Amy Kelly, cofounder of Revive Health Therapy, is a licensed family therapist who sees many creators. She is familiar with many of these issues, likening the growth of the industry to “a machine that’s been built with zero maintenance.”

She says influencers and creators can also lose their sense of perspective, due to the constant synthetic connections they’re forming online.

“When we are getting these likes and hearts and messages, we get these dopamine responses … It mocks and mimics in real-life interaction,” she says.

But on the flip side, when those comments aren’t flattering, it can feel disproportionately bad. “My reaction is going to be heightened versus like a random person on the street shouting some bad words to me,” she says.

It’s a problem Powell can relate to. She says she recently was called fat online simply for praising a performance by Beyoncé’s daughter, Blue Ivy. When she helped launch a cannabis community for Black women in the industry, she says she was subjected to harassment on X—mostly by other Black people—and was accused of “trying to plant ideas about drug use and the Black community.”

When she’s talking to executives, Powell sometimes emphasizes her marketing background rather than her status as an influencer. She says there’s “definitely some stigma” around the latter, where it’s perceived as “not a real job.”

But that perception is one that’s changing, according to Danial Abas, president of the Creators Guild of America. The guild, which formed in 2023, is a nonprofit organization aimed at protecting and advocating for creators and influencers. It is not a union.

“I think that people and businesses don’t quite recognize what influence means,” Abas says. “Attention is commerce, and every business requires attention … Creators are ahead of the curve in that they are creating attention for themselves.”

The guild, which says it represents more than 1,000 creators (Abas would not provide an exact number), recently released a “rider,” a set of standards that companies working with creators can...