Divon, T., & Lu, Y. (2026). (In)Visible politics: Influencers as brokers of the state on TikTok and Douyin. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565261449632
Summary
This paper theorizes how social media influencers—many from ostensibly non-political domains like fitness, food, and lifestyle—strategically engage with state politics during political crises to sustain their platform visibility. Through a comparative content analysis of 589 videos drawn from TikTok in Israel (during the 2023 judicial reform) and Douyin in China (during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis), the authors develop the concept of political brokerage as a visibility practice emerging from transactional relations among influencers, platforms, and the state. Their central argument is that during moments of crisis the state itself becomes a strategic visibility resource that creators mobilize, and that this dynamic operates across both democratic and authoritarian regimes—though conditioned differently by each.
Key Contributions
- Extends political brokerage theory from networked intermediaries to influencer cultures, foregrounding the state as both object and resource of brokerage.
- Introduces a comparative democratic/authoritarian framework (Israel/China) for analyzing influencer–state–platform relations across the ByteDance-owned sibling platforms TikTok and Douyin.
- Offers three operationalizable visibility strategies—state glamorization, patriotic expression, and out-group derogation.
- Theorizes a proactive/reactive dual dynamic of brokerage and reframes political influencing as a contextual, emergent practice rather than a fixed role.
- Reconceives nationalism and patriotism as flexible repertoires of practice activated situationally for visibility, contributing to debates on digital nationalism and “platform nations.”
Methods
A comparative, qualitative content analysis of 589 videos: 244 TikTok videos from 97 Israeli influencers and 345 Douyin videos from 242 Chinese influencers. For Israel, the authors compiled 998 trending hashtags (Jan–July 2023), yielding 6,533 videos, then purposively sampled Hebrew-language judicial-reform videos from non-political-domain accounts with over 10,000 followers. For China, they drew on the Douyin Trending Video dataset (tracking 9,946 hashtags hourly, March–June 2020), sampling COVID-19 videos from verified or high-follower accounts. Analysis combined open coding by two authors with multimodal content analysis of narration, in-video text, imagery, sound, templates, and gestures; faces and profiles were blurred for ethical anonymity.
Findings
- Three visibility strategies emerged across both cases: state glamorization, patriotic expression, and out-group derogation.
- Israel (244 videos): 61 state glamorization, 53 patriotic expression, 42 out-group derogation—the last mostly targeting internal left-wing protesters framed as threats to national unity.
- China (345 videos): 86 patriotism, 55 state glamorization, only 9 out-group derogation (chiefly casting the US or domestic rule-violators as threats).
- Israeli creators wove reform support into viral templates and reflexive personal formats (“Freedom Squats,” “Patriotic Makeovers,” travel vlogs at Masada), enjoying wider latitude for self-directed and sometimes contested positioning.
- Chinese creators largely reproduced standardized, state-aligned scripts (e.g., #BecomingAngelsToGuardYou celebrating medical workers), with limited expressive labor under structurally mandated compliance.
- State power and platform governance jointly condition how alignment, affect, and aesthetics circulate—visibility operating as a form of soft governance.
Connections
This paper’s focus on influencers as situational intermediaries of political discourse relates to broader work on political influencers and content creators, such as Gaw2025-ru and Topinka2026-hb. Its treatment of visibility as structured by platform governance and algorithmic reward speaks to platform-engagement research like Rieder2026-pp and Gillespie2022-jx. The comparative democratic/authoritarian framing and the study of nationalist repertoires on short-video platforms connects to politically contextual platform scholarship including Guo2026-fi and Wang2026-ub.
Podcast
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