This book shows that seemingly harmless social media feeds are powerful engines of distorted reality

When information floods every feed and traditional gatekeepers lose credibility, audiences default to tribal trust – believing what their group believes, following voices that feel familiar. Influencers fill this vacuum not through expertise but through emotional proximity. They don’t need credentials; they need consistency. They don’t cite sources; they cite lived experience. And in a landscape where verification costs exceed the reward of truth, their repeated presence becomes its own form of evidence.

The influencer’s power lies not in what they know but in how they make audiences feel, i.e., seen, validated and part of a shared mission. This is the architecture of modern influence: authenticity engineered, intimacy at scale, conviction manufactured through regularity. What once required institutional authority – the credibility to shape public opinion – now requires only algorithmic persistence. The more someone appears on your feed, the more trustworthy they seem. Repetition becomes reliability; familiarity becomes truth.

The influencer economy promised to democratise voice and in many ways it did. A Delhi home cook, a small-town fitness enthusiast, a college comic: each found an audience legacy media never would have granted. That has turned persuasion into a profession, far beyond the old model of celebrity endorsements.

Where a Shah Rukh Khan Cola ad was episodic, today’s creators maintain an ambient presence – posting daily, replying to comments, building parasocial relationships that feel like genuine friendship. This “as-if” intimacy, first described by mid-20th-century sociologists Horton and Wohl, lowers scepticism and heightens compliance. As sponsored content feels organic rather than purchased, it can persuade more effectively than traditional advertising – reading like advice from a trusted peer.

Therein lies the paradox. The more manufactured the message, the more authentic it can appear. Influencers make orchestration invisible, blending brand with story, ideology and lifestyle. This is what scholars call performative authenticity. They don’t just sell products; they sell identities. Identities connect people because we naturally gravitate toward our in-groups; those we perceive as “like us”. Social Identity Theory in social psychology explains how group memberships shape both self-perception and loyalty, while the principle of homophily shows why similar people cluster together. Within these networks, eating habits, mundane problems and beliefs naturally align.

Influence here speaks many tongues (Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Assamese) and carries the rhythms of region and caste. Early content on platforms was practical – makeup tutorials, exam tips, home cooking. Then came the commentariat and the wellness wave, where advice sometimes blurred into overreach. Globally and in India, the pandemic’s “infodemic” showed how health and wellness creators could amplify oversimplified or misleading claims, illustrating the power (and risk) of trust-at-scale.

Alongside rose the spiritual influencer. Figures such as a Sadhguru or a Baba Ramdev – whose massive cross-platform followings illustrate how sermon, sustainability and self-branding merge in one scroll, spawning thousands of vernacular micro-creators who mix myth with motivation and at times, politics. The result is moral outsourcing; when a favoured creator in his “as if friendship avatar” frames geopolitics or religion “in your plain language with cinematic ease”, followers treat them as hybrid authorities. Half-friend, Half-guru.

Digital creators aren’t simply making content. They are manufacturing context – turning posts into cues for what to feel, think and do. Today, millions of creators tap billions of viewers, weaving a dense, always-on network of persuasion. In this era of informational storms, influence flows openly and intricately through a web of follows, shares, stitches and duets.

Smartphone influencers now sit at the switchboard of persuasion: political parties seed briefs to creators, creators translate them into reels and reels turn into cues for belief and behaviour. Campaigns, be they political, social or economic are openly tapping creator reach. Some influencers even admit to paid election videos saying it doesn’t hurt their audience, because parasocial trust delivers messages past citizens’ defences. The effect compounds when synchronised emotion floods the feed. An example is events surrounding the Ram Mandir inauguration and how it framed ideology as inevitability – with unpaid celebratory reels algorithmically amplified into a chorus.

Regulators did notice the deviation; ahead of voting in 2024, after the inauguration, the ECI issued advisories on responsible social-media use and rapid removal of fake/synthetic content. An acknowledgement that influencer distribution now shapes the electoral weather. In short, the creator stack – persona → algorithm → community → monetisation – has become a conveyor for civic messaging. Whether that mobilisation is good or corrosive depends on what’s riding the rails. At scale, synchronised influence can energise participation or tilt voters inside echo chambers that quietly dismantle democratic deliberation.

The new influencer shows the unedited take, visible fatigue and spontaneous laugh; all of which signal transparency. As authenticity research shows, carefully managed disclosures and passionate displays increase engagement even when the performance is strategic. In this environment, influencers react first. They set the emotional mood of events long before journalists report the facts. This is because content that triggers strong feelings spreads fastest, coordinated reels, whether celebratory or derogatory, race across feeds and leave little room for nuance to survive.

The task ahead is to build counter-norms – receipts-first formats, friction for hot takes and platform/product nudges; that can preserve pluralism without surrendering the speed that makes digital publics possible.

