Influencer and micro-celebrity research has become a popular interdisciplinary research area across digital media studies and celebrity studies in the past few years, including a growing interest in Asia broadly (e.g., Abidin, 2018; Abidin & Brown, 2018; Hopkins, 2019; Hurley, 2019; Lukács, 2020) and their growth on platforms outside of Silicon Valley (e.g., Guan, 2020; Lin & de Kloet, 2019; Song, 2018). However, existing research in the field has still primarily focused on Influencers and their types of labor (e.g., Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017; Duffy et al., 2021; Pham, 2015; Raun, 2018; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019), their savvy around algorithms and machine learning (e.g., Bishop, 2019, 2020; Carah & Dobson, 2016; Cotter, 2018), and various aspects of their follower relations (e.g., Berryman & Kavka, 2017) and monetizing engagements (e.g., Gerhards, 2019; Johnson & Woodcock, 2019; Luvaas, 2016; Zhang et al., 2019; Zou, 2018), leaving the regulation and governance of Influencers still an under-researched topic from the perspective of Social Science & Humanities (e.g., Chen et al., 2020; Cunningham & Craig, 2019, 2021) that primarily consider socio-cultural issues. (For studies on Influencer governance from the perspective of Law, please see e.g., Goanta & Ranchordà, 2020). In this Special Issue, we consider the regulation and governance of Influencers not only through the lens and framework of specific rules, laws, policies, and regulations that set norms on the practices of influencers, but also the broader social, cultural, moral, technical, industrial, and political factors and restrictions to which Influencers are subject to accumulate sustainable impact and income. Moreover, we understand the governance of Influencers as a process wherein multiple stakeholders are involved in the influencer industry, including official regulatory bodies, digital platforms, Influencers, and their agencies, endorsed brands and fans, resolve conflicts over emerging problems to shape the practices, ethics, economy, and culture of Influencers. The need to examine these issues of regulation and governance is pertinent in Asia considering that it presently contains the world's largest population of active social media users, the most vibrant and diverse digital economies and Influencer cultures, as well as among the most dynamic and complicated internet regulations and policies. Industry reports and statistics emphasize this burgeoning industry in the region. For instance, Eastern Asia, Southern Asia, and Southeast Asia boast over 1.1 billion, 847 million, and 506 million social media users respectively in 2022 (Dixon, 2022). In Southeast Asia alone, the Influencer marketing industry was worth $638 million in 2019 and the figure is expected to increase to $2.59 billion by 2024 (Gross, n.d). Specific to the Chinese market, Influencer and KOL (Key Opinion Leader) marketing was estimated to be worth about 100 billion yuan in 2021 and the entire Influencer economy can swell to almost seven trillion yuan by 2025 (Thomala, 2022). The Special Issue advocates for a “turn to regulation and governance” of influencer studies by taking influencers as a “new subject” in the globally booming digital economy and culture. The papers critically and subtly investigate various regulation and governing issues on Influencers in Asia, including but not limited to specific case studies of controversies, new enactments in regulation and law, concerns around advertorial disclosure and tax transparency, regulation and censorship of influencers' content creation, platform and/or state interventions into Influencer management, Influencer management systems, and various sociocultural concerns on the regulation of topics pertaining to race & ethnicity, sex & sexuality, age & ageism, class & inclusivity, ability & accessibility, and so forth. The first pair of papers consider how the biography and demographic of specific Influencers may be subject to more leveraging by or vigilante policing from the state. Lee and Abidin's paper focuses on foreign Influencers in South Korea known as “oegugin Influencers,” and how by performing cultures of difference and distinction on YouTube, they can be deployed by governments to partake in nation branding campaigns. This ethnography found that while White presenting oegugin Influencers appeared to experience favor in their partnerships in such campaigns, others become entangled with online hate and xenophobia with little opportunity for redress. Turning to Singapore, Radics and Abidin's paper draws on socio-legal studies and cultural studies to illustrate how the law heavily regulates some categories of Influencer behaviors while failing to protect others. In their policy review and ethnography, the authors flesh out how governance over Influencers is selectively deployed on issues of race & culture and sex & safety, where minority-race individuals are differently policed and sexual harassment against women often has little repercussion. The next pair of papers focus on the cultural moralities of domestic markets in which Influencers operate. The Mahy et al. paper looks at how the online conduct of Influencers in Indonesia are subject to different tiers of moral governance. Situated against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, their study of prolific case studies captured in the news media found that community-led regulation is strong in the country, as evidenced through instances of online backlash. A counterpoint is witnessed in Barbetta's study of content producers in the Japanese YouTube ecology, who often work anonymously, behind-the-scenes, and are underpaid by the prominent Influencer YouTubers who hire them for production work. Personal interviews with these “ghostubers” reveal that in engaging with aspirations of hope labor, these intermediary workers have come to internalize and accept their precarity, amidst a lack of awareness around their legal and moral rights. The next pair of papers examine Influencer regulation and governance in Mainland China and China's special administrative region—Hong Kong. Xu et al.'s paper discusses the policies, approach and politics of Influencer governance in China. Their document analysis of regulatory policies and case study on the regulations of social eating “chibo” Influencers not only demonstrate China's state-centric model of influencer governance involving the state, platforms, and industry associations but also illustrate the vulnerability, creativity, flexibility, and resilience of Influencers who are indentured by China's state-controlled digital capitalism and desperately seek survival in the precarious industry. Building on the Foucaudian perspective of “governmentality,” Ran Ju's paper explores how Influencers in Hong Kong on Xiaohongshu—also known as Red, which is China's biggest lifestyle sharing platform—operate as agents and mediators of governmentality, and how “governmentality” occurs over and through these Influencers. Employing walkthrough and ethnographic methods, the paper found that Influencer governance in Hong Kong emphasizes disciplinary techniques of self-governance and self-management for both Influencers and users to enrich their knowledge and skills as good “entrepreneurial citizens.” The final pair of papers turn to Influencers and their entanglements with politics and political climates. Le and Hutchinson's paper on the Vietnamese context identifies the dynamics that arise when Influencers operate in the context of tightly-run state media regimes. In their case study approach of a prolific Influencer who conducts name-and-shame livestreams is an exemplar of practices that instigate the state to pressure platforms to abide by their censorship regulations. The Filipino example, by Soriano and Gaw, similarly underscores the sociotechnical relationship among Influencers, platforms, and users in the climate of antimedia populism. In “networked political brokerage,” the authors offer an examination of how YouTube Influencers can advance partisan commentary or delegitimize mainstream media institutions through networked and discursive tactics. We hope that this collection of papers will contribute to the growing pool of studies on Influencer cultures, and foreground the diversity of Asian sociocultural contexts to generate ethnographically-rich theories and understandings of emergent forms of Influencer governance.