Selling without being a sellout

The growing use of social media has enabled new forms of prescription whereby an individual entrepreneur, called “influencer” or “content creator”, can be recruited by a business to pitch a product to their audience on their profile. The promotion of environmental practices also involves such practices of prescription and can be a source of tension. Using quantitative web scraping methods as well as qualitative methods, the author examines the forms of eco-responsible prescription present on social media. Although content creators distance themselves from commercial considerations through their discourse, and emphasize the alternative nature of their activity, their practices stem from the business world and are rooted in commercial relations—of cooperation, competition and pricing requirements—with the other actors present on social media.