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Affordances and aesthetics of digital media platforms have given politicians new ways to connect with potential voters and actively manage their own self-image. Digital political communication is also often influenced by current trends in PR or commercial marketing; for example, the tools and tactics of social media influencers. Based on qualitative case studies of YouTube channels belonging to two Swedish party leaders, this article examines the adaptation of influencer practices in the politicians’ online presence, and what impact it has on the presentation of themselves and their politics. It analyses how different genres of beauty and lifestyle influencers are embraced and adapted to a political context, as well as the ways in which specific audio-visual elements are used to construct the mediated performance of political authenticity, giving viewers ‘behind-the-scenes’ access to the politicians’ personal as well as professional life. The analysis shows how the adaption of videos in confessional genres such as story time, Q&A, and vlog, which feature personal expressions of emotions and experiences, is illustrative of an increased personalisation of political communication, where the dimension if intimacy is emphasised.

Politically motivated criticism of influencer collaborations with certain brands or organisations is a recurring feature on social media today. This article is based on a case study of followers’ reactions to collaborations between two popular Swedish influencers and Visit Dubai, the governmental tourism agency of the United Arab Emirates. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, the article takes a sociocultural approach to influencer marketing and examines how and why politicisation happens in comments to sponsored posts. The analysis focuses on discursive struggles over the construction of political issues and the role of influencers, as well as expressions of perceived interconnectedness and authenticity work among followers. It offers a qualitative understanding of audience perceptions of influencers’ political power and responsibilities, and argues that this is connected to how the role of influencers is constructed – as a friend or as promotional professional.

In early2022, two of Sweden’s most popular influencers launched YouTube series where they interviewed political leaders about the upcoming parliamentary elections. The series were presented as a way to reach and engage younger audiences, who supposedly would not take part in politics otherwise. They also triggered a debate about political influencers, both in traditional newspapers and in social media, where actors in and outside of the influencer industry participated. This chapter examines the discursive construction of “political influencers” in these debates, by analysing contradictory stances, as well as the boundary work of journalists, experts, and influencers themselves, in mediated discourse. The chapter highlights how the commercial nature of influencers, and their tendency to bring forth their personal lives, creates tensions in relation to their perceived political function, role, and power. The chapter also underlines how influencers are constructed as both a promise and a threat to political interest and participation, specifically for young people.

Influencer Politics focuses on current discussions about the role and impact of social media influencers in the political sphere, and how the personal, political and promotional often converges in digital media. A key question is how core ideas of influencer culture – authenticity, intimacy, commercialism, and self-branding – shape the ways in which politics are expressed and understood in this context, as well as opens up space for new ways of connecting and interacting with the public. It also highlights the way that influencer culture itself is infused with politics, where issues of, for example, empowerment and exploitation are articulated and discussed in different ways. The book is the result of a common interest among researchers engaged in work on political aspects of influencer marketing and influencer culture from critical, cultural, and strategic perspectives, and offers a range of case studies devoted to both the promises and limitations of influencer politics.

• A unique overview of influencer politics and its different dimensions. 
• Contributions from leading scholars in the field. 
• Addresses questions of power, politics and influence that are widely discussed in the public sphere globally.

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.

Though politics and promotion have never been completely separate, the convergence between the two spheres is increasingly prominent in today's digital culture. To broaden our understanding of such promotional politics in social media, this paper examines commercial collaborations between four Swedish influencers and two private companies that offer services enabled by specific neoliberal reforms during recent decades, and how they strive to present these services in a way that attracts an affluent but socially conscious middle-class. It argues that the political potential of influencers might not always be as spokespersons for a cause or party, but rather as ‘ideological intermediaries’ who promote a lifestyle to be inspired by, and aspire to. The analysis identifies the discourses that influencers draw on to achieve the promotional and ideological outcomes of commercial collaborations, as well as the authenticity labour that they perform in the texts. Further, the paper analyses how notions of authenticity also impact audiences' interpretation and politicization of the collaborations, in the comment sections to the sponsored blogposts

The focal point of this chapter is surveillance practices in relation to social media influencers and digital marketing. The aim is to examine how the idea of surveillance can be expanded to include both social and technological aspects that work at individual, peer, and top-down levels. Drawing on examples from the Swedish influencer industry, we discuss and problematise how surveillance can be understood in such a context and how different dimensions of surveillance are manifested, exploited, and contested. The chapter concludes that participatory and gendered peer- and self-surveillance are an inherent part of influencer culture, and that the commercial success of influencers depends upon these practices. Similarly, platform surveillance and data mining connected to digital advertising can be understood as part of a contemporary commercialised surveillance culture that is closely related to both digital technology and the political economy of the influencer industry.