“Seraphine” first appeared on social media in late June, posting selfies to Instagram and tweeting about her desire to “share music and hopefully connect with people.” By August she was releasing songs to a Soundcloud account. But Seraphine isn’t a typical social media personality — for one thing, she’s an animated character. For another, she’s dropped League of Legends easter eggs in her posts that have sparked rumors about her association with it. Now, Riot Games has confirmed that she’s a “virtual influencer,” not unlike the other virtual bands created by the company: True Damage and K/DA.

Friday, Seraphine announced she’s collaborating with K/DA on an upcoming song. “I’ll be working with them to help produce their album and (gasp!) feature on an upcoming track,” she tweeted. In turn, K/DA tweeted a group picture featuring Seraphine with the accompanying text, “Asked and answered.”

Google has launched Shoploop, a site where brands and influencers can create short videos showcasing a product and provide a direct link to buy it. The site, currently only available on mobile web, aims to combine ads, tutorials, reviews and shopping in one platform.

The idea for Shoploop came when Lax Poojary, founder of Google’s experimental workshop Area 120, was riding the New York City subway and saw a woman switching between apps on her phone, Poojary wrote in a Google 120 blog post. Turns out, the woman had seen a social media post about a makeup product, looked up a review for it on YouTube and then had to navigate to an online shop. It occurred to Poojary that this process could be simplified.

Espiritu is behind Epic Gardening, the hugely popular, multiplatform gardening social media presence. At age 32, the San Diego-based gardener has laid down roots in YouTube (660,000 subscribers), Instagram (221,000), TikTok (523,000), even Pinterest, and his follower count easily crests 2 million across them. Thanks to a mix of advertising revenue and brand deals — Espiritu is the official American purveyor for Australian raised-vegetable-bed brand Birdies, for example — Epic Gardening is his full-time job.

A cornerstone of Espiritu’s appeal is that he’s self-taught. He first began gardening in 2011, after graduating with a business degree: He had been paying his bills through playing online poker and planted his first seeds as a hobby. By 2016, he left his role as a founding member of publishing startup Scribe Media to pursue Epic Gardening full time. His style is easygoing, knowledgeable and approachable. His recent series tackles beginner mistakes like “Starting Your Garden in The Wrong Place” and “Planting at the Wrong Time.” He’s made most of these mistakes himself.

“It started when I noticed there wasn’t really gardening information that speaks to an average human being,” Espiritu said. “There’s all of this jargon — like deadheading your roses [pruning a dead bloom to encourage new growth] — and we don’t know what that means when we’re just starting out. We need someone to speak to us in plain English, on a platform that we actually consume, not the county extension office website or a Master Gardener website.” (The Master Gardener program is a national system for basic horticulture training.)

He added, “Those are great sources of information, if you’re already in the game — but these people aren’t in the game.”

These months of sheltering in place have been boom times for urban-gardening influencers. Amateurs have flocked to the hobby, and Espiritu’s following has grown astronomically. “It’s like 150,000 in a month,” Espiritu told me, of his YouTube following, “and it took me five years to get my first 100,000.” He’s had to post a disclaimer on his Instagram Stories, explaining he’s getting too many questions, in comments and DMs, to adequately answer all of them. His blog, started in 2013, has crested 1 million views per month. When we first spoke over the phone, in late March, he was packing hundreds of signed copies of his urban-gardening book. As of mid-June, Espiritu had bought a new home, with the intention of turning it into an Instagram-worthy homestead. 

This all goes back to the pandemic. While most of the panic buying is around survivalism — toilet paper, frozen foods, canned beans — seeds have also been selling wildly, The New York Times has reported. Though the food supply chain is stable, it’s difficult not to feel the nippings of anxiety when grocery shopping. In this kind of environment, the idea of producing one’s own food can offer an enviable illusion of control. 

The idea of farming as a respite from the hamster wheel of late-stage capitalism is hardly new. Toiling with the land can sound like liberation for a generation consigned to a nine-to-five until death — even as that idealized version of farming is far from the truth. The fantasy plays out in games like Stardew Valley (which has sold more than 10 million copies), where you leave your big-city job to work on your grandfather’s land. Ideas of agrarian self-sufficiency also litter the American imagination historically, with victory gardens — personal gardens meant to divert stress from the agricultural system — emerging during World War I and II.

I’ve also noticed this trend anecdotally. Friends who had been disinterested in gardening have begun growing basil, mint, rosemary. During an early March trip to Target in Los Angeles, I noticed the seed display had been moved by the checkout, suggesting you might casually consider growing an entire plant the same way you’d buy a last-minute pack of gum. When I returned to that Target in April, the “edible” side of the display had been ransacked of everything but a few potato-seed packets. The ornamental section, plied with images of beautiful flowers, was fairly untouched.

