Sponsored by the State: The Private Regulation of Government Influencers

The popularity of influencer marketing is ever growing. Based on parasocial relationships rooted in authenticity and relatability, the appeal of influencers is effectively used to promote commercial goods and services. This popularity is increasingly migrating outside of commercial advertising. In the past years, governments around the world have collaborated with influencers for public interest communication such as supporting wars, promoting Covid public health policies or financial literacy. Although entrenched in promoting the public good and facilitated by public funding, the dynamics of these collaborations remain very much unknown. Shedding light on how governments employ influencers can help us understand how commercial strategies shape the advertising of public goods as state propaganda. From a regulatory perspective, commercial advertising has been subject to a lot of rules relating to the content as well as the transparency of commercial messaging. Yet government communication—whether called propaganda, public service communication, or the advertising of public goods—has not been governed with the same level of clarity. This study explores comprehensive materials from 10 freedom of information requests on government influencer campaigns answered by the Dutch government between 2020 and 2024 (N = 1302 pages). Using qualitative content analysis, we focus on understanding the characteristics of advertising contracts between the government and the influencers in their service, in order to critically reflect on the transparency of the monetisation entailed by these transactions.