The Commoditisation of Controversy: The Dark Side of Influencer Culture
Credit: Good Faces
In May of 2020, a young man in his early twenties accepted his uncle’s invitation to visit home only to find the police waiting for him. He had, using a fake account which he claimed to have grown to around fifty thousand followers before it was suspended, made derogatory comments about the former president, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, and his wife, Patience Jonathan. He would reportedly go on to spend eighty-four days in police detention before being released. This young man was Babatunde Olushola Thomas, the now self-acclaimed life coach.
When Shola returned to Twitter fame sometime later, he would no longer be the young man building influencer status by savaging the former president of Nigeria. No. Beside a few indirect comments, Shola’s new persona would garner him over four hundred thousand followers and a bestselling book at the time of writing.
Light-skinned and slight-looking, Babatunde Olushola Thomas has very expressive hands. An interview with Sahara Reporters, in the wake of his release from police detention in 2020, has him seeming somewhat soft-spoken, quick to throw his hands into forms and patterns to shape his point. Nothing about that Shola portrays the image of a man with the ability to herd a movement.
If anything, he seemed vulnerable and out of his depth, which isn’t a shock given the circumstances of his arrest and detention. It is also clear that his mockery of the former president was not a function of any burning thirst for activism since, in his own words, the jokes were just him “catching cruise” and the Twitter account was a big part of his livelihood. He made money off advertisements and sponsorships and the loss of his account was a big blow. Shola was, admittedly, in it for the money..
Nowadays, Shola styles himself a life coach. Through his social media activism and appearances on Twitter Spaces and other platforms like Clubhouse, he claims to teach the means to become a high-value man. In the quest to make men kings and give them game, Shola leads a crusade against ‘simps’ and ‘shitty women’.
A lot of Shola’s teachings are easily accessible self-improvement advice that have been pushed in various forms since before the internet. Calls for men to exercise, practice proper hygiene, ‘chase the bag’, develop a good dress sense, and improve their sense of self-worth have gone out since before Shola was born, and he is neither the most unique nor the most experienced of these voices even now. However, despite this, Shola has a firm hold on his audience. Shola’s four hundred thousand followers come from the same power that is steadily spurring the new breed of social media influencers. The power of controversy.
Shola is hard on men he calls ‘simps’, a word which Urban Dictionary defines as “someone who does way too much for a person they like”. Shola is also hard on the women these men simp for who he preaches are undeserving.. These views have garnered him a large share of the ‘alpha male’ market. That he is a mid-twenties self-certified life coach selling these views in thirty-minute consultation sessions of 200 dollars each also garners him another share of the market of people looking for the outrageous.
Shola may very well still be ‘catching cruise’, but he walks the fine line of creating and capitalizing on opportunity without exposing himself to risk. The Shola that parodied a former president is gone, but the new Shola, champion of ‘high value men’ and crusader in the war against simps, may remain relevant for a while to come.
By most indications, Uloma, on Twitter, doesn’t want the fame that comes with being an influencer, as evidenced by her Twitter account being locked for a while. Her tweets, however, directly contradict this notion by being incendiary. She trends every other week for her strong fringe feminist views which are, in many eyes, extreme and well over the border into misandry. Emotion comes through in her tweets, enough to cause readers to flinch and doubletake, and her wording almost actively encourages the more unflattering interpretations. Her follow-ups, if anything, add fuel to the flame.
Here are some of her tweets.
Her tweets inspire a lot of uproar and quite a bit of defense, too.
“On social media, people belonging to an idea hold on to each other,” one Gen Z user who declined to be named says. “It’s difficult to acknowledge that these influencers, the trending members of certain movements, are their own people too outside the movement, and that all their opinions and arguments do not unilaterally represent the umbrella movement. But movements are still somewhat fragile, and people feel the need to protect their own, even when they may be a bit extreme. Because, any attempt to say, okay, you’re going a bit too far, that gives counter-movements room to pounce.”
Whatever the result, Uloma’s tweets have people listening. Every post she makes is set upon by foes and allies alike, and her growing influence is there to use for whatever she may desire.
Malik and Valking are famous for making ‘savage tweets’. Malik is currently on the rise, with a new account, and a nose for finding the tastiest tweets to reply with his trademark savagery. Valking is a little older (his Twitter account was created in 2019) but he has much the same approach as Malik to much the same success.
All of this is pointing to a trend that isn’t new, but has definitely shifted in scope. Controversy has evolved from simply being one of many avenues, to being the universally acknowledged main road to influencer status. Almost nobody gets and holds internet virality by being stable. New influencers have to be even more outrageous, more polarizing, and push more controversial ideas to be noticed in a grueling, oversaturated cyberspace. Unlike the old breed, new influencers cannot just be incidentally extreme. What was once a growing trend is fast becoming a requirement.
Despite this, there are many young Nigerians seeking a small measure of internet fame who are not willing to ride any ideology waves to get there. Many of them have to work harder to create content. Without the vehicle of controversy, they have to build their following the hard way, by punching into the ether and hoping somebody notices. For every Sabinus bursting onto the scene after milling in the murk for a while, there are a million others remaining there either for lack of talent, resources or opportunity. For many, the temptation to pick a controversial idea and ride it to the top is rising every day. An anonymous respondent had this to say:
“Influencers have to become, essentially, highly distorted caricatures of the ideas they ride to prominence in order to build and keep a following. Shola could not simply have been another person giving masculinity-affirming life advice. Those people cannot hope to lead any movement beyond, maybe, a niche support group. Not in 2022. In essence, Shola had to be Shola to blow.”
Many other people have no compulsions about the path. Influence is wealth and power, and a lot of people want it. Twitter is prime hunting grounds for those seeking shreds of influencer power, and a rock thrown in any direction will hit a ‘hot take’ tailored to be as disruptive as possible.
Once, it was assumed a person had to first have influence to abuse it or be controversial, and the celebrity rising to power on the wings of controversy was the unicorn. Now, in the new culture of social media influence, people abuse influence they do not yet have to gain the one with which to hold their status, and the wings of controversy are the highway to heaven.