In the age of social media, anyone, at any time, can rise up to become an influencer.
And they can encourage the masses to do any number of things. Try makeup or read a “hot” new novel. Social media has been a huge point of leverage for musicians or activist or artists (sometimes all three in the guise of a single person) to make their voices heard.
But the intersection of social media and cryptocurrencies — which, depending on how you look at it, are new payment vehicles for the masses — is a bumpy one.
As profiled in CNBC this week, cryptocurrency creators, who ostensibly are out to educate the masses, are finding it tough sledding as their videos are being taken off TikTok. This summer the company put in place a mechanism that flags or bans videos from promoting financial services and products such as cryptocurrencies. In at least some cases, those creators/promotors have said that they will consider taking their activities to YouTube or other platforms.
Beyond the (we would think slight) ripple effect of driving at least some users to rival platforms, there’s a larger issue here for TikTok and by extension other social media juggernauts. When is the line crossed where promotion — that key activity of social influencers as they seek to be, well, influential — becomes harmful to the public at large?
It’s interesting to note that the TikTok mechanism disallows the use of terms like “Binance” or “decentralized finance.” Bitcoin’s a no in a video, it seems. The bans have what we would consider to be speed bumps, which means that the creators are unable to post new content for a period of time that can last for a day or as long a week.
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Caveat emptor goes the old saying. One might be reminded of the days gone by when stars like Floyd Mayweather touted initial coin offerings (ICOs). Now, he and others have been advocates of cryptos. Perhaps not surprisingly, Kim Kardashian West has been known to tout a crypto or two, too.
As noted this year, mega-presences such as Elon Musk and others have the power to move crypto awareness and prices. Dogecoin is only a visible exponent of the craze.
See also: Mainstream Acceptance On The Horizon For Bitcoin?
But in the age of influencers, as AU10TIX CEO Carey O’Connor Kolaja said in a PYMNTS interview, we need to make sure that influencers are credentialled to speak on certain topics.
“I’d love to draw the analogy to payments,” she said. “At the end of the day, you’re given a credential that effectively means that you can borrow money — perhaps on a credit card or through some alternative form of lending.”
Read more: In The Age Of Social Media, Influencers Need Digital IDs And Verified Credentials
We would think that the credentials would apply, where social media and cryptos are intertwined, to those who have real experience with buying and selling them, who make the risks known and explicit, who provide some educational information as well.
As PYMNTS found in the May Cryptocurrency Payments Report: How Consumers Want To Use It To Shop And Pay, a BitPay collaboration, 12 percent of consumers own cryptos, and as many as 18 percent of consumers would use crypto to make a purchase.
See more: How Consumers Want To Use Crypto To Shop And Pay In 2021 And After
