The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Tanmay Samanta, whose focus is on digital greenwashing. Social media, and especially influencers on social media platforms, are critical to promoting sustainable consumerism; influencer marketing is also a key element of greenwashing, however.
Their style of storytelling is central to their success, and considerable effort goes into this. Greenwashing, in particular, purposefully creates false, favourable opinions about a product, service, or company’s efforts to be environmentally friendly. Tanmay explored this especially for social media influencers in India, examining their influence, their use of sustainability or greenwashing narratives, and their deployment of visibility optimisation techniques. The focus is on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, and the study used purposive sampling by focussing on relevant hashtags.
YouTube was especially prominent here; Instagram and Facebook were largely used alongside their YouTube channels. Sustainable living and lifestyle, awareness and information, and sustainability and the environment were prominent topics of the influencer content created. 40% of content creators addressed the issue of greenwashing in a critical way; 44% remained neutral; 16% practiced greenwashing either directly or indirectly.
Some channels engaged in environmental journalism and solution-oriented storytelling; some such influencers were even arrested for confronting the greenwashing practices of corporations. Presentation styles vary widely between these channels, from highly polished cinematic videos to direct engagement in environmental cleanup activities. Other channels’ practices were not so positive; here, an emphasis on pro-environmental practices was used to obscure much more negative implications.
