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Javnost - The Public, Vol. 33 - 2026, No. 1
Popular Culture as a Vehicle for Identity Representation: Social Media Influencers, Collective Identity Portrayals, and Audience Engagement
Social media influencers—regular people who become famous through successful self-presentation on social media—intertwine entertainment with socio-political narratives in their communication. In this content, they display collective identities like sexual or religious identities. These collective identity portrayals (CIPs) could foster the visibility of marginalized groups and shared meaning-making but may also reinforce stigmatization. This quantita- tive content analysis investigates how YouTubers identified in a prior youth survey (N = 1829) portray collective identities in their political videos (N = 267). Our findings reveal that most (67.79%) of these videos contain at least one CIP. Furthermore, videos containing political and religious CIPs receive more comments, suggesting that collective identities may trigger collective action. Finally, while religious and gender CIPs are embedded in an emotional context, sexual CIPs co-occur with incivility. These findings align with the idea that collective identities in digital public spaces are expressed through personal experiences without formal gatekeeping. Notably, many sexual CIPs referred to minorities, underscoring the assumed vis- ibility of underrepresented groups on social media. However, their presence alongside incivil- ity contradicts the assumption that these spaces may approach such issues in a more positive way compared to the discourses dominant in legacy media.