I understand nothing about why we kill influencers

César Gastelum had more than five hundred thousand followers on TikTok. Everywhere you read "influencer killed mid-live", as if the live stream were the accident. It is not an accident. It is the subject.

And the subject is not Mexican.

What we thought an influencer was

For fifteen years we had a comfortable definition of the job. An influencer was a billboard that breathes. An audience rented out to brands. A modern sandwich-board man, better paid, better lit, but a sandwich-board man. We credited him with visibility, never with power. The proof is in the vocabulary: product placement, collaboration, paid partnership. Trade.

That definition had one immense advantage. It made the phenomenon harmless.

A billboard does not get judged. It does not get prosecuted. It does not get killed. You take it down when it stops paying, and you put up another.

That definition has just died. Three times this year, on three continents, in three different ways.

The lethal version

César Gastelum presented himself as bélico. The word comes from belicoso, warlike. In the subculture around the Mexican cartels it names an aesthetic: the guns, the big engines, the gold chains, the corridos tumbados, and the affiliation claimed without ever being named. To be bélico is not to say "I belong to a cartel". It is to say "you know perfectly well what I am", and to let the algorithm do the rest.

The Mexican security ministry and the local prosecutor's office stated that he had posted videos alluding to a faction of a criminal group.

Seen that way, an account with five hundred thousand followers is no longer a medium. It is infrastructure, and it does three things any armed organisation values.

It recruits. A seventeen-year-old in Culiacán does not join a criminal organisation by reading a leaflet. He joins because the life he is shown is desirable, filmed on a good phone, cut to the rhythm of the music he already listens to.

It marks territory. Every video says who controls what, without saying it.

It humiliates the adversary. And that is where it turns lethal, because in a conflict of honour, public humiliation calls for a public answer.

Enemy infrastructure gets destroyed. That is not a metaphor: it is the reasoning that brought somebody to that table on Tuesday.

This is not an isolated case

The local press in Sinaloa counts around a dozen influencers killed in recent years, several of them described as linked to criminal groups.

In May 2025, Valeria Márquez, twenty-three, a beauty influencer, was shot dead in Jalisco while livestreaming. The authorities implicated her former partner, the son of a leader of the Jalisco New Generation cartel. The murder was striking enough that the United States cited it in June 2025 in a round of sanctions targeting that cartel.

And in January 2025, a small plane dropped leaflets over Culiacán, naming and threatening some twenty artists and YouTubers accused of dealing with a rival faction.

A plane. Leaflets. To threaten YouTubers. A criminal organisation judged that twenty content creators were worth a flight and a public operation. You do not do that for billboards.

The judicial version

Let us cross the Atlantic, and change register entirely.

Andrew Tate is the best known masculinist influencer in the world. He goes on civil trial from June 22, 2026 before the High Court in London, where four women accuse him of rape and sexual violence over events alleged to have taken place between 2012 and 2015. He and his brother Tristan were charged criminally in the United Kingdom in January 2024 with rape, human trafficking and actual bodily harm. They are also prosecuted in Romania. The Romanian courts accepted their extradition to the United Kingdom, but only once the Romanian proceedings are complete. British prosecutors have since identified further complainants, and the brothers were detained in the United States after thirty-eight new British charges.

What interests me lies elsewhere, and it is the tipping point.

In these files, the audience is not the backdrop, it sits at the heart of the accusation. Tate is not accused of speaking badly on the internet. He is accused of acts, and his influence appears as the alleged means: what made the recruitment, the introductions, the hold possible.

There is the shift. As long as an influencer is a billboard, his speech is at worst a matter of professional ethics and misleading advertising. From the moment you consider that he can produce acts in other people, his speech becomes an instrument. And an instrument gets investigated.

It is the same recognition of power as in Culiacán. Only here the answer is a courtroom instead of a bullet.

The symbolic version

Third continent, third answer, and this one you see every day.

