creating nonplastic children’s cups and lunch boxes became her main gig after she lost her human resources job at Macy’s during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I started doing social media because I didn’t want to hire a marketing company,” Gomberg said.

Gomberg’s posts were initially largely focused on research related to plastic, but have become increasingly political over time. When campaigns put out the call for influencers to meet with candidates, Gomberg answered.

She interviewed Katie Porter, she met with Xavier Becerra. And it was at a Becerra event in April when she met Kaitlyn Hennessy, another influencer focused on politics.

They found that the world of online influencers can be isolating. “We stare in front of our phones,” Hennessy said. “You don’t want to see our screen time.”

As they scrolled through social media posts about the governor’s race, they found a cause to unite them.

They kept seeing videos posted by social media accounts espousing similar messages in support of Tom Steyer. Hennessy wondered at first if they were actually created by artificial intelligence.

They found that the posts seemed to be created by a network of women who, in some cases, had created several different profiles to promote a variety of products.

They pored over Steyer’s campaign disclosures and saw that the campaign listed payments to several prominent influencers — including one with the handle Zay Dante, with 1.8 million followers on TikTok — who had not disclosed creating paid content for the campaign.

The pair filed a complaint laying out their allegations, which the Steyer campaign has called “baseless.”

In the wake of their complaint, Steyer defended his campaign’s use of paid influencers, writing on Substack that his campaign believed content creators should be paid for their work and that the campaign had been transparent about disclosing those payments.

In a separate post, influencer Carlos Eduardo Espina said he had been paid $400,000 for work he has done for the Steyer campaign. Espina, who has more than 14 million followers on TikTok, is an advisor to the campaign, which was publicly announced.

“You will never see anything on my channels that I don’t believe in, or that I think goes against the best interest of my community. No one buys my opinion. But I also think it’s fair to be compensated for my work,” he wrote on Substack.

Not everyone is ready to accept payment for posts.

Lauren, the influencer who advised Kennedy’s campaign, said that while he doesn’t begrudge other influencers accepting sponsorship, he chooses not to.

“A passive viewer might think you really believe this,” he said. “I have a strong connection with my audience. I really consider them my family.”

Lauren said he favors disclosure requirements.

Briant, the propaganda researcher, said she is concerned about the possibility of foreign actors trying to influence Americans through paid posts.

In 2024, for example, federal prosecutors filed an indictment alleging that Russian state media employees had paid nearly $10 million to a Tennessee company that paid popular right-wing social media influencers to unwittingly produce pro-Russia content.

Briant said she believes that the only way to counteract increased manipulation through social media influencers is to impose harsh penalties when paid content is not disclosed.

“Ultimately, it’s a wild west at the moment if there are no repercussions for not doing it,” she said.

WASHINGTON — In recent weeks, several social media influencers have popped up in online feeds touting the California gubernatorial campaign of billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer.

Some complain about the price of gasoline. Others mention environmental concerns. One cites her newfound sobriety as evidence that people can change — a nod to Steyer’s self-proclaimed metamorphosis from hedge fund titan to scourge of big corporations.

“I did not expect the most progressive governor candidate to be a billionaire, but look at the policies you guys,” said one content creator on TikTok with the user name Jaz R. “Hear me out. I know Tom Steyer is a billionaire, but he also is for the people.”

The posts include direct-to-the-camera appeals, with personal details interwoven into messages of support for Steyer. An influencer goes for a stroll as onscreen text touts Steyer’s policies. Some seek to convey authenticity, if occasionally ham-fistedly; one influencer mispronounces Steyer’s last name.

What they do not include is a disclosure that their creators were paid by the Steyer campaign to produce the videos, according to a complaint filed this week with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission and a Times review of the posts.

The complaint alleges that the Steyer campaign failed to notify the influencers it hired of their obligation to inform their audience when their posts have been sponsored by the campaign.

California passed a law in 2023 requiring that influencers disclose if they have been paid to create promotional content for or against a candidate or ballot measure, one of the few jurisdictions in the country with such a requirement. There is no such requirement at the federal level.

“Every time there’s a new technology, you have to create legislation that requires them to disclose,” said state Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Orange), who sponsored the bill.

