Manuel Monterrosa set out for the United States last year with his cellphone and a plan: He’d record his journey through the dangerous jungle known as the Darién Gap and post it on YouTube, warning other migrants of the perils they’d face.

In his six-part series, edited entirely on his phone along the way, he heads north with a backpack, leading viewers on a video-selfie play-by-play of his passage across rivers, muddy forests and a mountain known as the Hill of Death.

He eventually made it to the United States. But to his surprise, his videos began attracting so many views and earning enough money from YouTube that he decided he no longer needed to live in America at all.

So, Mr. Monterrosa, a 35-year-old from Venezuela, returned to South America and now has a new plan altogether: trekking the Darién route again, this time in search of content and clicks, having learned how to make a living as a perpetual migrant.

“Migration sells,” Mr. Monterrosa said. “My public is a public that wants a dream.”

For more than a decade, cellphones have been indispensable tools for people fleeing their homelands, helping them research routes, find friends and loved ones, connect with smugglers and evade the authorities.

Now, cellphones and social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and TikTok are drastically changing the equation once again, fueling the next evolution of global movement.

Today, migrants are the producers of an enormous digital almanac of the trek to the United States, documenting the route and its pitfalls in such detail that, in a few stretches, people can find their way on their own, without smugglers.

And as migrants stream their struggles and successes to millions back home, some are becoming small-time celebrities and influencers in their own right, inspiring others to make the trek as well.

Their posts, pictures, videos and memes are not just in Spanish, but also in the array of languages spoken by migrants from around the globe who are increasingly showing up at the southern border of the United States.

In Mandarin, the route from South America to the United States is called “zouxian” or “trek.” In Hindi, Haryanvi and Punjabi, languages spoken in India, it is part of “dunki,” a reference to a “donkey” or informal route. In Haitian Creole, the Darién jungle is “raje” or “ditch.” In Pashto and Persian, languages spoken in Afghanistan, migration through the Americas is often referred to as a “game.”

Ankush Malik, a migrant influencer from India, documented his journey from India to the United States last year, kissing his grandmother goodbye at the start of his multipart YouTube series. His channel has been viewed nearly seven million times by congratulatory, loyal viewers.

“This looks so much fun. I want to do this too,” says one.

“Eagerly awaiting part 16 of this video,” writes another, “love and blessings from Gujarat.”

Some influencers, like Mr. Monterrosa, who studied communications in Venezuela, are bringing in a few hundred dollars a month from companies like YouTube — often a lot more than they were making at home. During a good month, Mr. Monterrosa says he has earned $1,000 in payouts, four times the minimum wage in Colombia, where he lives now.

But the content can be more profitable for social media companies, which make money from posts about migration the same way they do from cat videos, experts say: the longer viewers watch or scroll, the more advertisements they can be shown.

“Eyeballs = $$ for Fb,” said Harriet Kingaby, co-founder of the Conscious Advertising Network, a coalition of advertisers, technology providers and others.

Spanish-language posts with the tag #migracion on TikTok have nearly two billion views, according to figures reported by the platform. So do posts marked #darien, which sometimes appear between ads for H&M and the iPhone15.

On Facebook, migration-related groups flourish — one has more than half a million members — creating an open marketplace for smugglers who call themselves “advisers” or “guides.”

The company says that offering smuggling services violates its policies, and that it makes an enormous effort to identify and remove such content, including working with the United Nations. Still, The New York Times found more than 900 cases of Facebook users offering passage toward the United States.

“Accompanying you toward your dreams!” read one recent Facebook post, where a group calling itself a “travel agency” advertises several routes through the Darién.

Facebook removed this and hundreds of other smuggler posts flagged by The Times. A company representative called “the safety of our users” a priority, acknowledging that it was a challenge to keep up with the “mind-melting” amount of information on the site.

“We have every incentive to remove violating content from the platform,” said Erin McPike, a spokeswoman, adding that some of the posts did not violate the company’s rules.

At the center of this digital conversation is the Darién Gap, the perilous jungle straddling South and North America that has grown from a dense, rarely traversed forest into a migrant thoroughfare.

The Darién is the only way into the Northern Hemisphere by foot. Long trekked by just a few thousand people a year, it’s quickly become a harrowing rite of passage, crossed by more than 500,000 migrants — from more than 100 countries — this year alone, according to the authorities in Panama, where the jungle ends.

Political turmoil and the economic havoc of the pandemic are fueling the increase, but officials from Colombia to the United States say cellphones and social media are undoubtedly accelerants.

“I saw their stories on Facebook,” Irismar Gutiérrez, a 22-year-old Venezuelan about to venture into the Darién Gap, said of all the posts from friends and family who had made it the United States.

Farther up the trail, the path through the jungle filled with people taking selfies.

Gustavo Rainer Lugo, 26, hiking up a hill slick with mud, described himself as an aspiring TikToker documenting his own trek to the United States. Moved by what he had already seen about the Darién online, he wanted to show his fellow Venezuelans the realities of the gap — “the good parts and the bad,” he said.

That night, after arriving at a first camp in the jungle, he rushed to a nearby river to record a dispatch.

The Darién, once barely known around the world, has drawn so much attention that it may soon become a reality television show, with a team of 24 adventurers planning a Jeep expedition through the jungle. The producers say they hope to get “as many as 40 million eyeballs a month through TikTok alone.”

To the alarm of the Biden administration, the number of Venezuelans crossing the Darién took off last year as photographs and videos raced across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook showing Venezuelans who had made it into the United States.

Since then, the Darién social media universe has only exploded. On TikTok, a cheery and almost heartwarming Darién video montage featuring waving migrants and a leap into an emerald-colored river has almost 13 million views. A Facebook user with nearly 500,000 followers, named El Chamo (“the young guy” in Venezuelan Spanish), posted videos from the Darién, and then a follow-up called “My first job in the United States.”

