In “Chronically Online,” columnist Chloe Shannon Wong ’28 spotlights Stanford students immersed in the world of the Internet.

It’s 2018, and Fortnite is all the rage. Harry and Meghan just tied the knot at Windsor. “Black Panther,” BTS and Beychella (Beyonce x Coachella) are dominating pop culture — and DIY slime has taken the internet by storm.

Among the foremost proponents of the goopy, viral toy is 12-year-old Jenny Huynh ’27. She’s nurturing the source of her burgeoning fame — a YouTube channel called Jenny Slimey, named after Huynh’s toy slime company. 

At first, Huynh’s YouTube channel purely promoted her business. But after commenters said they liked her personality, Huynh graduated to vlogging her daily life. 

Six years and two channels later, Huynh has a collective 15 million fans, 1.5 billion views and 50-plus influencer partnerships across platforms. There are several terms that could describe Huynh: content creator, social media pro, online celebrity…

Influencer. 

As a group, their very existence is polarizing. Can one person really sway millions? Should we trust “authenticity” conveyed from behind a screen? And what does it mean to be an influencer?

“The answer is really ambiguous,” said Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. According to Hancock, influencing involves impacting an audience outside of our social network of family and friends.

Intention matters. Impressive metrics alone do not make an influencer.

Got starpower?

Huynh’s eponymously-named second channel documents a wide range of topics: life at Stanford, Blackpink concerts, plane flights to Jakarta, among others. Born and raised in Vietnam, Huynh primarily produces content in her native language and has become “an academic role model” for Vietnamese kids as she promotes “good practices” in videos.

She hopes viewers glean personal value from her content. “It’s very corny, but I always tell [my followers] to be themselves, and remind them that it’s okay to be different and express themselves,” she said.

The analytics don’t lie — people connect with Huynh. But why do some influencers rise above the fray, while others remain obscure?

That, Hancock said, is the “million dollar question.” 

“There’s been a number of things linked to popularity,” Hancock said. “One is [whether influencers are] interesting; [if] they’re doing content that people find amusing [and] relevant to their interests or passions.” 

But there’s another component. “Does that person seem to come across as themselves on a regular basis?”

“I try not to fake things,” Huynh said. “Authenticity is what people like most in the long run.”  

For Huynh, social media is similar to a part-time job. She’s strategic with her output and time. If a video involves 20 hours of work, but doesn’t receive high viewership, Huynh re-evaluates her approach to content creation. 

“I remember I made a video with 2,000 views [early in my career], and I was like ‘wow, I went viral,’” Huynh said. As her following grew, though, so did the pressure to succeed. At times she considered getting 200,000 views a “failure.”

But she’s realized that “at the end of the day, what really matters is the people I impacted.”

Reflecting on her career, Huynh shared a common refrain in the social media community:

“It’s easy to get popular, but hard to stay relevant.”

Fame is fickle. Many creators struggle to sustain a long-time fanbase in a world of shifting interests and short attention spans. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Huynh has lasted years in the game.  

Writing code, breaking barriers

“if i had to speak about love, i’d tell them about compsci,” wrote Athena Coco Hernandez ’27 in a recent TikTok post. Filled with Stanford-centric content and trendy hashtags (#collegelife, #womaninstem), Hernandez’s profile depicts sorority rush, Arrillaga steak nights, CS 103 and more.

Initially, Hernandez’s account (@athenachernandez) focused on college applications. At Stanford, she switched gears and began producing college lifestyle content, a gig that can be exhausting. 

“You always have to be ‘on,’” said Hernandez, who has 30,000 followers. “I’d be in class trying to pay attention…[thinking] ‘Oh my gosh, I need to get a clip for my blog.’ That shouldn’t be my priority as a student, but it’s the cost that comes with creating content.” 

As a Latina woman, Hernandez rarely sees people like her in computer science-related online spaces. She’s motivated to increase representation one TikTok at a time. 

“I hope my viewers are inspired by the things I do, whether that be my work ethic or continuing to pursue a degree that’s mostly [male-dominated],” Hernandez said. 

“I feel this so much,” someone wrote as a comment on one of Hernandez’s posts. “I took CS and was the only girl.” 

One of the upsides of social media is that “[Influencers] have sort of broken that hegemony of who [gets] to speak,” Hancock said. Historically, those chosen few were white males. With the advent of influencing, “we have people that have democratized that in many ways…we have so much more diversity of thought and opinions and ideas.”

But Hernandez doesn’t think of herself as an influencer. “Content creator” is a more appealing term: “It feels more personable…less isolating.”

Social media politics

On TikTok, Jaeden Clark ’26 (@milfluvjae) is a self-described “professional yapper.” Clark’s TikToks dissect pertinent issues concerning politics, gender, race and class amid rapid-fire, biting commentary. On President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 presidential race, for instance: “I’m joyous. It was about damn time.”

Clark joined TikTok during the pandemic with an apolitical page. But after a compelling conversation with his anthropology teacher about race, something sparked in Clark’s mind. What if I post that on TikTok?

My first TikTok was “just a wall of text [with] me behind it, hitting a dance,” Clark said. “And it ended up blowing up.”

Today, Clark has 260,000 followers and 50 million views.

“You can witness my own radicalization over the course of my content,” he said. Clark aims to produce videos everyone can resonate with and learn from. But the TikToker does have a specific audience in mind: Black American youth like his younger self who grapple with the topics discussed. 

Clark takes special pride in the personal impact he’s had on people like him. According to Hancock, these fan-influencer connections are known as parasocial relationships. While these bonds are unorthodox and not strictly real, they’re emotionally potent nevertheless. 

“There isn’t necessarily an anticipation that you’d hang out or do things together, but it doesn’t mean it’s not a relationship,” Hancock said. “Especially if somebody’s feeling hurt, or they see some part of themselves in [the influencer], [parasocial relationships] can be really quite powerful.”

Clark recalled a direct message sent by a 12-year-old Black girl: “‘I really have been watching your content for years now. And it’s really changed the way that I think.’”

More than arbitrary analytics, “it’s stuff like that that I think is priceless,” the TikToker said.

All that glitters

Though rewarding, being an influencer takes its toll. The role requires time, energy and constant creativity. It can breed an unhealthy desire for success. And it changes how people connect. At Stanford, others assume they know Clark’s beliefs before they know him.

“My TikTok self isn’t a lie or a facade,” Clark said. But people forget that politics aren’t Clark’s sole interest. “At the end of the day, I’m a Black kid from D.C. who talks and acts like it.”

By emphasizing certain traits, social media flattens our personalities, perhaps explaining why influencers are often deemed “fake.”

“I just don’t think that’s right,” Hancock said. “A lot of influencers show real aspects of their lives, including mental health struggles. It really is too broad of a brush to paint [all influencers] as deceptive.”

So are influencers a benefit to society? Hancock doesn’t think their contributions are “all or nothing.”

Most influencers exert a benign or positive impact, though there are problematic figures promoting hate, according to Hancock. Influencers entertain us, amuse us, offer respite from reality.

Hancock asked aspiring influencers to pursue their ambitions with a caveat: have a reason for sharing themselves online. Those purposes can vary — Huynh’s slime hobby, Clark’s interest in justice, Hernandez’s desire for representation — but they should be true to real-life goals.

Ultimately, Hancock said, influencers reflect the vast spectrum of “human behavior, activities and norms.”

Their existence puts all of humanity’s colors on display — the ugly ones, yes — but the beautiful too.