“I can always be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. And I think all astrologers have been wrong before,” he says.
The strategy appears to be working. Rivers says that in the weeks following the June 21 presidential debate and the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump, he saw his TikTok following increase by 30,000 — he now has more than 200,000 followers on the app. He also added 466 people to his paid tier on Patreon, where he charges between $5 and $22 per month.
Joe Theodore, an astrologer on TikTok who started his account in mid-July, now has nearly 10,000 followers. His first video, in which he predicted Harris would win the election, garnered more than 350,000 views. “The two videos I posted there have become very popular, but I didn’t expect that at all,” he says.
Although astrology itself has been practiced in one form or another for thousands of years, it has seen a resurgence in popularity, driven largely by millennials and Gen Z. In 2019, investor David Birnbaum told the magazine The New York Times which estimated that the “mystical services market” was worth more than $2 billion. In 2021, the Co-Star astrology app raised 15 million dollars and has been downloaded more than 5 million times on the Google Play Store since its launch in 2017. The Chani app, launched by astrologer Chani Nicholas in 2020, reached More than a million downloads in 2023. Many of the astrologers who spoke to WIRED teach online courses or have their own apps, too.
Rivers acknowledges that searching for astrological predictions, particularly around politics, could easily lead users down a rabbit hole of conspiracy. “People, when they’re scared, tend to believe. And they feel very powerless,” she says. “It’s really important to understand how to communicate responsibly.”
New Age spirituality, of which astrology is often considered to be a part, has been an entry point to conspiracies such as QAnon and is correlated with anti-vaccine beliefs“We’ve seen conspiracy, elections, politics, health, wellness, crystals, protein shakes all come together in a whirlpool of connectivity because of the way platforms were making suggestions,” says Jiore Craig, a senior fellow for digital integrity at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“Our algorithms target outrage and engagement,” says Jessica Lanyadoo, a professional astrologer and host of the astrology podcast The ghost of a podcast who has 117,000 followers on Instagram. “The best way to get someone engaged is to feed them conspiracy theories and cult content, which can be astrology for some people, depending on the astrologer and the motivations of the person consuming astronomical content.”
Nowhere is this channeling more evident than in the recent case of Astrological influencer Danielle Johnsonwho had more than 100,000 followers on X, where she posted under the name MysticxLipstick. Johnson had spent the better part of a decade building a platform for talking about astrology on social media, but tweets toward the end of her life indicate that Johnson believed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and conspiracies about COVID-19In the hours before the solar eclipse on April 8 this year, Johnson killed his partner and two children before committing suicide. His last post on X was a repost from a QAnon account, warning people not to look at the eclipse and that “something big is coming.” On April 5, three days before the eclipse, Johnson had posted: “WAKE UP, WAKE UP, THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE. EVERYONE WITH EARS, LISTEN UP. YOUR TIME TO CHOOSE WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS NOW.”