(In)Visible politics: Influencers as brokers of the state on TikTok and Douyin

Social media platforms are central to influencers’ pursuit of online visibility, yet little is known about how influencers strategically engage with the state across different political regimes to sustain that visibility. We examine how influencers on video-sharing platforms, many of whom originate in ostensibly non-political domains, navigate political crises as moments of intensified visibility, focusing on TikTok in Israel and Douyin in China. Drawing on a content analysis of 589 videos produced during Israel’s 2023 judicial reform and China’s 2020 COVID-19 crisis, we operationalize three visibility strategies: (1) state glamorization, (2) patriotic expression, and (3) out-group derogation as analytic lenses for examining how influencers broker the state within platform infrastructures. We show that influencers mobilize these strategies both proactively, by capitalizing on crisis-driven attention, and reactively, by aligning with dominant political narratives to avoid marginalization in saturated visibility environments. Across both cases, influencers operate as situational political brokers, translating state-linked discourse into platform-native vernaculars. We theorize political brokerage as a visibility practice emerging from transactional relations among influencers, platforms, and the state across democratic and authoritarian regimes, arguing that during moments of crisis, the state itself becomes a strategic visibility resource for influencers.