How influencers can shape public imagination: Insights from Kenya and Central America
This is an edited version of some highlights of a conversation hosted by the Global Narrative Hive on 16 May 2024. The conversation brought together speakers across regions working with influencers and creatives to shift narratives on reproductive justice related topics, including abortion. Continue reading to find out more about what they’ve learned through their experience and in their own contexts about what works, what doesn’t and what we still need to figure out. For a recording of this session, contact fenya [at] narrativehive.org.
ARYA: I’m really excited about this conversation with Catalina and Mumbi. My name is Arya Karijo. I’m an activist based in Kenya, and I’m also a storyteller. I like to introduce myself as a human being that exists as a transgender woman, loves as a lesbian, and I share through an African lens.
MUMBI: Hi, my name is Mumbi Kanyogo. I’m based in Nairobi, Kenya. I work as a strategy communications consultant and I coordinate a project called Kenya Coms Hub. I consider myself a storyteller and writer, and I do mutual aid work in Kenya. I also look at the world through a feminist lens, and organize with a lot of socialist movements here and across the continent and diaspora.
Kenya Comms Hub began its work in 2022, starting with an analysis of what the narrative space looked like in relation to reproductive health rights in Kenya. We did audience research on how people respond to sexuality education and legal abortion. We weren’t just interested in what the opposition was saying, but also looking at how actors in this space; people who are activists, in CSOs, who are responding to opposition narratives and in building their own movements. So not just talking to feminists already in the movement but also how they’re talking to the ‘moveable middle’ in order to build our movements.
I am Catalina Ruiz. I’m a feminist, journalist and philosopher from Colombia based in Mexico City. I’m the founder of an NGO working for narrative change in favour of human rights in the region, specifically with young, urban audiences. We do this through two projects. One is Volcanicas magazine: a feminist, regional, digital magazine. We cover all of Latin America, Mexico, Colombia and all of Central America. It’s also a feminist training school for Latin American content creators. We find the most charismatic original voices in the region, and bring them into feminism and human rights. Many of these influencers want to be agents of change, but they don’t know how. We’re trying to build connections and to form influencers that are organically part of the social movements in the region. We’re already seeing them becoming communication leaders in their communities.
ARYA: In one of my past lives I used to be in tech, and they would say that the jobs we do today are not new. So influencing, changing perceptions, mindsets and politics, that job has been done before. The empress did it, our chiefs in our communities did it, and now influencers are doing it.
My curiosity is about how social media creators can influence things like religious beliefs, which someone might have held for their whole life. I have my own favourite influencers, and I’m surprised how much they’re able to make me rethink or reflect about beliefs, which I never thought would change.
CATALINA: Content about life and style has an ideology behind it. So you see the influencer, she’s speaking about her wedding dress, going to the chapel, and talking to the priest. All of this is in a way promoting a spiritual practice. We have a great example: a creator from Guatemala who lives in a small town, and is a Christian. She translates feminist ideas to the language of Christian communities in Guatemala. There’s another way of using Christian language, symbolism and values that is compatible with feminism. Three pillars of Catholicism are faith, hope and charity, which I feel are perfectly compatible with human rights movements. She has been very successful with this.
We’re building our social imaginaries on social media, especially through discussions about life and style that aren’t innocent. They give us ideas of what’s aspirational, what types of family we should want, and what values we should support. You can see for example how the “tradwife” movement is usually pretty religiously connected. Reinforcing gender roles through spirituality or through life and style practices is a trap, but it definitely has an influence. You can see it in young people right now.
MUMBI: One thing we realized is that people hold onto religion in our country, not necessarily for faith-based reasons, but for reasons connected to survival. Because of the collapse of the public welfare system, churches are often the places where people get access to food, to community, to services, which the state is not able to provide. So when people feel like you’re attacking their religion, they see a contradiction between what you’re saying is religion and their experience, since it’s provided them with resources that they wouldn’t have had. It’s seen as an attack on the community.
We’re also seeing a lot more religious messaging from men than women. Abortion is more of a survival question for many women, rather than a philosophical one, as opposed to men who tend to philosophise around this because it doesn’t necessarily affect them. We started to wonder to what extent this might be a performance, because in DMs we see a lot more allowance, even among older men. It’s young men often using religious framing to shut down conversation around controversial issues.
When I think of the threat of social media I don’t think of the organized actors, for example, Family Watch International. I think about incels. They’re not organized, so it’s difficult to figure out who to fight. As feminists, we don’t always have the right response to actually stop young men and boys especially from being radicalized.
ARYA: In both cases, it’s not really about religion, right? Whether it’s an influencer connecting lifestyle with faith or a patriarchal man connecting religion to his position in society or a woman who’s part of the church group, defending her source of financial support and community… Religion is being used in a particular way, for example in the US to “Make America Great Again”, or here in Kenya our President said he was “prayed into power”. But when the Pope says we should respect LGBTQ+ people, he’s dismissed as misguided.
Another thing I’m curious about is personalities. Does centering an individual or personality work anymore? Or can we make anyone into a social media personality?
Mumbi: In the context of LGBTQ rights, since it’s a controversial issue, it’s often associated with foreign donors. People derail the conversation by saying: “you have been paid by so‑and‑so”, while in fact lots of people are paid to engage with social media. It’s not only on social justice issues, but, of course, that’s the tactic that’s used to derail the conversation to stop it from even beginning.
