Appeal to celebrity



People ask me questions about present situations in life, and I say, “I don’t know, I’m just an actor. I don’t have any opinions. Actors are pretty stupid. My opinion is not worth anything. There’s no controversy for me, so don’t engage me in it, because I’m not going to participate.” So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and fuck off, OK? It’s already three hours long. Right, let’s do the first award. An appeal to celebrity is a fallacy that occurs when a source is claimed to be authoritative because of their popularity. It is the bastard child of an appeal to authority and an argumentum ad populum. The appeal to celebrity is especially common in advertising.

The fallacy is an appeal to authority and thus a conditional fallacy.

Examples

 * A large part of the appeal of fascism and other right-wing populist movements relies on the idea of the “will of the people” usually centered around a charismatic figure In other words, the celebrity-style politician/dictator must be right — they draw huge crowds, so therefore they represent the ‘will of the people’. To reduce it to the absolute level of absurdity — Hitler had 66 million fans; who am I to disagree?
 * Donald Trump's use of the reality TV show The Apprentice to help win the presidency. Many people voted for Trump because they thought he was an astute businessman who would improve the U.S. economy.
 * Jenny McCarthy’s use of celebrity to spread pseudoscientific ideas
 * Gwyneth Paltrow using her celebrity to sell ridiculous ideas such as vaginal steaming
 * John McAfee using his notoriety as a cybersecurity "expert" to shill cryptocurrency
 * The Wall Street Journal using actress and health industry non-expert Suzanne Somers to comment about the Affordable Care Act.

It is well known in academic business studies that celebrity endorsements significantly increase advertising effectiveness. Therefore the most common form of appeal to celebrity, the usage of celebrities to endorse products in advertisements, happens far too often to note individual instances. Celebrity endorsements of products should be considered only at face value: they are when a company pays a celebrity, as part of marketing branding, to boost brand awareness by increasing buzz around a product with a positive review. Nothing more, nothing less. The celebrity in question may or may not like the product, they get paid either way. It is not uncommon for a celebrity to endorse one product, and then be spotted in public with a competitor's product. Even if they are contractually obligated to use the endorsed product in public.

Also, scammers will frequently depict celebrities, almost always without authorization, "endorsing" the scam in their own promotions. This is particularly common for get-rich-quick/investment type scams, scams promoting bullshit health products like supplements, and celebrity imposter scams, where a scammer impersonates a celebrity to fleece a victim into donating money towards a fake charity or other similar ruse. Even quack doctor Mehmet Oz fought back against people falsely using Oz's name to push out their own brand of bullshit health products.

Problems
Popularity is irrelevant to truth. The only minor exception occurs when the cited celebrity is popular because of their expertise (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, and Neil deGrasse Tyson in their respective fields), which merely shows (in this case) that said persons are good at explaining science, not necessarily doing it. It also doesn't follow that, for instance, Dawkins's expertise in biology gives him any particular authority in questions of religion, or for that matter other branches of science such as physics or astronomy. Similarly, may be an authority on basketball shoes, but because of his expertise at basketball, not because of his popularity. This also works for Canadian pop singers talking about LGBTQ issues (via their charity) because they are gay.