Meet the Lobbyist Next Door

Washington’s political power brokers are quietly inching toward a full embrace of influencers. If not handled with care, however, that can be hazardous—particularly when the arrangement is unmasked. Urban Legend, a small ad-tech startup operating out of a loft in Alexandria (VA), pledges on its website to “help brands run accountable and impactful influencer campaigns.” Launched in 2020 by a pair of former Trump administration staffers, its more comprehensive mission, one rarely articulated in public, is slightly more ambitious. Staffed by a plucky 14-person team, Urban Legend keeps its largest asset carefully hidden away inside its servers: an army of 700 social media influencers who command varying degrees of allegiance from audiences that collectively number in the tens of millions. The company has painstakingly cultivated this roster to reflect every conceivable niche of society reflected on the internet: makeup artists, Nascar drivers, home improvement gurus, teachers, doulas, Real Housewives stars, mommy bloggers, NFL quarterbacks, Olympians, and the occasional Fox News pundit. Renée DiResta, who studies narrative manipulation at the Stanford Internet Observatory, called influencer disclosure “yet another area in which law hasn’t caught up to digital infrastructure.” Many suspect that the lack of disclosure enforcement has bulldozed political money toward influencers, whose campaigns are not logged in Facebook’s political advertising archive. The Federal Elections Commission, too, has scant rules governing social media, leaving the entire field open, potentially, to anonymous money.