Although the use of influencers has helped educate many people in a positive way about issues, there is also a negative side…. Some influencers who have changed their mind after preaching about the issues have become very controversial.
Stella Rae and Bonnie Rebecca are two influencers who changed their diet and started eating meat again. This is after they promoted their healthy vegan lifestyle on social media. When they finally come out and admitted to the lifestyle change they received lots of criticism.
On the 28th on January, 2019, long time vegan Stella Rae posted a youtube video explaining why she isn’t vegan anymore.
After this video she received a lot of negative comments from vegans such as the ones below.
Followers were hurt that she promoted this as a healthy lifestyle and making money in the process from her followers even though she felt that her health was suffering. The followers and other vegans were made about how she could be so supportive and then just ignore what she used to believe. This led to people being unable to trust her anymore. This situation just shows that followers can’t connect to influencers when they don’t practice what they preach. When they change their mind and lifestyle people find them untrustworthy and fake. This reduces their influence on followers as I have found that people are only influenced by people that they feel have similar values.
Another similar case to this situation is Bonnie Rebecca, she posted a youtube video on the 14th of January, 2019. She received a very similar response as Stella Rae, they received this harsh reaction due to their large influence that was spreading all this information even when they didn’t believe it anymore. With situations like this it makes influencers very unreliable and untrustworthy. Although different people believe different things and are able to relate to different values. Even though they have and still receive so much criticism from the public, they also have some supporters who can relate to very similar situations. This shows that people relate to different things, they’re more influenced by people who have very similar values.
Ashleigh Lockton 