They don't have authority, but at the same time they end up with some sort of power to segway that by the nature of most social platforms. People come to those platforms to learn about a concept, but end up refusing to do the actual footwork and research themselves or even just read provided material presented in the box thing (I don't know what it's called, Reddit is gay). People are lazy, so they end up getting the answers to their questions from the loudest or maybe most biased, and even the most wrong commenters instead of source material.