Toiling with the land can sound like liberation for a generation consigned to a nine-to-five until death — even as that idealized version of farming is far from the truth.

“There is a bump in sales for all garden centers, seed companies and growing-related products,” Brijette Romstedt, owner of San Diego Seed Company, wrote to me, “due to the insecurity people are feeling due to the pandemic.” There is much to be insecure about: We’re relying on fashion houses and perfumers to produce PPE and hand sanitizer. 

Social media presences like Epic Gardening have become vital entry points for first-timers — many of whom are quarantined in an apartment or a parent’s home, have limited space to grow and have never done it before. Yet gardening influencers also present a specific irony: Tending to soil requires deep patience while social media is a factory of instant, aggressive gratification. 

“I just did a video about the things you can grow in under a month, though there’s not that many,” Espiritu said. “And the questions have become a lot more basic. People are like, ‘Why didn’t my lettuce grow, why is it looking bad.’ I tell them, ‘That’s because it’s only been alive for two weeks.’”

Newer urban-gardening accounts have rapidly gained followers, using the pandemic as a vehicle for growth. YouTube videos of low-effort tutorials, like regrowing green onions by sticking them in a glass of water, have gained serious traction, though some of them aren’t useful. “Yes, you can regrow like twentysomething different types of common vegetables,” Espiritu explained. “But what you get is unexpected. If you’re regrowing your carrot tops you don’t get carrots — you get greens, which no one’s going to eat.”

Growing something you can eat is more complex than admiring how quickly your green onions regenerate, especially if you’re starting with a seed. Considerations include hardiness zone (climate regions where certain plants thrive), container type, pest control, to name a few. But it’s easier to get hooked on the beautiful gardening inspo of Instagram and other platforms, where the time between planting and harvesting appears to be just a few seconds.

“It’s not a fast field,” Espiritu said. He had recently released a TikTok video of his five-level vertical garden of green beans and strawberries, brimming with leaves. “That’s 45 days of growing.”

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Instagram is designed to monetize the time you spend on it, regardless of accuracy. It’s easy to smash that follow and fall down a wormhole of unrealistically beautiful people, places or potatoes. My explore tab feeds me triptychs of dewy plants and dewier faces, and I’m debased enough to admit it doesn’t not work for me.

Nick Cutsumpas — who competed in Netflix’s The Big Flower Fight — runs farmernicknyc, a Brooklyn-based “houseplant consultant” account. He says he’s more invested in sustainability and agriculture but found those passions less ’grammable. “You’ve seen the people on Instagram who have these amazing homesteads, right?” he explained. “It only looks that way for maybe two or three months. If I took a picture of my garden in December it would get three likes, because there’s nothing there.”

The popularity of urban gardening during the pandemic has allowed Cutsumpas to post more agricultural content, like germinating seeds in his bedroom. (He’s also taking courses at the New York Botanical Gardens and has partnered with Greensulate, a “green roof” company, to convert the rooftop of a Staten Island building into a garden.)

But the majority of his content still plays to what attracts eyeballs. “I hate the term ‘influencer,’” Cutsumpas explained, invoking images of bikini-clad women in far-flung locales. It’s a bit hypocritical when Cutsumpas also flaunts his abs in front of a plant for World Naked Gardening Day. “If this is what it takes for someone to be inspired to buy more plants, eat more plants, follow my account and pick up sustainability tips, then I am 100 percent OK with that,” Cutstampas said. But I get it: Instagram favors the thotty.

Contrast this with the Master Gardener program — also known as Extension Master Gardener, or EMG. This national program was created in Washington State in 1972 to address the public lack of knowledge about gardening. The program is often tied to universities: The EMG website has every state university’s program listed. Though course load varies by state, becoming certified might require a semester of studies and some 40 hours of volunteering, along with an open-book final. The program isn’t meant to confer academic mastery. Instead it gives laypeople a ground floor of horticultural knowledge and a scientific approach that’s way more effective than Googling alone. 

“People bring in a plant sample or email a photo to the extension office Master Gardener desk,” said Signe Danler, instructor of the EMG program at Oregon State University (OSU). “The Master Gardeners on duty that day might say, ‘You’ve got aphids,’ if it’s obvious. If it’s more complicated, there’s a library and lots of online resources. If necessary, they can bump it up to the university level and have a pathology test done.” Under normal circumstances, Master Gardeners also run demonstration gardens and tables at farmers’ markets to field questions.

