Popular Culture as a Vehicle for Identity Representation: Social Media Influencers, Collective Identity Portrayals and Audience Engagement

Social media influencers (SMIs)—personalities who become famous through their successful self-presentation on social media—nowadays intertwine entertaining content with socio-political issues in their public communication. Through their self-expression and portrayals of others, they display diverse collective identities such as national, sexual or religious identities. These collective identity portrayals (CIPs) could increase the visibility of marginalized social groups, but may also contribute to their stigmatization. In this quantitative content analysis, we investigate how SMIs identified in a prior youth survey (N = 1829) portray collective identities in their political videos on YouTube (N = 267). Our findings reveal that the majority (67.8 %) of these videos contained a CIP. Furthermore, our results suggest that videos containing political and religious CIPs receive more comments. Finally, while religious and gender CIPs are embedded in an emotional context, sexual CIPs co-occur with incivility.