Far more trends on TikTok end up becoming mere blips than full-on movements. Influencers help spread the latest craze far and wide before inevitably moving on to a new fixation—today’s mob wife aesthetic turning into tomorrow’s “that time everyone was super into sea shanties for some reason.” One of the top TikTok trends of 2023 is still going strong, however. It’s a movement plenty of influencers probably wish would have just been a blip.
The de-influencing trend, a rejection of the most blatantly consumerist aspects of influencer culture, undoubtedly has legs. After 16 months of constant video content, it’s also succeeded in keeping TikTok-recommended jeans off its viewer’s legs. According to a new study conducted online by the Harris Poll on behalf of Intuit Credit Karma, 69% of American social media users say they have chosen not to purchase items on TikTok, Instagram, or any of their competitors. If the respondents’ reasons for avoiding these purchases are any indication, the appetite for social media shopping may soon shrink to girl dinner levels.
Popular TikToker Mikayla Nogueira accidentally helped spark the trend last year with a video that rubbed viewers the wrong way. In what became known as #mascaragate, Nogueira allegedly used fake eyelashes to promote the miraculous primping prowess of a L’Oreal product as part of a paid partnership with the company. The backlash was so intense that she took a rare break from the platform for a week before making an awkward return. Videos urging viewers not to buy products hyped by influencers had already been popping up for months, courtesy of creators like Michelle Skidelsky. The de-influencing trend exploded not long after the mascara incident, earning TikTok views in the hundreds of millions.
To be clear, shopping on social media has remained quite popular in the past year, with 38% of Americans reportedly buying products they saw on social media during that time. However, according to the Credit Karma study, which polled 2,042 U.S. adults, fewer people seemed poised to make those kinds of purchases in the year ahead.
The study offers three critical reasons for the great de-influencing: 32% of respondents claimed not to trust the social media stars shilling products, 28% did not trust the products themselves to be authentic or functional, and 26% felt that the ceaseless flood of promotions on social media has created an unhealthy atmosphere of overconsumption. These reasons coincide closely with the content many de-influencers tend to share in their videos.
For instance, a Tiktoker who goes by the handle Overcoming Overspending spends the length of a video with 9.1 million views demystifying influencer culture. A lot of influencers, she explains, need to spend money to film themselves buying and using products so that more viewers can watch their content and thus deliver the ad revenue that enables them to keep buying more products. The fact that they’re essentially getting paid to go shopping just may, uh, influence the way they respond to these purchases on camera. Many viewers already know on some level just how much deceit is involved in this process. However, seeing all of it spelled out may have driven them to think harder about their role in perpetuating the cycle.
Another strain of de-influencing TikToks focuses more on the quality of the merchandise, highlighting products that don’t live up to the hype. At the same time, so many videos instead center around the overconsumption aspect that they’ve spawned some clever parodies making similar points.
It’s probably not a coincidence that the emphasis on overconsumption connected with viewers in the same year the TikTok Shop e-commerce initiative emerged, its orange shopping cart logo turning their host videos into instant skips for wary viewers.
“These social media platforms do a very good job at driving consumers to overspend when scrolling their apps,” said Courtney Alev, consumer financial advocate at Credit Karma, in a statement about the study. “Especially considering how easy it is to purchase something in just a few clicks.”
The de-influencer trend driving consumers instead toward austerity seems to have connected most with Generation Z. According to the study, a whopping 88% of social media users in that demographic have been de-influenced. While the top contributing factor for all respondents is a trust issue with social media shills, 38% of Gen Z respondents cited “overconsumption” as their primary motivation. Perhaps that’s why so many people in that age range appear in videos promoting a more recent trend, one that grew out of de-influencing: underconsumption core.
In these videos, often set to the soothing sounds of Norah Jones’s “Don’t Know Why,” creators show off the old cars they’ve managed to keep running for ages, their DIY home decorations, and their “thrifted, gifted, repurposed family hand-me-downs,” with viewers cheering them on in the comments. As BuzzFeed points out, de-influencing may be another form of influencing. Still, this latest iteration is rooted in sustainability and global consciousness—worlds away from either promoting an incredible brand of mascara or eviscerating a shoddy one.
As the de-influencer trend continues to evolve, so will its impact on consumer buying habits. Perhaps the next iteration will dig deeper, beyond the underconsumption core, into something like dumpstermaxxing or forager chic. At that point, though, it might no longer make much sense even to have a phone with which to de-influence.