Influencer-enza

Influencers are taking over social media. They are people who make videos of their favorite subject — themselves — and hope the video goes viral. Their lives are not all that interesting, so they fake reality like a Kardashian’s plastic surgeon. And the unnaturalness of their alterations sometimes is just as obvious.

Jessica Fernandez is an influencer. She has nearly 56,000 followers on Twitch and 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. Last week she succeeded when a video she posted on Twitter went viral and received 2.6 million views. To put that in perspective, CNN got only 311,000 viewers in prime time on January 16. Anyone can beat CNN these days.

She had a tale to tell. Her plot was simple. Girl goes to gym to work out. Guy stares at her, approaches her, and freaks her out. She sought victimhood because it brings her sympathy and money. Her gain came at the expense of an innocent man who became an unknowing actor in her little fairy tale.

The New York Post gave her the headline she wanted: “Twitch influencer Jessica Fernandez films man staring at her ‘like a piece of meat’ at the gym.” The Rupert Murdoch-owned daily tabloid reprinted a story from one of his Australian papers.

The newspaper’s account read like a press handout from her. While it generously quoted her video (she said he stared at her “like a piece of meat”) the journalists did not appear to reach out to the man for his side of the story. Her side read like what I would expect a Southern belle to say in the antebellum. She said, “This guy kept making me extremely uncomfortable at the gym.

“This is why I’ll end up crying on stream. I feel so grossed out at times with the amount of sexualization I experience. Hopefully, this spreads awareness for girls who experience this type of treatment at the gym.”

It is the old strong, hard feminist reaching for a tissue routine. The Post’s one-sidedness went on for 14 paragraphs with quotes from tweets from twits who rallied behind her.

Not until Paragraph 15 did the story even hint at another side. It said, “A number of social media users claimed she was in the wrong, however.”

The story later said, “Daily Wire host Matt Walsh wrote, ‘I watched the whole video. The guy glances over a few times, probably wondering why she’s recording herself. Then he comes over and offers to help her rack the weights. She declines, he says, ‘Oh OK,’ and walks away. The end. She’s the problem here, not him.’”

Indeed, why do we assume he was interested in women? What I do know is he is buff and has been to the gym while she is a newbie. Others noticed too.

Blogger Liam Ho wrote, “TikTok Fitness Coach Joey Swoll is well-known within the TikTok fitness community for his work on combating toxic gym culture. He creates various educational gym content on TikTok, as well as responds to viral TikToks of individuals at the gym coming into question.”

Swoll tweeted, “If you watch the video, he sees that you struggle putting plates on the other side. Now any experienced lifter knows that when you have a barbell on the ground, it’s very difficult to put plates on. He sees that you struggled, being an experienced lifter he comes over and tries to help you, ’cause that’s what kind people do.

“Women are harassed in gyms and it needs to stop, but you are not one of them. An act of kindness or a glance does not make you a victim.”

In light of the backlash, Fernandez tweeted on Tuesday, “First of all, I want to apologize sincerely to the man at the gym where this all started. He didn’t do anything wrong to me and I blew our interaction out of proportion. I know many people think that I'm only apologizing because I got called out from the video I posted and this is half right. If I wasn’t called out for this video I wouldn’t have had the chance to learn from this mistake or even realize I made a mistake to begin with. When I first posted the video I felt I was completely in the right and I felt I was making a good attempt to connect and relate to my female audience who may have dealt with uncomfortable situations at the gym. And now after reading literally thousands of comments about me, the situation and the man in question it truly opened my eyes to how damaging this could have been for him. Men and women deal with very different problems in the realm of the opposite sex and after looking through the lens of an innocent man put in a situation like that. It honestly made me feel sick to my stomach with guilt.”

The tweet was a sincere, 923-word apology that thanked her critics. She also took down the video.

Others remain unapologetically narcissistic menaces to society.

NBC reported, “U.S. track and field star Sha’Carri Richardson claims she was removed from an American Airlines plane after she had an argument with a flight attendant.

“In a series of posts and stories on her official Instagram, the 22-year-old says that a male flight attendant asked her to get off a phone call, which she did before telling him that she didn't like his tone.”

NBC said the conversation went like this:

Richardson: I’m recording me but you jumped in my video so I caught you, because you jumped in my video.

Flight attendant: You can’t record.

Richardson: You’re harassing me at this point so I think you should stop, I think you should stop.

On and on it went. This kept the plane grounded. A fellow passenger sarcastically thanked her for making him miss his connecting flight.

Richardson replied, “Oh so you’re worried about a connection while a grown man is disrespecting me?”

As a matter of fact, she deserved no respect because she was disrespecting the attendant, the rest of the crew and the passengers by ignoring the rules. She should have shut up and recorded her video later. As my wife often reminds me, it is not all about you. That was not the lesson Richardson learned. Her Instagram video of the stunt got her 47,000 likes. She asked her minions, “Tell me if I’ll be wrong to pursue legal actions against the airline.”

