“I can always be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. And I think every astrologer has been wrong before,” she says.
The strategy seems to be working: Rivers said he gained 30,000 followers on TikTok in the weeks following the June 21 presidential debate and the July 13 assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and now has more than 200,000 followers on the app. He also added 466 paying subscribers to Patreon, which charges between $5 and $22 a month.
Joe Theodore, a TikTok astrologer who launched his account in mid-July, now has nearly 10,000 followers. His first video, in which he predicted Harris would win the election, has been viewed more than 350,000 times. “A couple of my videos on TikTok have gone a little viral, but I never expected that,” Theodore said.
Astrology itself has been practiced in some form for thousands of years, but it is experiencing a resurgence in popularity, especially among millennials and Gen Z. In 2019, investor David Birnbaum told The New York Times that he estimated the “mystical services market” to be worth more than $2 billion. In 2021, astrology app Co-Star raised $15 million and has been downloaded more than 5 million times on the Google Play Store since its release in 2017. Astrologer Chani Nicholas’ Chani app, released in 2020, was downloaded more than 1 million times in 2023. Many of the astrologers who spoke to WIRED also offer online courses or have their own apps.
Rivers acknowledges that asking for astrological predictions, especially on politics, can easily lead users down the pitfalls of conspiracy theories. “When people feel scared, they believe, and they feel very powerless,” Rivers says. “It’s really important to understand how to communicate in a responsible way.”
New Age spirituality, of which astrology is often considered a part, has been a gateway into conspiracy theories like QAnon and has also correlated with anti-vaccination beliefs. “We’ve seen conspiracy theories, elections, politics, health and wellness, crystals, protein shakes, everything get sucked into a vortex of connections because of the way the platforms are proposing them,” said Giore Craig, senior fellow for digital integrity at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“Our algorithms are geared towards outrage and engagement,” says Jessica Lanyadu, professional astrologer and host of The Astrology Podcast. Podcast Ghosts She has 117,000 followers on Instagram. “The best way to grab someone’s attention is to provide them with conspiracy theories and cult content. Depending on the motivations of the astrologer and the person who consumes astrology content, astrology can become cult content for some people.”
The most obvious example of this pipeline is the recent case of astrology influencer Danielle Johnson, who posted on X under the name MysticxLipstick and had more than 100,000 followers. Johnson spent nearly a decade building a platform on social media to talk about astrology, but her tweets in her later years suggest she believed in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and COVID-19 conspiracies. A few hours before the total solar eclipse on April 8 this year, Johnson killed her partner and two children before taking her own life. Her final post on X was a repost from a QAnon account, warning people not to watch the total solar eclipse and saying “something big is coming.” On April 5, three days before the total solar eclipse, Johnson posted, “Wake up, wake up. The apocalypse is coming. All who have ears, listen.” “Now is the time to choose what you believe.”
