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🚨New paper🚨out in @socialmedia-soc.bsky.social w/ John Wagner and @jenny-oser.bsky.social 🎉 We all know who's a political influencer on social media, right? Well... we may THINK we do, but what we're actually measuring is very different. How different? 🧵👇

Definitions vary wildly in size – from a few hundred political influencers to 100,000 or more – and even within the same order of magnitude, they rarely capture the same political influencers (often <40% overlap).

The dimensions of influence are not interchangeable and have non-trivial relationships. E.g. Engagement selects those posting more frequently, but Elite status does not.

Importantly, upstream definitional choices fundamentally alter the downstream audience demographics. "Network Importance" influencers reach significantly older, whiter audiences, while Follower and engagement-based definitions yield significantly younger audiences.

The overarching story here is quite simple: To build generalizable knowledge about social media influencers, we need clearer, multidimensional frameworks (rather than relying on single-metric measures), and we need to be more transparent about what we actually measure.