“I was interested in gardening from a very young age,” said Danler. “I gardened when I was in my teens, and I started gardening in planter boxes as soon as we bought our first house, my husband and I, back in 1981.” Though Danler took community college courses in horticulture in the late ’80s, she waited until her youngest child was in high school before pursuing a bachelor’s at OSU. Thanks to encouragement from an advisor and a scholarship, Danler went on to complete her master’s; OSU hired her soon after.

Over the phone, Danler cracked jokes that make starting out as a gardener feel more approachable. “I emphasize with my students, expect to kill plants,” Danler said. “Obviously, you don’t wanna kill your vegetables every year, or you don’t get anything to eat. But when you’ve been doing it as long as I have — I’ve killed hundreds of plants. That’s just part of the learning process.”

“I’ve killed hundreds of plants. That’s just part of the learning process.”

Like farming influencers on Instagram, OSU has seen a recent spike in urban-gardening interest, especially after making its courses free to the public. Its urban-vegetable-gardening module had 34,000 students in mid-April — compared to the usual size of a dozen students. Danler said that there were so many signups in the first weekend the system crashed.

Danler is suspicious of urban-gardening influencers — or more precisely, suspicious of solutions that are peddled without scientific rigor. “There are definitely people presenting themselves as authorities and handing out information that’s plain wrong,” Danler explained. “For example, people may think, ‘If I make a home remedy, it’ll be safer than something I buy at the store.’ But you can harm plants, you can do permanent damage to your soil, you can harm other animals.”

Danler has been working hard to diversify her student base, put more of OSU’s courses online and make the program more accessible. When she teaches the home horticulture certificate course, which has “the same training, the same classes” but doesn’t require volunteer hours, she gets far more students, from more-diverse backgrounds.

Unfortunately, EMG requirements can weed out folks who might otherwise be interested. A 2016 demographic study found that Master Gardener volunteers were primarily white women “educated, retired, and of economic means.” Their mean age was just under 65 years old.

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“I took a store-bought potato — and I knew nothing about farming potatoes — and I just stuck it in the dirt.” Fanny Liao, the gardener behind Instagram account fansinthegarden, said. “It was winter time, and I didn’t know that it was going to be slow-growing because there’s no sun. It took about six months for that plant to grow. I thought, ‘It’s pretty, I’m going to get a pound or two of potatoes, it will be awesome.’ I dug it up, and I got one. It was smaller than my fist.”

Liao, who is based in Los Angeles County, began gardening for the first time in December 2017 and started her account in order to “photo-journal for [her] mental health.” Liao knew nothing about gardening when she started, and this entry-level focus helped her reach over 11,000 followers as of July, despite having less than 5,000 followers at the start of the pandemic. She intends to keep her platform open to beginners, and with a smaller following she’s less likely to get bogged down with questions. 

Liao has no intentions of changing her strategy to attract more followers — though it helps that her account already adheres to the Instagram aesthetic. Despite her story of the solitary potato, her feed boasts vibrant harvests, like a handful of radishes in an ombre from white to fuschia or carrots that look like they’re hugging. “I take images that are appealing, because it shows people yes, you could grow this,” Liao said. “When people see it, they’re like, ‘What variety is this’ or ‘How long does it take from seed to harvest?’”

Rather than seek formal educational programs — or online extension courses — Liao has relied on advice from other gardeners on social media, and a healthy dose of trial and error. She credits much of her learning to Epic Gardening, and to CaliKim’s YouTube and Instagram. “Gardening is a never-ending learning process,” Liao said. “I’m not an expert in this field, so I’m going to leave it for the experts to answer the technical questions like Kevin [Espiritu] does. If you’re asking me what’s the ratio of soil that I need to put into the amendment? That’s not something that I know.” 

Her success is just one example of the way Instagram has democratized access, diversifying the pool of urban-gardening educators. This pool includes Espiritu, who is half Filipino and half white, and someone like Timothy Hammond, a Black urban gardener based in Houston, Texas, who runs bigcitygardener on Instagram. He started bigcitygardener in April 2017 “to try and make gardening accessible and related to everyone.” Liao has become well-known enough that she inspired another Asian American woman — Northern California-based friend Alex Hisaka, who runs forestlandfarmer — to start her own gardening Instagram account. 

I felt comfortable asking Liao novice questions like what grows fastest (lettuce and radish) and whether I can expect to grow enough basil to make pesto (I’ll need to prune aggressively for basil to be bushy enough), questions asked in earnest at the end of the interview, after we’d shaken off our formalities. I wanted to hear from the woman who spent six months nurturing a single potato — so embarrassingly off target from her ambitions, comparable to the three months I spent doting over 10 basil seeds, whose yield provided me with a sprinkle of garnish for a grocery store frozen pizza rather than the pesto of my dreams.

