Quality Content Creators and Left-Wing Influencers

This paper examines how counter-speech and political messaging intersect with the content creator economy in contemporary digital media environments. Addressing the ego-driven dynamics of influencer culture, the contentification of everyday life, platform regulations and algorithmic attention economy, and platform vulnerabilities, the paper maps the key contradictions, potentials, and strategic approaches in left-wing content creation. The analysis spans both the global English-speaking Internet and a recent wave of “quality” content creators in Turkish social media who became visible during the counter-politicization following the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor and President Erdoğan’s principal opponent, Ekrem İmamoğlu. Operating under significantly greater political pressures, these creators develop distinct strategies to navigate and breach both top-down and bottom-up forms of polarization in Turkey, including strategic depoliticization and embedding counter-speech within educational “quality” content. The integration of production, reproduction, and leisure under digital platforms enables new pathways for political dissent. Turkish digital spaces provide an important example to observe how dissent is expressed in everyday life despite heavy digital policing and staggering political risks. In this regard, I followed and interviewed several content creators who mobilized their platforms to protest the arrest of İmamoğlu in March 2025 and the subsequent repression against the opposition. These creators produce “quality” content on foreign language education, mental and sexual health, interior design, and hobbies, which address the reproductive needs of their audiences for professional and personal development and self-actualization. They use their platforms for economic gains through advertising revenues and promoting their paid services. They have follower counts between 100,000 to 500,000 on Instagram and are able to reach out to a relatively diverse audience because of the appeal of their fields of expertise. Their activism has required careful navigation of platform moderation to minimize algorithmic suppression, as well as strategically curating content to enter general recommender feeds. Some creators have exposed disparaging and hateful messages to draw attention to the platform vulnerabilities they encountered in this process, most often tied to their gender and sexual orientation. My interviews further revealed persistent fears of legal prosecution, which has become a defacto tool for silencing dissent in Turkey. Yet these creators also described how positive audience feedback provided morale and encouragement. Although they lost a number of followers because of their political content and received threatening and hateful messages, their protesting content brought them attention and a wider audience as well. Nonetheless, key questions remain regarding the sustainability and resilience of activism that depends on the loosely coordinated efforts of individual content creators. These are further complicated given that social media platform architectures promote investing in individual figures rather than the multiple voices and agencies of a collective. Along with discussing the potentials and possibilities for counter-hegemonic speech and activism through content creation and influencership, the paper will also open these complications to discussion.