Donald Trump’s appearances on the podcasts of Joe Rogan and Theo Von, among others, have been widely seen an important part to secure his second term in office.

But while Trump Thinking about alien life on Mars with Rogan, he has a group of acolytes who appear on dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller niche podcasts hosted by right-wing content creators who usually don’t talk about politics.

As it is, just six days before the election, Kash Patel, the man who is now struggling to run the FBI, is over. SHOWS on Disappointing Discussions livestream, a fringe, QAnon-infused show hosted on a platform called Pilled.

“The Deep State exists,” Patel told the audience. “This is a Democratic-Republican uniparty swamp monster machine.”

At the time, there was no solid evidence behind an idea in the Trump campaign appeared to understand innate: Social media creators, especially those who don’t usually talk about politics, have a unique ability to engage their audience.

Now we have evidence.

A new one reportshared exclusively with WIRED and published today by researchers from Columbia and Harvard, is a first-of-its-kind study designed to measure the impact that influencers and online creators can have on their audiences.

The study was conducted with 4,716 Americans aged between 18 and 45, most of whom were randomly assigned to a list of progressive content creators to follow. For five months, from August to December 2024, these creators produced non-partisan content designed to educate followers rather than clearly advocating for a specific political point.

The results show that exposure to these progressive-minded creators not only increases general political awareness, but also shifts followers’ policy and partisan views to the left.

In contrast, a placebo group that was not assigned any creators to follow but was allowed to scroll through social media as normal “showed significant movement to the right,” which the researchers said was related to proper leaning on social media networks.

For the authors of the study, and experts who analyzed the research, the findings confirm that not only are today’s influencers potentially more powerful than traditional media, but content creators who rarely share political content may be the most powerful of all.

“The research confirms what a lot of people have hypothesized, which is that content creators are a powerful political force, and they will absolutely play a big role in the 2026 midterms, and they will play an even bigger role in the 2028 election,” said Samuel Woolley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies digital propaganda.

The Politics Paradox

As well as trying to prove that social media influencers are able to shape public opinion, the researchers also want to know if creators are more or less influential if their content is more overtly political.

To do this, the researchers randomly assigned study participants a list of creators to follow, with some assigned creators who primarily posted about political issues, while others were assigned creators who were largely apolitical in their output.