On Monday, streamer and content creator Hasan Piker helped raise more than $56,000 in one stream for Oliver Larkin, a former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer who is seeking to primary Jared Moskowitz, a moderate Democratic congressman from Florida. It was the most the campaign had raised “in a single day,” Larkin said on X shortly after the stream ended.

Over the past few years, creators have become an essential piece of campaign messaging strategy. But Piker’s recent stream for Larkin is the latest sign that online influence is being leveraged for direct fundraising as well.

Piker isn’t alone. Trisha Paytas, a YouTuber with more than 5 million subscribers and a long history of provocative stunts, isn’t known for her political activism, but in February she donated more than $10,000 to a campaign called Creators Against ICE. The campaign, organized by the creator collective Creators for Peace, is just one in a string of fundraisers organized by coalitions of creators turning social media followings into political fundraising machines.

Unlike traditional fundraising models like super PACs that pool funds from publicly reported donors, these creator collectives pool audiences and leverage social networks and off-the-shelf tools like Shopify and Tiltify to convert followers into donors. Creators for Peace is one of the most prominent groups in a line of creator coalitions mobilizing around causes from Gaza relief to immigration aid—establishing a model that could reshape grassroots fundraising ahead of the midterm elections.

“There are a lot of creators that I think recognize the power of having a platform,” says Hassan Khadair, one of the Creators for Peace organizers. “There’s more of a call to action culturally with creators than I think there’s ever been before.”

Creators for Peace was established in 2024 by Nikki Carreon in an Instagram group DM with a handful of other creators to raise money for Gaza relief. That group chat expanded into a more than 120-person Discord server that included influencers with millions of followers on platforms like Instagram, Twitch, and YouTube. People like Kurtis Conner, Hasan Piker, and the Try Guys, who collectively boast more than 15 million followers on their primary platforms, got involved. Members shared infographics with their audiences and organized a livestream. By the end of the campaign, the group had raised more than $1.6 million.

“We largely start from zero on each new campaign. I will individually reach out to several creators, we’ll get something out, and then once we allow that to catch fire on its own, a bunch of creators will reach out to us,” says Khadair. For the Creators for Peace immigration fundraiser, Khadair says, “we really wanted to try and move out of the leftist bubble just a little bit, because a lot of our audiences tend to align with us on these issues.”

By connecting with more apolitical creators like Paytas, the Creators Against ICE campaign has raised nearly $140,000 for the National Immigration Law Center, according to the group’s Tiltify fundraiser.

Creators have come under fire for remaining silent on political issues for years. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, audiences began demanding that influencers creating content on anything from fashion to food publicly speak out and take sides on political issues. In these online spaces, silence is often seen as complicity.

Groups of Democratic political influencers, like UnderTheDeskNews, have also started raising funds for whistles to alert communities about the presence of ICE agents and community watch support as well. In February, around 80 creators were part of an anti-ICE merch fundraiser tied to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, selling T-shirts, hats, and stickers featuring the singer’s Sapo Concho mascot. The campaign raised more than $100,000 for immigration legal defense funds.

State-backed cyber threat actors from the likes of Belarus, China and Pakistan are all ramping up their activity in the wake of the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran, even though their government paymasters are not directly involved in the war.

This is according to intelligence published by Proofpoint, which claims to have observed several such campaigns unfolding in the wild. It believes this wave of malicious activity reflects a mixture of threat actors opportunistically using the conflict to create lures in their routine options, and intelligence collection directly related to Middle Eastern governments and their allies.

“These campaigns were conducted by both known groups and previously unobserved actors, with suspected attribution to China, Belarus, Pakistan and Hamas,” wrote Proofpoint’s research team.

“The campaigns heavily relied on aspects of the conflict as topical lure content to engage the targets and often used compromised accounts belonging to government organisations to send phishing emails,” they said.

In one such campaign, Belarussian threat actor TA473, or Winter Vivern, impersonated a European Council president spokesperson relaying a statement on the European Union’s (EU’s) position on human rights, regional security and Iran’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

It was sent to government organisations in both Europe and the Middle East – the first time Winter Vivern has been seen targeting the Middle East – and contained an HTML file which, if opened, displayed a decoy image while conducting an HTTP request in the background. However, said Proofpoint, for now at least, this request is likely intended for target tracking purposes only, as it neither observed nor retrieved any next-stage payloads.

At the same time, the China-linked UNK_InnerAmbush actor ran a phishing exercise targeting diplomats and government officials in the region. Using a compromised email address, it used the death of Ayatollah Khamenei as a lure, purporting to share “secret on-site images” obtained via the US Department of Foreign Affairs – which should be a dead giveaway to anybody with knowledge of American politics, as US foreign affairs are handled by the State Department.