HMN 2026: Who are the influencers with millions of followers who don’t actually exist

Lil Miquela has 2.5 million Instagram followers, a high-fashion wardrobe, and a clear political voice. She has advocated for Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQI+ community, fronted major brand campaigns, and built a devoted global fanbase. She also has no pulse.

Lil Miquela is a virtual influencer, a computer-generated character designed to look, sound, and behave like a real person. And she is not alone.

In China, Liu Yexi blends traditional aesthetics with cyberpunk visuals to amass a huge following. Ling, created by Chinese AI startup Xmov, has promoted Tesla, Vogue, and luxury tea brand Nayuki.

These personalities are not simply a quirky digital novelty.

My research shows they are symptoms of something far more significant: a fundamental shift in how global culture is made, circulated, and controlled.

And the gatekeepers driving that shift are not governments or people. They are algorithms.

What exactly is a virtual influencer?

Virtual influencers are computer-generated characters (built using AI, animation, and careful brand strategy) who operate on social media platforms exactly as human influencers do.

They post, collaborate with brands, respond to followers, and take political stances.

Unlike human influencers, they never have an off day. They never say something unscripted. They are, by design, perfectly controllable.

That controllability is not incidental. It is the point.

Digital platforms like Instagram and Douyin (the Chinese counterpart to TikTok) are governed by algorithms that reward consistent, high-performing content.

Virtual influencers are engineered specifically to satisfy those algorithms, producing a constant, optimized stream of engagement.

The algorithms running these platforms are not neutral systems. They are active shapers of decision-making, worldviews, and lifestyles, and they embed the economic imperatives of digital capitalism into our daily lives.

The result is that algorithms don’t just reflect culture. They decide which cultural ideas are allowed to spread globally.

A new kind of globalization

My research , published in the Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, points to a new wave of global cultural integration, something called “re-globalization“—which is the tension between global reach and local identity.

Re-globalization is distinct from the economic globalization of the late 20th century. It’s powered by digital platforms rather than trade agreements or geopolitics.

Where previous waves of globalization spread ideas through media, trade, and migration, this new version is mediated by platform logic: the rules, incentives, and filters built into social media platforms that determine what content spreads and what disappears.

Because virtual influencers are owned by corporations, the worldviews and values they promote are carefully managed for commercial appeal.

This amounts to a kind of ideological curation at global scale, a colonization of everyday life where human experience is increasingly replaced by corporate-designed simulations.

The contrast between Lil Miquela and Liu Yexi is instructive.

Lil Miquela embodies a Western-centric aesthetic: sleek, cosmopolitan, and faintly unsettling in her near-human appearance. Liu Yexi draws on traditional Chinese cultural imagery. On the surface, they seem to represent very different visions of global identity.

But look closer and the differences dissolve.

Both are owned by corporations. Both are optimized for algorithmic engagement. Despite their surface differences, they serve the same system.

This convergence matters because re-globalization, despite its apparent cultural diversity, may reinforce global inequalities.

Cultural and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of transnational tech companies, while the appearance of local identity is carefully managed from above.

Engineered authenticity

Perhaps the most uncomfortable question in all of this is about belief.

Virtual influencers are increasingly used for what the industry calls “brand activism“—that is, voicing support for social movements, political causes, and cultural values.

Lil Miquela, for instance, posted in support of Black Lives Matter.

But when an algorithm promotes a virtual influencer’s political stance because doing so is commercially profitable, popular discourse is actually being shaped by commercial logic, not genuine human conviction.

Followers often form deep emotional bonds with virtual influencers.

These are the same one-sided connections people develop with celebrities or fictional characters, and they form without the follower necessarily realizing the “person” they feel connected to was designed in a boardroom to maximize engagement.

This is not just a matter of consumer awareness.

If the culture being reshaped by re-globalization is built on predictive patterns and engineered emotion rather than genuine human exchange, the stakes extend well beyond marketing.

Virtual influencers are early indicators of a much deeper structural shift, one already reshaping how power, culture, and identity work in a connected world.

The technology driving this will only become more sophisticated.

The virtual influencers of today are relatively easy to spot. The ones coming will not be.

Digital platforms and AI are too embedded in modern life to reject.

But they do demand serious thinking about global data governance.

Who sets the rules for algorithmic systems? Whose values do they encode? And who decides what spreads and what doesn’t?

Right now, those decisions are largely being made by a handful of tech companies.

Every time an algorithm decides what content reaches millions of people, it is also deciding what ideas, values, and worldviews get to travel.

That is an enormous amount of cultural power, and it sits almost entirely outside public scrutiny.

Lil Miquela has been telling us that for years. We just thought she was selling handbags.

This article was first published on Pursuit. Read the original article here.

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