What I realised is that it’s more about the quantity of micro-influencers, instead of people with huge platforms. We try to create networks of audiences. As opposed to having one influencer with a following of 500,000 people, we get together a group of smaller ones with 5,000 or 10,000 followers. The idea is to get many different influencers with a network of followers instead of having one. We found that people were more willing to listen to the message if it was by someone they had interacted with before, because there is more trust. We need influencers that can create a sense of comfort in the audience’s mind, so they’re willing to listen to the message.
Arya: I love that — it’s like a swarm of bees instead of one big bird! It’s interesting to see different people delivering the same message. It’s almost like peer‑to‑peer influence.
CATALINA: There’s part of being a good content creator that you can’t teach, because on social media you only have 3 seconds to engage. The first thing that you need is that when people see you for those 3 seconds, they stay. It’s not about how normatively pretty you are, it can be about anything. It’s a very “je ne sais quoi” thing that you can’t put your finger on, that you can’t teach.
The second thing is that visibility doesn’t necessarily equal influence. It sometimes does, and it definitely helps. But, for example, when you have influencers that have 10,000 followers, which are what we call micro-influencers, their engagement is much higher than an influencer that has 100,000 followers. That’s because she’s not going to be able to answer messages and read everything to then tailor her content. As you gain followers, you lose engagement and you have more distance with your audience. Those social relations are very influential on your vote and what you’re thinking. It’s information that’s probably getting to your family and your immediate social group. These are the people that are likely to influence your decisions in a democracy.
Social media is definitely personality driven. You can see the result of that in recent elections. Sometimes you don’t even have to put out something with ideas, it’s just nonsense that goes viral, and that might give you a chance at the presidency. You can see this with Milei in Argentina, or Trump. Usually what they have is very controversial personalities and that really works, because they generate conversations. How can you cover Trump without giving him more visibility and reach? Not covering it and ignoring it doesn’t work either, so there’s quite a challenge in the way that information is distributed today through social media.
Everyone seems to be against polarisation and we’re told you should put out content that is not polarising. Yes, you can do that, but are the algorithms going to show it? They very well might not… So we are stuck in this situation where the mechanism of how information gets distributed has changed with algorithms that create echo chambers that have taken the place of the public arena of discussion.
Mumbi: Social media is a lot about performance. Someone might agree with you, but because they’re being witnessed by their peers, they’re unlikely to be willing to shift their opinion in public. So we heavily invested in moderation as well. Aside from influencers putting out content, thinking critically about the private space like DMs as an opportunity to take the conversation further, in a way that people might not otherwise be as open to.
When you push controversial content, you also run the risk of all your content being disengaged with. So we couched the topic of abortion within our larger conversation on sexuality education, because there are common narratives underlying all topics connected to reproductive justice.
Catalina: Years ago in Colombia we launched a digital campaign using the hashtag #JuntasAbortamos. People told stories of how they accompanied someone’s abortion. It was a beautiful campaign, because it shared friendship and solidarity stories, rather than exposing victims. However, you couldn’t do this in Central America, where abortion is completely criminalised. In places where we have more liberal laws, you have to push the bar. Previously the narrative came from a place that was miserable. Instead with #JuntasAbortamos, we said that women get abortions, that it’s normal, and it’s not because they’re victimised necessarily. Sometimes women get abortions with their friends, they watch a movie, they ask for a pizza, and they stay for the weekend, and that’s it. It’s uncomfortable and can be painful, but it’s not worse than forced maternity. We moved the bar to talk about how everybody has abortions and how many weeks we should give them. This strategy was used before the court ruling that gave us abortion until the 24th week. We probably wouldn’t have been able to achieve that if we hadn’t banalised abortion. That normalisation was very controversial, but ultimately helped move the discussion a bit to our side, towards the number of weeks, instead of whether abortion is even legal.
Ecuador is a very conservative society, but we had a content‑creator who did makeup and clothes. It was very interesting because it was not high end but for people who were working class and didn’t have much money. There was also a lot o.f body positivity in this space. In her seminars, attendees began sharing stories about domestic violence, because she had built a safe space. She then connected them with organizations who could provide support. In building trust, she built bridges so her audience would come to her. These sorts of strategies are very interesting, and work well in places where it’s very restrictive.
ARYA: Groups spent very little on the influencers here, but had a huge effect in pushing back against reproductive policies. How do we position that and how much money do we need to make this workable?
Catalina: How much money do we need for this? We’re human rights defenders, and we’ve done this without financing and money, but that is not sustainable in the long run. We really need the global funding community to invest in narrative change. We already see a lot of investment in policy, strategic litigation, and research, but we really need funding for narrative change, for content creation on social media. In the human rights movement it’s still viewed as something that is collateral, adjacent, an afterthought, and it’s definitely not.
There’s an ideological battle on social media. People are getting their news from social media, and not going directly to journalists. We also need funding for other forms of journalism that are reaching young people that have feminist values. That is really a game changer. We have to create good, valuable information and disseminate it in a creative and dynamic way.
MUMBI KANYOGO: We had a very restrictive budget. We just need more funding for these kinds of things. The most important part is to generate information about what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully it will demonstrate to people who have influence in resourcing that it’s actually a useful strategy to be used to shift people’s ideas.
