Unexpected Voices: How Cultural Agents Reshape Political Communication

Digital media has transformed how citizens encounter politics, often through incidental exposure in ostensibly apolitical spaces. Prior research emphasizes content drift, where political information enters non-political spaces through algorithms or social networks. We theorize a different pathway—actor drift—where cultural figures embed political messages into their routine output, transforming audience perceptions. Analyzing millions of Instagram posts and comments from chef-influencers before and after the onset of the Israel–Hamas war, we show that identity-proximate chefs integrated political commentary into their culinary posts, which drew higher engagement but triggered disengagement from loyal followers. These dynamics capture a core tension: politicization extends the reach of cultural agents while eroding the parasocial trust that made them influential. Actor drift complicates theories of selective exposure, bypassing self-selection yet producing backlash that both disrupts and reinforces echo chambers.