5 min readFeb 12, 2026 06:00 PM IST
First published on: Feb 12, 2026 at 06:00 PM IST
By Nilanjana Bhowmick
Sayak Chakraborty, Shamik Adhikary, Ranveer Allahbadia — some of you may recognise these names not because you follow them, but because their faces and videos keep surfacing on your timeline despite clicking “not interested” innumerable times. And lately, they have all been in the news for various harebrained actions, and in Adhikary’s case, something far more horrific. But together, they are a warning about the dangers of influence without ethics. From Chakraborty’s communally provocative antics at Kolkata’s famous Olypub, to Allahbadia cracking a completely tone-deaf joke on a comedy show, to the horrific details of Adhikary’s alleged torture and sexual abuse of a woman friend, the myth of the social media influencer is crumbling like a house of cards. Do remember that this is the same ecosystem that takes spirited, trend-driven stands on violence against women or Hindu-Muslim relations or spirituality one week and is exposed for completely bizarre behaviour the next.
Before Chakraborty and Adhikary captured the headlines in the last few weeks, sometime last year, Allahbadia, a hugely popular YouTuber, found himself at the centre of a national storm after making a culturally inappropriate joke on a comedy show. There are no similarities in the three incidents — Allahbadia’s mistake was one of cultural misreading; Chakraborty’s mistake was cluelessness about the real-world consequences of his words. His behaviour was crude and far more malicious — going after a poor man from a minority community that has been living under sustained fear in contemporary India. What if this had happened not in Kolkata, but in some city in Uttar Pradesh? What if the man he humiliated had faced consequences beyond an arrest? Adhikary’s case is altogether darker. It’s a reminder that the persona you sell online can hide a far uglier truth offline.
The thread connecting all three is not the nature of their actions, but the architecture that enables them: Disproportionate power bestowed on individuals with enormous reach, with no ethical guardrails, no cultural maturity, and no real scrutiny, until something stupid, nasty, or downright horrific spills into real life. These episodes force us to confront a question we rarely pause to examine: Who exactly is an “influencer”?
Many people with large social media followings are simply content creators. Some are genuinely talented and use platforms to entertain or inform. But a much larger cohort, especially the daily vloggers as they are called, has discovered an easy route to money and visibility, one where outrage, provocation, and recklessness are not bugs but features. This particular set of creators — with no domain expertise to fall back on — survives by exploiting the pull of nonsense and moral panic. The more outrage, the better the visibility. The more trolls, the more traction. So everything becomes content: Family, children, spouses, feuds, sometimes even staged feuds, and even strangers in restaurants. Humiliation, fear, and privacy become currency.
On social media, “influence” is a numbers game. Followers. Views. Reach. It does not mean you have shaped ideas, changed minds, or contributed anything of substance to public life. More often, it simply means you are good at digital marketing, or part of a content factory engineered to harvest attention. Most influencers are not organic cultural figures. They are artificial products of market demand. Brands want cheap, scalable access to audiences. Capitalism obliges, as it always does, optimising reach, minimising cost, and outsourcing credibility. But is this system harmless? Not at all. It plucks people out of anonymity and hands them immense power: The power to speak to millions instantly. That power can be used for commerce, politics, propaganda, or personal gain. And where there is visibility without training, restraint, or consequence literacy, misuse cannot be far behind.
So what is the way out? I have mused over this question for a long time. Should there be mandatory ethics training for those who have scaled the reach? Should there be some basic requirement of domain expertise — or at least consequence literacy — before you are allowed to broadcast to hundreds of thousands? But then I am reminded that there is a general crisis of ethics across the media ecosystem, and social media is not separate from it. It is simply its most unfiltered and dangerous form. This chaos we see unfolding before us is perhaps not accidental. A broken system seems to suit both political and capitalist interests. Disorder is easier to manipulate. Confusion is profitable. The more fractured public discourse becomes, the easier it is to control those trapped within it.
The bottom line is that there is no institutional rescue coming. The only thing left is to resist normalising this culture as much as we can. Because once this — influence without ethics — becomes normal, the harm it causes will become normal too.
The writer is the author of Lies Our Mothers Told Us
