Social media influencers sit at the center of how millions of Americans understand and participate in our democracy. Their posts shape civic participation, offer commentary that feels personal and authentic, and increasingly serve as vehicles for campaigns, PACs, and marketing agencies looking to reach voters in ways users experience as more intimate than traditional ads. As our Architects of Online Influence report documents, political influencer activity has grown rapidly: political actors spent tens of millions on creator-driven messaging in 2024, party conventions welcomed scores of influencers, and nearly a fifth of Americans regularly get news from creators online. Content creators have also been caught up in opaque and even illegal practices, such as channeling foreign funds to influence U.S. elections.

Yet even as political creators — those who post about politics on social media as part of their business model but are unaffiliated with traditional media outlets — play a defining role in how the public engages with American democracy, they operate in a governance vacuum. Relevant policy areas have not caught up to reality, nor have norms regarding transparency for paid speech. As a result, the influencer industry slips through the cracks of federal campaign finance law, congressional oversight, and platform policies, raising a fundamental question about how to ensure that the fast-growing political influencer ecosystem develops in a way that aligns with democratic interests.

Given that, it would be natural to wonder whether the Federal Election Commission would step up to the plate. After all, the FEC oversees disclaimers, disclosure requirements, and rules governing much of paid election-related speech. But its current structure and legal constraints make the FEC an imperfect fit for addressing the emerging issues of the influencer era. Under federal campaign finance law, the agency’s authority attaches primarily to “public communications” as defined in statute and regulation — which largely excludes internet content unless payment is made directly to the platform. Because most political influencer activity involves payment to creators rather than the platforms that host them, these posts fall outside the FEC’s jurisdiction by design.

When the FEC updated its rules in 2024, it acknowledged how digital communication has evolved and considered whether to subject paid influencer content to the same disclosure and disclaimer requirements that apply to political ads. Ultimately, the agency adopted a narrow reading that is consistent with existing statutory limits. In doing so, however, it left unresolved how, and by whom, political influencer activity should be governed. Since then, the FEC has been mired in firings and vacancies, leaving it even less equipped to respond to emerging needs.

Nor is Congress positioned to fill that gap. All but the most modest of updates to campaign finance law have struggled to gain traction, and the political and legal realities surrounding the regulation of online speech make comprehensive federal legislation on influencer transparency unlikely in the near term.

In the absence of a clear regulatory or legislative path forward, much of the power to mold the political influencer industry’s future lies in the hands of social media companies. Ceding a key election integrity issue to opaque, unaccountable companies is considerably less than an ideal democratic solution. But companies may be more responsive to this issue in the foreseeable future than the government, and have more latitude because their interventions are not limited by the First Amendment. And crucially, in the case of political influencers, company interests may at least partially align with democratic interests, creating a unique opportunity to develop good policies.

Trust and authenticity lie at the heart of the political influencer industry. Creators are successful and desirable as business partners because of the trusted bonds they form with their audience. They drive engagement on platforms, making them highly valuable as part of platforms’ business models. In turn, platforms have an incentive to support creators. One way they can do that is by supporting user trust in creators and in the platform itself. Many of their policies, however, do not currently align with that goal.

Social media company policies that apply to political influencers are messy, confusing, and at times arbitrary. Compare Meta and TikTok’s approach to political content. TikTok’s political advertising and branded content policy forbids any paid political content from appearing on the platform. That means an influencer who was, say, incentivized to post about a candidate because they were gifted a fun piece of campaign merch, would potentially be in violation of TikTok’s rules if they posted. The policy sounds clear-cut on paper, but belies the immense challenge of compliance and enforcement. Huge amounts of political content circulate on TikTok, and multiple investigations have found that some of this content is paid. Meta, meanwhile, has overlapping, complex policies governing branded political content that require sorting through multiple different webpages to understand. When creators are presented with a tradeoff between violating platform rules or missing out on a business opportunity, it’s easy to understand why creators might choose the former, and sidestep platform policies or transparency standards.

Despite the clearly different models — TikTok’s “ban” versus the confusing web of Meta’s policies — the two result in the same problems: circumvention and a lack of transparency. Both are bad for voters, content creators, and platforms — and for democracy itself. Voters deserve to know who is being paid and courted to persuade them. Creators, many of whom earnestly seek to bolster democratic participation, should be able to pursue that goal without fighting self-defeating, impractical rules. Platforms have an interest in maintaining user trust on their platforms, rooting out violative practices, and encouraging creator and community engagement.

As companies adjust their policies to account for and attract the political influencer industry, they need to grapple with existing tensions and seize the opportunity to find options where all of these incentives align. For example, creator compliance on Meta might be higher if the overlapping policies were easier to understand and didn’t require sorting through multiple web pages. Creators and political actors, for their part, could bolster these changes by establishing industry norms–such as through codes of conduct that address transparency and conduct due diligence on funders–that lower the risk that influencers could face account suspension or other platform enforcement.

A necessary step towards coalescing around pro-democracy reforms, and one that our organization is actively pursuing, is cross-industry conversations that help stakeholders better understand the challenges that other invested parties face and the feasibility of potential interventions. Most creators are not lawyers, and those who advocate for the government to require payment disclosures from political influencers, for example, might focus more on which policy changes they want to see from social media companies and political organizations if they had more clarity on why private policy progress is more achievable than government regulations that would likely not pass Constitutional muster. And companies might be more inclined to take feedback on their own policies if they heard from an organized group of creators and compliance experts that a competitor’s platform was more appealing thanks to its more user-friendly guidance.

The political influencer industry is firmly part of American politics, but the contours of its role in our elections are still being determined. It has the capacity to support democratic interests and bolster political participation, or to undermine those interests by dispensing with campaign finance transparency and increasing the power imbalance between voters and multimillion-dollar political machines. Ahead of this year’s midterm elections, developing responsible platform policy is the best opportunity to shift the needle in favor of democracy.