Influencer responsibility in practice: The role of Instagram debates for individualised politics during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments discouraged citizens from travelling both within and outside the nation in an effort to mitigate the spread of the virus. Still, some Scandinavian influencers, whose livelihood often depends on producing aesthetic travel content, chose to go abroad, which led to criticism from both followers and others. While ethical debates over air travel have taken place in social media for a long time, the specific conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions, combined with the centrality of travel within influencer culture, created new controversies and discussions on several influencers’ Instagram accounts in Norway and Sweden. In this article, we use digital ethnography and multimodal discourse analysis to examine discursive negotiations of different moral positions in regards to long-haul travel, the political role and responsibility of influencers, as well as how appeals to solidarity and individualised responsibility were performed and contested in socially mediated spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.