Danler plays in a different league from the influencers — one that takes in mind the health of the soil over time and its larger environmental impact, one a beginner might eventually aspire to.

“It can be hard for experienced folks like myself to remember just how much there is to know,” Danler said after I shared Espiritu’s videos with her. “All of his information is correct. I like his low-key, straightforward style. He’s addressing that level of basic knowledge, and doing it well.” 

Despite this gulf, when I asked her for advice for first-time gardeners, she echoed the same sentiments as every influencer I spoke to: “Don’t get too bogged down. Gardening should be first and foremost something that you enjoy. It should feed your soul.”

“Don’t get too bogged down. Gardening should be first and foremost something that you enjoy. It should feed your soul.”

This is easy to forget, thanks to the gig economy, which has recast hobbies as side hustles, narrowing their value into what can be monetized or used to build a social media audience.

But posting my own plants to Instagram has only ever offered me a cheap, momentary thrill. It is the slower, unanticipated joys of growing that have actually been nourishing: watching an orchid send out roots, seeking footholds and future lives in the humidity of the air; watching a Pilea peperomioides sprout new limbs, living up to its nickname, “friendship plant,” when I gift these cuttings to others. Eating my basil was a separate, individual delight from actually growing it. I checked its progress every morning like a parent marking their child’s height on the door frame. 

Regardless of qualification or skill, my favorite instructors have been the ones who remind me of the joys of growing for the sake of growing. TikToker Garden Marcus captures this ethos best. Watching one of his most popular videos about propagating pineapple is like taking a shot of sunlight. 

The steps are simple: Cut the top off, put it in water until it sprouts roots, plant it in soil and water it. Marcus reflects on the pineapples he’s rooted over the years — this method of propagating doesn’t produce new pineapples, instead the top grows more leaves — and zooms in on a lizard that lives in one of the older bushes. He likes to feed the plant the water it was rooted in, a move with no particular utility, just a warm human impulse. And yes, he also regrows the tops of his carrots.

The main part of the campaign has seen popular meme accounts like @grapejuiceboys and @tank.sinatra post fake direct messages from Bloomberg. In one of the DMs, for example, Bloomberg says he has learned how to use Photoshop before sharing a photo of Bernie Sanders that has been a wellspring of memes recently.

Most people haven’t responded enthusiastically to the ads, even if they’re properly disclosed. “Omg such an ironic and cool way to sell out,” wrote Jon Elkin, one of the people to comment on the post — and that’s just the most PG response.

The campaign is the brainchild of Mick Purzycki, the lead strategist of Meme 2020 and the CEO of Jerry Media. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Jerry Media was one of the companies that helped hype the infamous Fyre Festival.

Bloomberg’s social campaign extends beyond working with Meme 2020. Last week, the Daily Beast found the Bloomberg campaign contracted a company called Tribe to pay micro-influencers — accounts with more than 1,000 followers but fewer than 100,000 — $150 per post to create original content “that tells us why Mike Bloomberg is the electable candidate who can rise above the fray, work across the aisle so all Americans feel heard and respected.” The way the Bloomberg campaign sees it, memes will be essential if Democrats are going to have any chance to win against Donald Trump in the presidential election later this year.

“Mike Bloomberg 2020 has teamed up with social creators to collaborate with the campaign, including the meme world,” Sabrina Singh, a senior national spokeswoman for the Bloomberg campaign, told The New York Times. “While a meme strategy may be new to presidential politics, we’re betting it will be an effective component to reach people where they are and compete with President Trump’s powerful digital operation.”

While there’s something to be said about how effectively President Trump uses Twitter and other social media platforms to engage his base, it’s hard to say if Bloomberg’s memes will energize young voters the same way. What’s clear, however, is that this is one of the first times a political candidate has tried to use influencers to secure potential votes and is likely a sign of things to come.

Apparently, Spotify is not sharing the new feature with artists, who received their own version of Spotify Stories last year. Instead, this will be available to select influencers like YouTube makeup and fashion vlogger Summer Mckeen, who has just over two million subscribers on both YouTube and Instagram and 126,455 Spotify followers. It’s unclear how many followers users will need in order to qualify for the Stories feature and what other factors will be taken into consideration.

The Spotify Stories are only available on the iOS and Android apps at the moment. There isn’t a desktop version yet, and it’s unclear if there ever will be. For Spotify, this is still just a test. As we’ve seen with other Spotify tests, these don’t always develop into full-fledged products, and the company’s response is still vague.

