Inauthentic influencers potentially reach millions with manipulative content

Ultimately, the IDJC identified 158 networks of these accounts collectively representing $8.5 million in ad spending and 504 million impressions from September 2023 through April 2024.

An impression is a count of every time a post appears on a user's screen while scrolling on a social network—whether or not they liked, shared, commented, or interacted with it at all. It provides the broadest possible picture of the impact a single post may have had on users.

For comparison, the analytics service Databox estimates that the entire apparel and footwear industry achieved 460,000 impressions via Facebook ads in one month in 2023. If extrapolated over the period of the IDCJ study, that could amount to roughly 3.68 million impressions—a fraction of the more than 500 million impressions made by inauthentic influencers.

Researchers categorized pages according to independent reviews by team members, Google searches to determine political party affiliation, and the Ad Fontes media bias scale . The team found that conservative-leaning pages spent $2.1 million more on ads over the period studied and recorded 315.4 million more impressions than progressive-leaning pages. And accounts falling into these ideological categories targeted different groups of Meta users across Facebook and Instagram.