The rise and fall of a MAGA supporter
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
'The art of hating': Why $150B influencer industry needs snarky trolls
In 2023, however, Bader appeared noticeably thinner. When some fans asked her whether she’d undergone a procedure, she blocked them. Later that year, she announced that she would no longer be posting about her body.
Enter snark subreddits. On Reddit, these forums exist for the sole purpose of calling out internet celebrities, whether they’re devoted to dinging the late-night antics of self-described “hot mess” Alix Earle or venting over Savannah and Cole LaBrant, a family vlogging couple who misleadingly implied that their daughter had cancer.
While the internet is synonymous with fan culture, snark subreddits aren’t for enthusiasts. Instead, snarkers are anti-fans who hone the art of hating.
Remi Bader attends New York Fashion Week on Feb. 10, 2025.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Tory Burch
After Bader’s refusal to talk about her weight loss, the Remi Bader snark subreddit blew up. Posters weren’t upset that Bader had lost weight or had stopped posting about her body size. Instead, they believed Bader the influencer, who’d built her brand on plus-size inclusion in fashion, wasn’t being straight with her fans and needed to be taken to account.
It worked. During a March 2025 appearance on Khloe Kardashian’s podcast, Bader finally revealed that she had, in fact, had weight-loss surgery.
Some critics see snarkers as a big problem and understandably denounce their tendency to harass, body shame and try to cancel influencers.
But completely dismissing snark glosses over the fact that it can serve a purpose. In our work as social media researchers, we’ve written about how snark can actually be thought of as a way to call out bad actors in the largely unregulated world of influencing and content creation.
Grassroots policing
Before there were influencers, there were bloggers. While bloggers covered topics that ranged from entertainment to politics to travel, parenting and fashion bloggers probably have the closest connection to today’s influencers.
After Google introduced AdSense in 2003, bloggers were easily able to run advertising on their websites. Then brands saw an opportunity. Parenting and fashion bloggers had large, loyal followings. Many readers felt an intimate connection to their favorite bloggers, who seemed more like friends than out-of-touch celebrity spokespersons.
Brands realized they could send bloggers their products in exchange for a write-up or a feature. Furthermore, advertisers understood that parenting and fashion bloggers didn’t have to adhere to the same industry regulations or code of ethics as most news media outlets, such as disclosing payments or conflicts of interest.
This changed the dynamic between bloggers and their fans, who wondered whether bloggers could be trusted if they were sometimes being paid to promote certain products.
In response, websites emerged in 2009 to critique bloggers. “Get Off My Internets,” for example, fashioned itself as a “quality control watchdog” to provide constructive criticism and call out deceptive practices. As Instagram and YouTube became more popular, the subreddit “r/Blogsnark” launched in 2015 to critique early influencers, in addition to bloggers.
Few guardrails in place
Today the influencer industry has a valuation of over US$250 billion in the U.S. alone, and it’s on track to be worth over $500 billion by 2027.
Yet there are few regulations in place for influencers. A few laws have emerged to protect child influencers, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has established legal guidelines for sponsored content.
That said, the influencing industry remains rife with exploitation.
It goes both ways: Corporations can exploit influencers. For example, a 2021 study found that Black influencers receive below-market offers compared with white influencers.
Savannah and Cole LaBrant came under fire for implying that their daughter had cancer, in what their critics called a ploy for attention.
Danielle Del Valle/Getty Images for Lionsgate
Likewise, influencers can deceive or exploit their followers. They might use unrealistic body filters to appear thinner than they are. They could hide who’s paying them. They may promote health misinformation such as the controversial ParaGuard cleanse, a fake treatment pushed by wellness influencers that claimed to rid its users of parasites.
Or, in the case of Remi Bader, they might gain a huge following by promoting body positivity, only to conceal a weight-loss procedure from their fans.
For disappointed fans or followers who feel burned, snark can seem like the only regulatory guardrail in an industry that has gone largely unchecked. Think of snark as a Better Business Bureau for the untamable world of influencing – a form of accountability that brings attention to the scammers and hustlers.
Keeping it real
Todays’s snark exists at the intersection of gossip and cancel culture.
Though cancel culture certainly has its faults, we approach cancel culture in our writing as a worthy tool that allows audiences to hold the powerful accountable. For example, communities of color have joined forces to call out racists, as they did in 2024 when they exposed lifestyle influencer Brooke Schofield’s anti-Black tweets.
Influencers build trust with their audiences based on being “real” and relatable. But there’s nothing preventing them from breaking that trust, and snarkers can swoop in to point out bad behavior or hypocrisy.