Watch how somebody gets disqualified in tech. The standard line is: "he is only influential because he has followers". It is presented as a devastating criticism. The implication: his words have no value of their own, they only have an audience.

Except that this criticism describes exactly the situation it claims to denounce.

On artificial intelligence, X has become the primary source. The announcements, the corrections, the lab arguments, the papers commented on by their own authors: it all happens there first. LinkedIn comes behind, often hours or days later, and what you read there is very largely a reprocessing of what was said on X. I observe it in my own feed, and it is easy to verify: take any technical subject from this week and walk its chronology back.

So when somebody says "he is only followed because he is on X", he is not describing a fraud. He is describing a supply chain for information, and he is its last link.

That is the third answer to power: when you can neither kill it nor prosecute it, you declare it illegitimate. It is the least violent of the three, and the most revealing, because nobody ever takes the trouble to delegitimise something that has no effect.

What changed, and it is not the influencer

Put the three side by side. A cartel that kills. A prosecutor who charges. A peer who dismisses.

Three very different answers, with one thing in common: none of the three makes any sense if the influencer is only a billboard. You do not assassinate a billboard. You do not put it on trial. You do not waste your time explaining that it is illegitimate.

So what changed is not the job. It is what travels through it.

For a long time the scarce resource was information: whoever knew held the power. That era is over, not because information no longer counts, but because it is everywhere and free. The scarce resource has become attention. And whoever captures attention is not renting out a space: he steers what tens of thousands of people are going to believe, want, buy, hate or join.

That has a name, and it is not "influencer". It is called power.

Power has only ever had three adversaries, always the same ones, for a very long time: violence, law and delegitimisation. Culiacán, London, X.

Nothing new under the sun, except that power has changed hands without those who received it noticing. And that is what should occupy us, because the transfer happened without the counterparts.

A journalist has a press card, a code of ethics, a newsroom, a right of reply and a liability regime. An elected official has a mandate, a term and accounts to render. An influencer with five hundred thousand followers has none of that. He has power without status, and therefore without the protections that come with it.

That is precisely what makes him so easy to reach. A murdered journalist triggers an international reaction. A murdered influencer triggers an article about the fact that he was livestreaming.

The vertigo, to finish

Why during the live stream?

Because killing somebody while he is broadcasting is choosing a channel. The message travels neither through the press, which might contextualise it, nor through a communiqué, which might be denied. It travels through the victim's own feed, to the victim's own audience, distributed by the algorithm that had made her popular.

The tool that brought him into existence broadcasts his death. And the recommendation system, which does not know what it is looking at, pushes the sequence toward exactly the people it is meant to terrify: those who already followed that content.

No engineer designed that. It is a consequence.

We say "influencer" as though it were a light thing, a matter of shampoo and promo codes. Somebody in Culiacán took the word literally. Somebody judged that influence was a real capability, worth a plane to threaten it and a bullet to put it out.

On that precise point, he may have been right before we were.

What is established, and what is not

Established: the death of César Gastelum on August 4 in Culiacán during a TikTok live stream, his audience, his self-presentation as bélico, the statements of the Mexican security ministry and the local prosecutor's office; the murder of Valeria Márquez in May 2025 and its mention in the American sanctions of June 2025; the leaflets dropped by plane over Culiacán in January 2025; the count of about a dozen influencers killed in Sinaloa reported by the local press; the proceedings against Andrew and Tristan Tate in the United Kingdom and Romania, the civil trial date of June 22, 2026, and the thirty-eight British charges.

Not established: the exact motive for Tuesday's murder, and the intention behind the choice of the live stream.

Acknowledged interpretation: the reading of the three answers to power, and the observation on the chronology from X to LinkedIn, which is a matter of observed usage and not of a study.

Sources: Associated Press, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, CBS News, NBC, franceinfo, La Presse, Le Devoir, communiqués from the Mexican government's security ministry, the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Treasury for the June 2025 sanctions, and the Crown Prosecution Service for the British proceedings.