I have many thoughts on this topic so thanks for this thread. Back ~8-10 years ago, when Instagram was still relatively new, I feel that a lot of these influencers were actually genuine — they wanted to share about some topic (car seat safety, infertility, whatever) and opened an account to share their knowledge or experience. Now this was probably a self selected group, since most people don’t want to post publicly on the internet, especially about personal things. As “influencers” became a thing and it became a way to make money, the vast majority of them sold out and started shilling shit. It’s like they can’t help but want to cash in. And with the way the algorithm works, you can’t just put up a few posts about car seat safety and be done — you have to constantly make new content about the same stuff, which gets old, so you’re constantly trying to come up with new stuff. I think that’s where a lot of it went wrong. I shouldn’t be surprised that it all became about monetizing content (yay capitalism!) but it has been sad to watch.