Within the competitive world of family vlogging, snarkers see themselves as doing more than stirring the pot. They’re truth-tellers who bring injustices to light, such as abuse and child labor exploitation. Some of this exposure is paying off, with more and more states introducing and passing family vlogger laws that require children to one day receive a portion of their parents’ earnings or restrict how often children can appear in their parents’ videos.
Yes, snark can veer into cyberbullying. But that shouldn’t discount its value as a tool for transparency. Influencers are ultimately brands. They sell audiences ideas, lifestyles and products.
When people feel as if they’ve been misled, we think they have every right to call it out.
Jessica Maddox, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama and Jess Rauchberg, Assistant Professor of Communication Technologies, Seton Hall University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This Dem shows how to take a GOP smear and hit back — and it damn well works
The question is a serious one. Priebus could have landed a punch Hogg couldn’t recover from. Instead, Priebus just couldn’t help himself. He decided to smear the Democrats by way of smearing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose deportation case has dominated headlines for weeks.
“The Democrats are a complete mess,” Priebus said. “They’ve got no message. They’ve got no movement. They’ve got no leader. It doesn’t get any worse than that. You’re defending Harvard. You’re traveling to El Salvador for MS-13 gang members” (meaning Kilmar Abrego Garcia).
Another Democrat – another older Democrat – would have done a couple things. One, ignore the lie about Abrego Garcia being a gang member. Two, accept the lie as valid in order to demonstrate some kind of bona fides. This is what U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen did when he said: “I am not defending the man. I’m defending the rights of this man to due process. And the Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported.”
Hogg does neither. He takes the smear head on.
“This was not an MS-13 gang member and you damn well know that,” Hogg said. “The administration admitted that it was wrong. In America, we have due process and we are a land of law and order. This administration keeps showing time and time again that they do not care what the Supreme Court says, they do not care about the rule of law and you cannot defend sending people to another country.”
There is risk in this. After all, this is America. It’s a plain reality that a lot of white people are going to look at a brown Spanish-speaking immigrant of Central American extraction as a gang member simply because they are terrible people. To them, men like Kilmar Abrego Garcia are already guilty of something on account of who they are.
But I think the tradeoff is worth it. By centering the smear, Hogg put ownership of it back on Reince Priebus’ shoulders, thus calling into question the character of a man who would stoop so low. “Oh, come on” was Priebus’ feeble retort to Hogg’s “and you damn well know that.”
The other benefit is robbing the Republicans of validation and the appearance of a consensus. It robs them of more chances to keep pushing and pushing with greater lies and smears and bad faith, until it’s impossible for the Democrats to take their own side in the fight.
Another thing that an older Democrat would have done that Hogg does not do is dismiss the lie as distraction. That word doesn’t get enough scrutiny. What it means is this: “I’m not going to bother debating racism with racists. Instead, I’m going to try appealing to their wallets.”
This thinking was evident in comments made to The Hill recently by an unnamed Democratic operative. “People can’t afford eggs, and … you’re flying to sit with someone who’s accused of being in a gang,” they said.
“Republicans have given us such an opportunity with DOGE and … with Trump tanking the economy. Obviously, you can walk and chew gum at the same time, but I don’t think we can take our eyes off the prize in terms of talking about real world impacts and how people are being hurt in their everyday lives by some of these policies.
“Democrats want to think that everyone has the same morals and values that we do, and we want to think that everyone’s outraged by the same things that we are and we want to be the ones to help people and stand up for the moral injustices. That doesn’t necessarily win elections though, and last cycle was proof positive of that. We need to step back and wait for someone to be deported who has a really compelling story that’s devastating that Average Joe’s upset about.”
Translation: when the Trump regime deports a white person, then we can talk. As long the subject is a brown Spanish-speaking immigrant of Central American extraction, all this is wasted effort and a distraction.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Abrego Garcia Family/Handout via REUTERS
I posted this to Bluesky last week and said it was a textbook example of Democrat conceding to white power. A shrewd reader demurred. “That's not conceding to white power. It is agreeing with white power.”
It’s also misreading the moment. More polls are showing majorities disapproving of the president’s handling of immigration (and virtually every other major issue). I don’t think that’s because voters have suddenly rediscovered their love for the rule of law. (They elected Donald Trump, after all.) What’s happening is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is generating a kind of “media ambience” that people can feel without actually understanding the details of his case. A similar ambience about prices (ie, eggs) informed the last election.
There’s already “a really compelling story that’s devastating that Average Joe’s upset about.” And Democrats like Hogg are refusing to accept Republican bad faith that might dilute that story’s impact.
