Crowd Forensics and Warrant Braiding: Collaborative Persuasion Knowledge in AI Influencer Threads

Something odd happens under synthetic influencer posts as their comment section turn into detective investigations of glitches, lighting, and where the content came from and one viewer’s private suspicion becomes a public cue the next viewer inherits. This shift helps us extend the persuasion knowledge model with collaborative persuasion knowledge (CPK), a platform-level process through which networked consumers exchange forensic evidence and interpretive warrants to negotiate the legitimacy of a persuasion attempt. In 1,613 organic comments on 128 Instagram posts from 12 global synthetic influencer accounts, spanning 2018 to 2025 and coded at the comment level by two independent coders, we identify two mechanisms that follow different platform logics. Crowd forensics is collaborative auditing, whereby commenters inspect artifacts, trace provenance, and challenge the tactic. Warrant braiding works the other way, by assembling aesthetic, technological, and normative warrants that make synthetic engagement feel acceptable. The two mechanisms tend to appear under different conditions. Crowd forensics appears in 100 of 128 threads and is more common on posts with artificial intelligence disclosure, whereas warrant braiding appears in 32 threads, more common on carousels and lower-visibility posts. Overall, audiences recognize synthetic persuasion individually, and they also inspect, contest, and normalize it together, with implications for disclosure policy, creative format choices, and platform governance.