Dubai’s Army of Influencers Gets Back in Line

As Iranian missiles and drones exploded above Dubai in the first days of the Iran war, the city’s legions of social-media influencers started posting. “Your boy is currently in the middle of World War III right now,” the day trader Mike Babayan, who posts under the handle “Nitrotrades,” said into his camera on February 28, a clip that garnered 1.1 million views on Instagram Reels. It was a departure from his usual fare of filming fancy sports cars and stock-trading strategies. Now “I am seeing a lot of people who are just, like, packing up and leaving altogether,” he said, standing under the Burj Khalifa, the cloud-scraping, 163-floor high-rise where he lives.

“That was meters away from us,” another influencer, Will Bailey, said, wide-eyed, as he turned his camera to a nearby plume of black smoke and explained that it was coming from the Fairmont Dubai. CNN later reported that an Iranian drone had struck near the hotel. In a subsequent video, Bailey moved inside from the pool at the sound of two explosions, saying that the target appeared to be the Dubai Marina. The videos had an altogether different vibe from other recent posts that show him admiring his torso and getting his blood tested at a hospital. (He hates needles.)

Turning moments—whether geopolitical crises or quotidian morning trips to the gym or a coffee shop—into viral content is what social-media influencers do. But the war has scrambled the equation for influencers in Dubai. The strikes were gold by influencer standards, the chance for a bit of cinema-verité reporting from the front lines, Dubai-style. Yet the influencers have thrived by portraying Dubai as a magnet for the business-class (and above) global jet set, who are drawn to the city’s futuristic, crossroads-of-the-world appeal. After a few days, many influencers reached a Solomonic compromise: They might mention the war, but only to reassure their followers that Dubai was actually great and so ably led that there was no reason to worry about anything happening just across the Persian Gulf. The switch underscored how content creation in Dubai is different from content creation in most other places, because Dubai is fundamentally different from most other places.

Moving through Dubai is like moving through a series of simulacra: make-believe worlds of bright lights, tall buildings, and international fashions conjured out of the desert sand over the past 50 years. If you like, you can go to an “Irish Village,” which you can enter through a circular portal. On the other side, you will find an Irish-themed beer garden with storefronts (a “Tobacconist” and the “Ballinasloe Post Office”) that leads to a replica of an Irish pub with draught Guinness. Inside the Dubai Mall, “Chinatown” has floating, glowing orange paper lanterns and a “Neon City” section with LED-lit signs that roughly mimic the famous neon lights of Hong Kong and Shanghai. The Mall of the Emirates has an indoor ski resort. (Dubai’s average daytime temperature in March is 84 degrees Fahrenheit.)

There are European-style waterfront areas and hypermodern cafés that look as though someone typed the prompt “South Korean café with lots of stainless steel” into ChatGPT and then built exactly what it spat out. If you’re searching for some authentic, old-school Middle Eastern atmosphere, you can visit Al Seef, an area completed in 2017 and designed to look like a traditional bazaar. Al Seef features an array of food options—KFC, McDonald’s, Peet’s Coffee, and a Starbucks—all designed to look ancient. I could go on, but you get the point: To walk through Dubai is to experience an ever-changing series of scenes, as if you were moving among different levels of a video game. When you drive around, the haze slightly blurs the distant skyline, as though the world beyond you hasn’t fully loaded yet. Many of Dubai’s prominent spaces and buildings are shiny—lurid, even—and seem as though they’ve been designed to photograph well. In other words, Dubai is the perfect backdrop for social media.

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The United Arab Emirates (Dubai is one of seven) courts influencers as a matter of state policy. The U.A.E. Government Media Office organizes an annual three-day influencer conference called the “1 Billion Followers Summit,” which celebrates “the power of online communities.” MrBeast—the most popular YouTube video creator in the world—and the actor Will Smith spoke at the convention in January. At the event last year, the government advertised the extension of its “Golden Visa”—a special five-to-10-year visa for “investors, entrepreneurs, scientists, outstanding students and graduates, humanitarian pioneers and frontline heroes”—to influencers. A government Creators HQ office helps influencers with the boring part of their work: obtaining a Golden visa, securing film permits and licenses, relocating to Dubai, and registering their businesses.

The push has succeeded. Based on a hashtag count, Dubai is one of the top-five most Instagrammed cities in the world, above Miami and Los Angeles and just below Istanbul and New York.

Influencers are often regarded as a nuisance, fodder for dry wit and schadenfreude. “Won’t Someone Please Think of Dubai’s Influencers?” read the headline of a column in The Spectator. “Influencer Trapped in Five-Star Dubai Hotel Says Brits Who Have Got Out ‘Have Been Lucky…,’” read another from the Daily Mail.

But from Dubai’s point of view, courting them made sense: What better than to have people whose lives appear idyllic and fun showcase your city to millions of others? There are, however, conditions. Influencers need to stay in the good graces of the Emirati government to remain. Posting advertisements—influencers’ main source of income—requires an “Advertiser Permit,” and holders agree not to violate the U.A.E. government’s restrictive media content standards, which include a ban on publishing anything that “might harm the national currency or the economic situation in the State.” After the Iran strikes, the U.A.E.’s Public Prosecution office posted that “circulating rumors and information from unknown sources through social media platforms” would be “subject to legal accountability in accordance with applicable legislation,” and that “spreading rumors is a crime.” The message was clear.

“You can’t say anything negative about the Dubai government or anything negative about Dubai, full stop,” Ralph Anthony Chiti, an influencer and investor, told me. No one from the government had contacted him, but he said he felt pressure to conform or risk reprisals.

He had intended to start a crypto hedge fund in Dubai and to remain there. But he left for London after the strikes began. “I didn’t feel in danger. I just felt like Dubai was just pretty quiet. The streets were empty. It just wasn’t as vibey as it was beforehand,” Chiti said, adding that he felt able to speak more freely now that he was out of the U.A.E. with no immediate plans to return.

Back in Dubai, soon after the rash of posts about being scared and shocked, a uniform counter-message spread across Dubai’s influencer ecosphere. Posts using very similar language and images touted how safe the U.A.E. was because of the country’s strong leadership and advanced air defenses. Others included this Q&A: “You live in Dubai, aren’t you scared?” “No, because I know who protects us,” often accompanied by a video of Emirati leaders.

A BBC analysis of 129 influencer posts from Dubai in the first days of the war found that many contained similar language emphasizing the same themes—“stability,” “safety,” “strong leadership”—and sometimes were uploaded within minutes, or even seconds, of one another. The study didn’t draw any conclusions on how that happened.  

“We live in one of the greatest cities in the world,” Louise Starkey, an Australian living in Dubai, posted from the patio of a waterfront restaurant a week into the war. “It is safe and feels normal.” Babayan, the day trader, told his followers that, two days after the possible start of World War III, “besides a few loud noises, absolutely nothing happened. Everyone is safe and life continues as usual.” He declined requests for comment.

On Wednesday, after Babayan’s, Starkey’s, and other similar posts about how things had gone back to normal, Iran fired another barrage of missiles and drones at the U.A.E. Two drones fell near the Dubai airport, injuring four.   

Dubai wants to portray an image of composed opulence so that it can, in some ways, keep the real world at bay. Influencers specialize in creating a world that looks better than the one we are living in. They are a good match.