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, in which political messages appear in non-political spaces due to algorithms or social networks. We theorize a different pathway—actor drift—in which audiences receive political content from messengers they initially followed for explicitly non-political reasons. 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 overall but triggered disengagement among loyal followers. This withdrawal was dose-dependent, scaling with politicization intensity, and extended even to a politically aligned audience. Rather than creating a new pathway for incidental political learning, actor drift reconfigures audience composition. These dynamics demonstrate a core tension: politicization extends the reach of cultural agents while eroding the parasocial trust that made them influential.