INFLUENCED

When the influencers come for you, it’s time to accept your fate. They wield their phones like weapons. A snide comment here, a post about how you affected them there, and worlds crumble in the wake of their carefully curated rage. It doesn’t take much—just one tweet, one story, one perfectly angled selfie accompanied by a scathing caption, and the machine lurches into action.

A lifetime of sweat, tears, and sacrifice can unravel in hours. Your business, your livelihood, your name—all it takes is one viral moment in the wrong hands. “Can I have it for free?” they ask, their tone sweet but sharp-edged, a wolf in the hide of a doe-eyed influencer. If you say no, the smile fades. Their following becomes a weapon.

The first comment comes quickly, then the avalanche of shit follows. Because you see, it’s not just them. It’s their army of sycophants, loyal to the idea of this person more than the person themselves. They’ll post their fake shit reviews, their takeovers of innocent social media content, their rage dressed up as victimised indignation. 

You watch helplessly as your name trends for all the wrong reasons, every like and share a nail in the coffin of what you’ve built. They don’t know you. They don’t want to. Whatever you’ve done to their leader, or their ideology, it’s against everything they stand for. People who defend you are swept along in the avalanche of shit, because if you’re not with these people then you’re against them. It’s the tolerance paradox.

Behind the scenes, it’s all strategy. Every authentic piece of user-generated content, every off-the-cuff remark—it’s rehearsed, calculated, fed through the meat grinder of engagement metrics. And it works. It works better than any product ever could, because they’ve turned their followers into the product, their clicks and likes into currency.

These speakers, these leaders of a new religion. They don’t deal in goods or services, but in the fragile trust of their audience. They are the kings and queens of echo chambers, where validation bounces endlessly off the walls, growing louder and emptier with every pass. Every selfie, every viral moment, every takedown—none of it is built to last.

They know it, even if they’ll never admit it. The fickle nature of fame is a shadow they can’t escape. One wrong move, one careless word, and the machine will turn on them too. The same army that builds them can destroy them. They’ve seen it happen, and they live in fear of it happening to them.

But some thrive in the chaos. They know how to split their audience into factions, pitting followers against enemies in the name of loyalty. They don’t just crave attention—they crave power. They revel in the destruction they leave in their wake, laughing as their followers do the dirty work. They don’t just trend; they divide. They conquer.

In the end, it’s not the comments or the clicks or the likes that matter. It’s the venom. The ability to turn one voice into many, one opinion into a movement. They speak with forked tongues, and the poison spreads fast, leaving nothing untouched.

If you want to succeed just as they have, then you need to bury your integrity, switch off your empathy, sell your soul to Cash Converters. Split your tongue.