Also read: 'Never so scared': Furious pastor berates cops after witnessing tasing of MTG constituent
This single thing could halt Trump's rampage — and it's out of his control
Federal agents, acting without even the decency of a signed warrant, stormed into Judge Hannah Dugan’s courtroom on Friday morning and dragged her away like a common criminal. No warning. No legal process. No respect for the law she had spent a lifetime upholding.
But they made sure the cameras were there, so America could see what they were doing. Because this was not about justice. This was about terror.
This was a warning shot aimed directly at the beating heart of America’s judiciary: “Fall in line — or you’re next.”
In that moment, the world’s oldest democracy lurched closer to the edge of authoritarian rule. In that moment, America became a little less free — and a lot more like the nightmare Vladimir Putin always hoped we’d become.
The FBI arrested Judge Hannah Dugan last Friday without even having a legal arrest warrant; this is as outrageous and police-state illegal as an administration can get.
And Pam Bondi’s performance Friday — after her federal agents swarm-raided this county judge — wasn’t staged for the general public.
The real audience was a very small, select group: America’s judges.
Their message is very simple: “Piss us off, judges, and you could end up in prison, too.”
Trump has already pacified the Article I branch of government — Congress — and now he’s in the process of pacifying the Article III branch, the Judiciary.
There are only 3 branches to our government: cowing both Congress and the nation’s Judiciary will leave only the president in charge of the entire country under all circumstances in all ways.
Nothing and nobody else will be able to stop him, short of a military coup (and he’s already decapitated the senior leadership of the military) or unending demonstrations in the streets (demonstrators who may soon face live ammunition).
That is called dictatorship. Real dictatorship. Putin-style dictatorship where you are punished for the smallest deviation from orthodoxy and can find yourself in prison or sued into bankruptcy if you dare speak out in public.
It appears more and more every day that Putin is Trump’s mentor, if not his handler. Trump is doing everything he can, with help from a South African billionaire, to destroy the historic American infrastructure (which has been an example for the world for 250 years) and turn us into the newest member of the dictators club, joining Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Hungary, North Korea, and the rest of the fascist and authoritarian world.
To get there, now that they’ve pacified every single Republican member of Congress (most recently, Don Bacon criticized Trump’s schizophrenic tariffs; a day later he started talking about retiring), they only have to seize control of the Judiciary, and then nothing except We The People will stand in their way.
Nothing. Will. Stand. In. Trump’s. Way. Except We the People. And he knows it.
Look at the striking parallels between Putin’s strategies and Trump’s actions:
From installing Trump’s loyalists in the military and the federal police agencies of the Department of Justice and FBI, to his open threats against freedom of the press, to the GOP’s efforts to rig elections and purge voters, Trump’s subversion of US democracy looks eerily familiar.
He’s taking pages directly from the autocrat’s handbook.
Trump has openly quoted and praised autocrats like Putin and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, who has presented his leadership in speeches to the GOP and CPAC as a model of an “illiberal” state.
Trump’s not hiding his admiration for dictators; he’s flaunting it. And now he’s putting the final stages of their script into action.
Trump’s movement toward authoritarianism follows “a known playbook. It’s unfolded in many other countries,” as journalist Anne Applebaum notes. “These are democratically elected leaders who characterize themselves or describe themselves as deserving of no opposition. So I am the true Hungarian, or I am the only real American.”
In a mere matter of weeks into his presidency, Applebaum says, Trump and his allies “have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy.”
The speed is shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. It only took Hitler 53 days to completely end democracy in Germany. Others, like Lukashenko, Orbán, Putin, Mussolini, Duterte, El-Sisi, and Erdoğan took longer (none longer than two years), but you could argue that Trump has been working at this project for 9 years now.
Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, who studies how democracies slip into authoritarianism, warns that we’re heading toward what experts call “competitive authoritarianism”: regimes that “constitutionally continue to be democracies” with regular elections and legal opposition, but where “systematic abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.”
Make no mistake about what’s happening: Trump and his allies are methodically working through a four-step process to establish complete autocratic control, which will turn America into a one-man dictatorship.
1. Terrorize Congress: Trump’s already largely succeeded here. Republican lawmakers now march in lockstep with his agenda, afraid to oppose him even when their consciences scream otherwise. The V-Dem Institute already warns that Trump’s actions are “extremely worrying” for American democracy.