“At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience. Some of those tests end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning,” a Spotify spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Enforcement for the new rules should take effect in the “coming weeks,” Facebook said. It’s also working on tools to help creators honor the new policy, such as setting minimum age requirements or their content.

This is the first time Instagram is limiting what influencers can pitch in their feeds, and it’s considered overdue by some. Facebook and Instagram have both come under fire for letting social media stars advertise harmful products, including possible underage users. In some cases, those stars don’t understand the products or even use them. And to some extent, Facebook might not have much choice. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, for instance, banned Instagram posts that appeared to show under-25s promoting vaping. If the company doesn’t ban these posts itself, it risks further heat from regulators that might impose their own restrictions.

Critics have said the company’s marketing campaigns make the brand attractive to teens. According to federal data, vaping among teens jumped 78 percent from 2017 to 2018. But the company says it has never marketed to youth and that its target market is existing adult smokers. The company previously came under fire for ads on social media, but it has since shut down its Facebook and Instagram accounts in the US. A Juul spokesperson said its “paid influencer program, which was never formalized, was a small, short-lived pilot.” The company supposedly paid less than $10,000 to fewer than 10 influencers, who were all over the age of 30.

The FTC investigation has been going on since at least September, but this is the first it has been reported. The Food and Drug Administration is also investigating the company, and it’s faced scrutiny by the House and Senate. “We fully cooperate and are transparent with any government agency or regulator who have interest in our category,” a Juul spokesman said in a statement, which can be read below. Juul isn’t alone. Yesterday, North Carolina filed a lawsuit against eight other e-cigarette companies.

Juul has attempted to curb teen vaping — though it’s unclear how effective any of its measures have been. Its track-and-trace program allows educators, law enforcement and parents to search Juul serial numbers in an online portal to determine where they were purchased. It’s also considered using Bluetooth e-cigs to block teens, and today, it launched new standards, which will require retailers to scan customers’ IDs and prevent bulk purchases. Those efforts may not be enough to spare Juul additional federal scrutiny.

The full statement from Juul is provided below:

“Without commenting on any specific investigation, we fully cooperate and are transparent with any government agency or regulator who have interest in our category. We have never marketed to youth. Our earliest marketing campaign in 2015 was intended for adults in the 25-34 year-old demographic and lasted for six months. If one views the sales and revenue data, there is no evidence that it drove use, youth or otherwise. Nonetheless, we regret that the campaign was executed in a way that was perceived as appealing to minors. To avoid any misconceptions, we changed our approach to advertising in a way that offers no room for misinterpretation about the mission of our company or our intended customers. Today, our marketing efforts exclusively feature adult smokers aged 35+ who offer their personal experiences about switching to JUUL products – all conveyed in a style, tone and message that is a direct appeal to current adult smokers. We have exited social media entirely and request that social media platforms delete inappropriate third party posts and listings. We have no higher priority than to prevent youth usage of our products. Our product is intended for current adult smokers and our marketing specifically is designed to help achieve that goal.” – A Juul spokesperson

The tool creates a split screen, and plays YouTube content on the top half. It uses front-facing cameras to capture users and AR filters to apply virtual makeup samples in the lower screen. With the help of machine learning, the tool works on a full range of skin tones, and Google has already demoed the tool with several beauty brands. In those trials, it found that 30 percent of viewers activated the AR experience in the YouTube iOS app and spent an average of 80 seconds trying on virtual lipstick.

While the tool is still in alpha, you can find it through FameBit, Google’s in-house branded content platform. It’ll be up to brands to implement AR Beauty Try-On, but at least one, MAC Cosmetics, has already signed on. With so many beauty bloggers vying for attention on YouTube, it’s likely more brands and influencers will follow suit.

Solace Vapor, Hype City Vapors LLC, Humble Juice Co. LLC and Artist Liquid Labs each received a letter. They now have 15 days to review their marketing, including posts on social media, and to make the necessary disclosures. “These letters are a reminder that companies who use social media influencers to promote their products must comply with all applicable advertising requirements,” said Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Moreover, ads must disclose material health or safety risks—in this case, the fact that nicotine is highly addictive.”

This isn’t the first time the FTC has issued warnings to social media’s stars. It’s already warned that paid posts should include terms like ad, promotional or sponsor. Tagging #sp or #partner isn’t enough. Even Instagram and YouTube’s built-in notification tools that label sponsored content may be too subtle for the FTC. And earlier this year, the FDA expressed concern that vaping companies Juul and Altria might be undermining efforts to prevent use by teens. While vaping and social media influencers are relatively new phenomena, the same old rules apply.