The real victims were the other passengers. Maybe they should sue her. They certainly were glad to see her go.

Breitbart reported, “Olympic sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson posted a series of videos that she claims prove an American Airlines flight attendant harassed her. Still, the way her fellow passengers cheered during her removal from the flight seems to show few agreed with her complaints.

“The embattled Olympian posted her video to Instagram in which she immediately accused a flight attendant of harassing her when he walked by and let her know it was time to turn electronic items off because the plane was preparing to take off.”

The story also said, “She even curses at some of her fellow passengers when they express their frustration with her disruptions.

“Ultimately, when she gets up to leave the plane, some of the passengers applaud her removal.”

Conservatives who dismiss such posting as vanity do not understand what is going on. This is strictly business. It is marketing. Being a victim usually pays. Look at the $100 billion in aid and military equipment Zelensky just scored. That’s a thousand times more than the $90 million Black Lives Matter raised. The damage Zelensky and BLM did cost multiple times the loot they scored.

Besides money from social media, influencers can also score by living rent-free — not inside someone’s head but inside someone’s skyscraping apartment building with stunning views.

The New York Times reported, “Marketers have for years chased trendsetters who can shape consumer behavior with their recommendations, and influencers have used that demand to trade targeted posts for perks.

“That’s true in real estate, too, where celebrities have peddled hash-tagged images of luxury condos in exchange for payouts and swag. Just a few years ago, brokers were hiring models to attend open-house parties and paying people like the actress Tavi Gevinson in exchange for highly filtered photos hawking their properties.

“But the currency of these transactions is shifting. Today, the exchanges are more low-key, and cash rarely changes hands. Instead, developers simply offer niche influencers entry to their towers, and in return they get a direct line to a more targeted audience.

“At high-rises across the country, photographers, musicians and others are increasingly aligning their Instagram and TikTok accounts with these developers. For some, especially those who once had to resort to high jinks just to gain access to Manhattan’s most exclusive buildings, it’s now enough to be let in the front door.”

Of course, there is a downside to landlords who choose to comp rent for publicity.

People magazine reported, “The landlord of the Hollywood Hills home that formerly housed the creative collective Hype House is suing the group of TikTok influencers for breach of contract and for allegedly causing more than $300,000 in damages to his home.

“According to the lawsuit obtained by People, TikTok stars Thomas Petrou, Cole Hudson, Mia Hayward, Calvin Goldby, Patrick Huston, and Nicholas Austin are named as defendants in the breach of contract claim filed by landlord Daniel Fitzgerald.

“Fitzgerald told KTLA that the group allegedly caused more than half a million dollars in damages to the home's tilework and jacuzzi and were responsible for leaving water and roof damage.”

Imagine that. Narcissists do not care about other people. I will have to remember that.

But marketers are always looking for the next best thing, so expect this to last a while. Werner Geyser is a promoter of Influencer Marketing. He wrote, “An influencer is someone who has

• the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience.

• a following in a distinct niche, with whom he or she actively engages. The size of the following depends on the size of his/her topic of the niche.

“It is important to note that these individuals are not merely marketing tools, but rather social relationship assets with which brands can collaborate to achieve their marketing objectives.”

The obvious drawback in branding a product with an influencer is in how that influencer gained influence. Geyser warned people about mega-influencers and macro-influencers who have large followings. Judging by the antics of Jessica Fernandez and Sha’Carri Richardson, caution is warranted.

Geyser wrote, “In all reality, micro-influencers are the influencers of the future. The internet has led to the fragmentation of the media into many small niche topics. Even if you are into something relatively obscure, you are likely to find a Facebook group or Pinterest board devoted to it. And it is in these niche groups and boards that micro-influencers establish themselves as genuine influencers.”

Now this is where I am supposed to put down influencers as producing nothing. After all, I called this column Influencer-enza, a nod to the elitist sneer of affluenza in the 1950s. If only we could go back to that golden age.

But influencers do produce a product: victimhood. And influencers are siphoning ad revenue from traditional corporate media, which is why you should expect Disney, News Corp. and the rest to attack influencers as the movement grows.

Oddly, influencers mimic the mainstream media. They have a Hillaryan view of the world as they assure people that all their problems are because of racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamophobes — you know, the whole basket of deplorables. Trolling for victimhood by influencers is the social media version of Jussie Smollett and other race hoaxers. They create drama because there will always be an audience for self-pity.

As former heavyweight boxer Ed Latimore once tweeted, “The demand for racism in the U.S. is greater than the supply.”

Hoaxers seldom pay a price for their lies, but society does. We distrust each other more and have less empathy for real victims as the lies pile up. It is good that Fernandez regrets what she has done. She showed a sense of shame that is all too uncommon these days.

Tomorrow’s column is “With all due respect I am against dumb.”