a huge audience today could mean little in terms of human enthusiasm—the majority of followers might be bots, hate-followers, and dead profiles, as evidenced by low engagement on the user’s actual posts. Moreover, now that social media has dominated culture for more than a decade, many big accounts belong to figures of an earlier era of notoriety;... See more

The large numbers don’t quite mean what they used to as signals of relevance or clout, as social media has become more aged, more manipulable, and more automated by artificial intelligence.