More than £2m spent by government on influencers since July 2024

There is a certain irony in watching the British state—an institution built on centuries of formality, from the Queen's Speech to the ministerial red box—handing public money to TikTokers and Instagrammers. The £2 million figure, reported by the BBC, is barely a rounding error in the context of Whitehall's overall communications budget, which has long funded lavish TV campaigns and newspaper advertising. Yet the symbolic shift matters more than the sum. When a department pays an influencer to extol the virtues of a government scheme, the line between independent content and state-sponsored messaging blurs in ways that traditional advertising never quite managed. The case for this approach is straightforward. Broadcast audiences are aging, and the public service information that once reached millions through a single prime-time ad break now fragments across platforms. If the government wants to inform young people about, say, student finance or vaccine eligibility, it must go where they are—which increasingly means the feeds of people they follow and trust. In that sense, influencer outreach is not a luxury but a practical necessity, no different from the wartime Ministry of Information commissioning posters or the 1980s government funding public information films. The medium changes; the mission does not. The case against is equally compelling, however. Influencers are not journalists. They are not bound by impartiality rules, and their audiences rarely stop to ask who is paying for a given endorsement. When a government department quietly funds a popular creator, the resulting content can carry an unearned authenticity—a sense that "ordinary people" are sharing their genuine views, when in fact the post is as manufactured as any press release. The BBC's reporting, available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwly71pz2xl1o, notes that departments are using influencers alongside traditional media, but it does not fully answer the deeper question: how much disclosure is enough, and who polices it? What makes this story particularly Poli Split is that both readings are true. A government that refuses to adapt to modern media would be rightly criticised for failing to reach the public. A government that spends millions on unaccountable online personalities invites charges of propaganda by other means. The solution is not to abandon influencer outreach but to demand the same standards of transparency that apply to every other form of public communication—clear labelling, auditable contracts, and measurable outcomes. Until then, the £2 million will remain less a scandal than a question mark, and the answer will depend on which side of the divide you already stand.