Many migrant content creators say they are acting as citizen journalists and educators, helping others understand what the route demands and make informed decisions whether to risk it.

Mr. Monterrosa, the YouTuber, said his family fled to Venezuela in the 1980s to escape violence in Colombia. Then he went back to Colombia in 2017 to escape the turmoil in Venezuela. He said he tried to make a living in Colombia before heading north, at one point selling chocolates and cigarette lighters on public buses and sleeping on the floor of a shared apartment.

He and his family have fled violence and poverty so often that migration is part of his identity, he said, something “I carry with me.”

In the miniseries about his journey to the United States, he passes the body of a man who looks near death and considers the terrible question, faced by nearly every migrant on the route, of whether to stop and aid a person who cannot go on.

“Is it inhuman not to help?” he asks.

He has been told by others that he inspired them to go north, including Miguel Alejandro Rojas, 27, who used Mr. Monterrosa’s work as a blueprint for his own popular Darién miniseries.

But Mr. Monterrosa does not see himself as incentivizing large-scale migration.

He says much bigger factors are to blame for that — like the crises in migrants’ home countries, the demand for cheap labor in the United States, immigration policies that force people onto illegal routes, and the social media platforms that benefit from the onslaught of new content.

Migrants who narrate and share their own journeys “are just a few more survivors” in a world that offers them few other options, he added.

Much of the content about the Darién and the rest of the journey is aspirational, featuring everyday people overcoming great odds, sometimes accompanied by religious music. One TikTok video of a disabled person making his way through the jungle on the back of another man has more than 10,000 comments.

Even a Darién parody subgenre has emerged, built on a long tradition of using humor to confront tragedy. A video featuring a fake Hugo Chávez, the father of Venezuela’s socialist revolution, migrating through the Darién has been shared more than 23,000 times.

In it, Fake Chávez curses his successor, President Nicolás Maduro, who has held onto power for the last decade. The bit carries the hashtag #hunger #corruption and #fear.

Facebook and TikTok are also flooded with the faces of people who have disappeared or died in the Darién, often accompanied by desperate pleas from family members asking for any information about their loved ones.

“It’s been 34 days without any news from them,” says one post on Facebook, above the photographs of two boys from Ecuador.

Another, with an image of a diapered toddler, includes a plea for the child’s name and relatives because her mother “drowned in a swamp.”

Sasha Arteaga, 33, a Venezuelan immigrant in Colombia, has built a TikTok following by posting these cases, then scrolling the internet for hours looking for signs of the missing person in the videos of other migrants. She has sometimes located people in the jungle this way, and then begged the Panamanian police to perform a rescue.

Her channel, which she started in August, has soared in popularity, though she says she makes no money from it. “As soon as I opened it, I had 10,000 followers,” she said.

Another series of TikTok videos speaks to the journey’s deep toll. Staring at the camera, Yorthin Alexander Valera and Jessica Hernández begged for help finding their son Ignacio, 6, who they lost in the forest. They feared he had drowned or been kidnapped.

In an anguished follow-up video, Mr. Valera begs God for forgiveness.

“I only wanted to try to give something to my children,” he says. “Why, God?”

And yet, the number of people making this journey continues to grow.

In a statement, YouTube said that it does not allow videos that promote human smuggling. The company also removed some content after it was flagged by The Times.

A representative from TikTok said the company had the same policy, and that it uses automated and human moderation to identify posts that violate its guidelines.

TikTok, which says its goal is to “inspire creativity and bring joy,” has handled images of migrants navigating dangerous terrain by placing labels on these videos.

One such post showed a frightened toddler clinging precariously to a man’s back as he crossed a fast-running river up to his neck. The soaking toddler screamed as the water spilled over them and the man gripped a rope to reach the other side.

“The actions in this video are performed by professionals or supervised by professionals,” the warning read, as if the child or migrants were professional stuntmen. “Do not attempt.”

With just a few clicks, migrants can now move so easily from TikTok videos to Darién-related Facebook groups and WhatsApp conversations with smugglers that a trek toward the United States can be conceived, planned and arranged in a matter of hours.

This has posed an enormous challenge for the Biden administration, which tries to counter with its own messaging on X, Instagram and Facebook. It highlights the consequences for people who show up at the border — including deportation — and offers an alternative, reminding them of legal pathways to immigration.

Blas Nuñez-Neto, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security, said that trying to thwart the messaging from smugglers online is “a constant kind of daily battle.”

“There’s no doubt that the U.S. government can sometimes not move as quickly as some of the bad actors that we’ve seen working online.”

Mr. Monterrosa is planning to leave soon for the Darién. To save money for the trek, he has produced new videos for his channel, sometimes interviewing Venezuelans in Colombia about their lives. A recent dispatch features an Australian podiatrist who decided to trek the jungle in a Spiderman outfit, helping migrants with foot injuries — and filming his own journey along the way.

Ms. Arteaga, the Venezuelan who broadcasts the most tragic stories from the jungle, now has a new project: preparing her own journey through the Darién to the United States.

When she first arrived in Colombia, she said she made money dancing at stoplights, eventually opening her own dance studio. But when rent rose, she was forced to close it. Today, she lives in a home with 12 others, sleeping six to a room.

“Sometimes you try so, so, so hard to get ahead,” she said, “you work so much, and in the end, it’s not what you expect.” She has her backpack and boots, and is leaving behind two children, ages 13 and almost 2.

“Many people know about the danger,” she said. “They do this because they need to.”

She will film her own journey as well, she said, hoping to help people hurt or stuck along the route.

The post Live from the Jungle: Migrants Become Influencers on Social Media appeared first on New York Times.