2. Terrorize the Media: Trump has, as The Washington Post writes, “relentlessly attacked the free press, another pillar that allows democracies to stand above authoritarian regimes,” as political scientists have noted. “He has echoed the worst dictators in history, calling journalists the ‘enemy of the people.’” With help from Elon Musk and other billionaires, he’s creating a media and social media environment where truth itself is under assault. And last week his administration threatened to arrest journalists and charge them with treason, an offense for which they could be executed.
3. Terrorize Judges and Lawyers: What we witnessed Friday with the raid on a county judge and the arrest of a retired judge earlier in the week is just the beginning. The final step in this process will be intimidating the Supreme Court, and if Trump’s minions can first terrorize the entire federal judiciary, it will be much easier to terrorize members of the Court itself, just like Putin and Orbán have done. This follows dangerous cracks in democracy’s pillars that experts have been warning about.
4. Terrorize Citizens: Once the above institutions are captured and there’s no more Constitutional opposition to Trump, the final phase begins: crushing individual dissent through fear, persecution, and potentially violence. This is the playbook Malcolm Nance detailed in his work analyzing Putin’s strategies to undermine American democracy and has already started against immigrants and student visa holders. If history tells us anything, American citizens will be next.
Most of this is already in place; time is running out fast.
Trump and his fellow fascists know their time is running out because elections are coming in a handful of months and their popularity is already crashing. They are at maximum power right now, and it is already beginning to decline.
This is another reason why they are pushing so hard to frighten judges, so they can implement the final destruction of any Constitutionally-based opposition to Trump’s one-man rule.
If Trump can consolidate authoritarian rule as quickly as some other historical dictators did, the complete (albeit hopefully temporary) end of American democracy could happen very rapidly, possibly even in the next few weeks or months. The window for action is closing fast.
But there’s still hope, because we’re still We The People. As long as our protest movement continues to grow and demand a stop to the damage Trump and Musk are doing to our democratic republic, we may be able to slow or even stop this anti-American cabal and reclaim our republic.
Our protesting in the streets and reaching out to legislators may encourage resistance within the media and courts, and might even inspire a handful of Republicans to stand against this wannabe dictator.
When democratic institutions fail, the last line of defense has always been citizens willing to take to the streets. Ukraine provides the most powerful recent example of how a determined populace can rescue democracy from Russian-inspired authoritarianism.
During Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests in 2014, over half a million people joined demonstrations in Kyiv to defend democracy against creeping authoritarianism. Those protests ultimately ended Viktor Yanukovych’s Russia-backed puppet regime (and kicked out its Russian-funded American advisor, Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager) and became known as the Revolution of Dignity.
Ukrainians stood firm in the streets despite violence and intimidation, and their courage changed history.
Ukraine’s later Orange Revolution similarly empowered ordinary citizens to engage in mass protests, with some lasting continuously more than two weeks. This peaceful revolution successfully defended Ukraine’s democratic aspirations against Russian influence and showed the world that people power can overcome autocratic manipulation.
Putin fears democracy, particularly at his doorstep like in Ukraine and the Baltic states. He knows that democracy is contagious, and any spread near Russia, he believes, poses an existential threat to his autocratic rule. That’s why he invaded Ukraine, and that’s why he spent millions on social media trolls to support Trump’s election and his assault on our democratic institutions.
As Ukrainian historian Hanna Perekhoda warns, “If we let Russian authoritarians win, it will mean that the authoritarian forces also in our countries, in the U.S., for example, will grow stronger.”
If this assault on the Courts (and the implied intimidation of all judges including those on the Supreme Court) succeeds, and the media continues to bow down, the only thing left will be us in the streets.
People protest against Donald Trump, in Washington. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
The time for half-measures, “very strong letters,” and polite political disagreement has passed. We are watching in real-time as our 250-year experiment in democracy is being dismantled by a would-be dictator taking his cues from — or, at least, modeling his presidency on — Vladimir Putin.
This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan exaggeration. This is the stark reality facing our nation today. Fascism and dictatorship are at our doorstep.
Just last week, it was reported that Trump has now deported three American citizens, including a child taking cancer therapy.
Not content to just pull student visas and ask them to leave the country, Trump’s goons have been imprisoning students for writing OpEd articles for weeks. And now they’re show-arresting judges.
The arrest of Judge Dugan is not an isolated incident; it’s part a broader strategy to intimidate the judiciary and consolidate power.
When judges are arrested for upholding the principles of due process, the very foundation of democracy is at risk. This moment demands vigilance and action from all who value the rule of law.
The preservation of our democratic institutions depends on our collective response to such unprecedented challenges.
Buckle up, America. Democracy itself is on the line, and if the courts fall, we’ll be its last defenders.