It’s called a feed for a reason. It keeps feeding – your time, emotion and need to belong. Apt for platforms whirring through a digital storm, the feed never sleeps. It operates on the same logic outlined in earlier chapters; algorithms reward what provokes, amplify what travels fastest and train users to participate not through conviction but through visibility. In this architecture, patriotism also is performative – measured not in sacrifice but in shares.

The culture has extended far beyond professional influencers. During the pandemic, Prime Minister Modi’s “9 pm 9 minutes” appeal asked citizens to light diyas and candles to salute frontline workers. Doctors, engineers, stockbrokers, even neighbourhood WhatsApp admins joined in – each documenting their participation, finding their own audience of likers, sharers and admirers. Balconies glowed and phone screens recorded terraces glimmering with diyas. Participation became visibility, citizenship became content. What emerged was a new social contract: to be seen is to belong. Those who didn’t post risked being marked as absent, indifferent, even disloyal. The ritual wasn’t about the frontline workers – few of whom received meaningful policy support – but about the ritual. It was a collective performance of unity, algorithmically amplified and emotionally satisfying, one that substituted symbolic gesture for substantive action.

Sociologist Sherry Turkle observed in Alone Together, “We expect more from technology and less from each other.” The diya-lighting became a case study; millions performed solidarity through their screens, though the gesture required nothing beyond a smartphone and nine minutes. It offered the emotional satisfaction of collective action without the inconvenience of collective organising. It was patriotism optimised for the feed – instant, shareable and utterly frictionless.

In this age of infinite connectivity and endless scrolling, being online is synonymous with being seen. To like, share, subscribe, forward, edit or repost are no longer casual gestures – they are acts of digital citizenship. Each click becomes a data point, each interaction is recorded, analysed and fed back into the algorithmic loop. Users are no longer anonymous participants but categorised subjects – sorted, tagged and profiled into ever-narrowing bands of loyalty and dissent. Patriotic feeds blur the line between entertainment and enlistment. They reward engagement with belonging and train attention to serve the cause that shouts loudest. As mentioned earlier, this builds the trust cage – an environment where credibility floats indistinguishably among genuine conviction, performative allegiance and algorithmic amplification. Users scroll through a landscape where every post could be a sincere belief, paid promotion or bot-generated noise and all will arrive with equal force.

The result is a flattening of discourse. Complex questions about agricultural policy, freedom of expression or public health collapse into binary choices. You’re either with us or against us, patriotic or propagandist, Indian or anti-national. The feed doesn’t have room for ambivalence; it demands declaration. And because visibility rewards certainty over doubt, the loudest voices dominate while the thoughtful ones fade into algorithmic obscurity. What makes patriotic feeds particularly potent is their fusion of affect and ideology. Unlike traditional propaganda which announces itself as persuasion, these feeds operate through emotional adjacency. A reel celebrating Diwali seamlessly transitions into a clip about border security, a cooking video ends with a call to buy local and a fitness influencer’s workout tips conclude with praise for indigenous wellness traditions. The message is never overt – it’s ambient, woven into the rhythm of daily content consumption. The message may not even be true – it may be misleading, selectively framed or carrying a dubious emotional charge. Yet it still will shape people’s minds and behaviours, because belonging binds people more cohesively into one voice than the discomfort of the bitter truth ever can.

This is influence at its most sophisticated, not telling audiences what to think but training them how to feel. Users scroll through their feeds experiencing a continuous emotional narrative such as pride, solidarity, belonging that links consumption to conviction. They don’t realise they’re being persuaded because the persuasion feels like participation. They’re not being lectured, they’re being included, where inclusion is the scarcest commodity in the attention economy. In a fragmented society where traditional institutions like family, community and faith have weakened, the feed offers a substitute: digital belonging. To forward a patriotic message is to signal membership. To post on Republic Day is to prove you care.

Many times, in the patriotic compilations, real incidents are seamlessly spliced with mislabelled or doctored clips from other countries, turning aesthetic pride into a carrier of quiet falsehoods.

The performative patriotism also carries costs. How can we distinguish genuine conviction from strategic posting? When celebrities synchronise their solidarity, how much of it is belief and how much is brand protection? When millions light diyas on command, are they expressing shared values or simply performing participation to avoid being marked absent?

The feed trains us to see patriotism as something we do rather than something we are – a series of gestures, posts and likes that accumulate into visibility. But visibility is not virtue. Performance is not a principle. The danger is that in optimising patriotism for the feed, we hollow out its meaning, reducing it from a complex commitment to community and justice, into a frictionless, shareable aesthetic that demands nothing but a like.

Excerpted with permission from Forwarded As Received: How Misinformation Turns Viral, Violent And True, Saadia Azim, Simon and Schuster India.