Violating the law doesn’t carry criminal, civil or administrative penalties, but the FPPC can take influencers who break the law to court and ask a judge to force them to comply.

The complaint was filed by two California women — political influencers themselves — who said they noticed a number of new accounts that suddenly started posting similar-sounding videos promoting Steyer earlier this month.

“They had the exact same language, they had the same talking points,” said Beatrice Gomberg, who worked with Kaitlyn Hennessy in their digital sleuthing efforts.

The FPPC did not comment on the complaint.

Steyer’s campaign appears to have relied on paid influencers more than any candidate for governor, according to the most recent campaign finance filings.

That spending represents only a small fraction of the massive campaign war chest Steyer has seeded with nearly $180 million of his own money. But the complaint highlights the growing degree to which political candidates have come to seek out the authenticity that social media influencers seem to offer.

Steyer campaign spokesperson Kevin Liao said the campaign had properly followed the rules in hiring influencers and that the campaign is “confident” that Gomberg and Hennessy’s complaint is “baseless.”

“Creators make their living generating content. The campaign believes in compensating people for their time and work product and has paid creators to generate content,” Liao said in a statement. “Payments for creator content are disclosed in campaign finance reports, and we notify creators we directly work with of their disclosure requirements.”

While many of the new Steyer influencers have few followers, Steyer’s campaign disclosed in its most recent campaign finance report that it had paid thousands of dollars to numerous social media influencers with massive audiences, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Several of the videos produced by these popular social media personalities also failed to disclose that they had been paid by the campaign, according to the complaint and The Times’ review of the content.

But even accounts with few followers can still have a big impact if they are producing a steady stream of content supporting Steyer, said veteran California political strategist Mike Madrid.

“What they’re trying to do is trip the algorithm,” he said. “It looks like it has a bigger audience than it really does. It’s taking the concept of astroturfing into the digital age.”

Gomberg and Hennessy said they became friends after meeting at an April campaign event for Xavier Becerra, Steyer’s chief Democratic rival in the race, who holds a narrow advantage over Steyer in several recent political polls.

The pair have been prolific social media supporters of Becerra’s campaign ever since, though they insist they are not being paid for their efforts.

They said they discovered that many of the new pro-Steyer accounts seemed to be run by influencers — mostly women — who had previously created different social media accounts to hawk other products.

One of the pro-Steyer influencers had an online portfolio listing numerous clients, including the Steyer campaign and a gummy designed to boost arousal, according to the complaint and the Times review of the publicly accessible website.

The pair said they stumbled on an advertisement placed by a vendor for the campaign on a platform used by creators to find work. The advertisement indicated that creators would be paid $10 for each post, with bonuses for posts that amassed large viewership.

The vendor who posted the ad did not respond to a request for comment.

The advertisement has since been updated to say that it pays $1,000 per month and that creators will have to disclose that it is paid content.

As Gomberg and Hennessy dug deeper, they determined that some of the influencers promoting a candidate for governor weren’t even based in California.

A TikTok account using the handle jess.votes, for example, appears to be connected to a woman registered to vote in Florida. Other accounts were connected to women who indicated elsewhere that they were based in Pennsylvania, Missouri and Michigan.

Several influencers who created seemingly paid content promoting Steyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Times.

The brouhaha over paid social media content is just the latest instance of the growing political impact of online creators.

Eric Swalwell’s campaign for governor — and congressional career — came to an end after multiple women accused him of sexual assault. A pair of influencers had publicly raised concerns about Swalwell’s behavior and helped connect victims with journalists who produced highly detailed reports of the allegations.

The California law requires influencers to disclose in a political post’s audio or text that it was sponsored and who paid for it.

The onus is on the creators to make the disclosure, but campaigns are required to tell them that they must do so. Despite passage of the law, the issue has so far remained largely under the radar.

“I have dozens of candidates and campaigns and I have not heard this issue come up one time,” said a campaign finance lawyer who requested anonymity because they represent numerous candidates with active campaigns.

Gomberg and Hennessy said that they were driven to call attention to potential violations of the disclosure requirements because of their concern about the corrosive influence such paid content could have if left unchecked.

“You have people who have trust in these creators,” Hennessy said. “You have a responsibility to your audience.”