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It has become increasingly more common to promote cosmetic surgery on social media with the help of influencers. A debate about the phenomenon has recently been evoked in Swedish media, where concepts such as power and responsibility are often discussed. The study “Influencers, the ideals and the sponsored cosmetic surgeries” aims to shed light on how power relations and responsibility is portrayed in connection with influencers' marketing of cosmetic surgeries. By analyzing content from a documentary made by SVT, we have been able to distinguish different social actors who are assigned specific roles, where the documentary genre has an impact on how the content is presented which can have effects on the audience. The study's theoretical framework is based on theories of habitus, field and capital as well as the framing theory. The analysis is based on the method multimodal critical discourse analysis, where we have used analysis tools such as lexical choices, attributes and stage environment and social actors as well as Fairclough's three-dimensional model.

In the result, we distinguished five distinctive discursive themes, where the result showed discourses about influencers as actors with power who are partially taking responsibility, although influencers being portrayed as victims were most prominent in the documentary. The discourse about society as a collective, platforms and clinics as actors with power was portrayed from a more critical perspective where a big part of the responsibility was placed on those actors, and not on the influencers promoting the surgeries. Another conclusion of the study is that the creators of the documentary have a big role in shaping the portrayals of the actors and the discourses in the documentary.