From Mobility Inequality to Populist Grievance: Passport Privilege, Travel Influencers, and the Politics of the Digital Tourist Gaze

In this commentary, author Zeynep Temel examines how passport hierarchies and unequal mobility shape not only who can travel, but also who gains the authority to represent the world through digital tourism. Drawing on research on visa regimes, mobility infrastructure, the tourist gaze, and platform-mediated representation, she argues that passport privilege can become representational privilege. Travel influencers do not simply document destinations; they participate in constructing their meanings for global audiences. Yet access to this representational power is structured by nationality, class, wealth, and mobility rights. Temel further shows how such inequalities can feed broader grievances around globalization, exclusion, sovereignty, and dignity, creating discursive conditions in which populist narratives may resonate without claiming that mobility inequality itself directly causes populism.

By Zeynep Temel*

A striking map of the world has circulated repeatedly on social media. Produced by Sightsmap from geotagged photographs uploaded to Google’s former Panoramio service, it visualizes photographic activity as points of light. Europe glows. North America is heavily illuminated. Other parts of the world appear far more sparsely represented. In the ranking associated with the map, New York, Rome, and Barcelona occupied the first three positions among the world’s most photographed cities (Marcus, 2014; Swanson, 2015).

The map is not a contemporary measure of Instagram or TikTok activity. Panoramio itself was discontinued, and the visualization reflects a particular platform, user population, and period of digital photography. It should therefore not be mistaken for a neutral map of where photographs are taken today. Yet this limitation arguably makes the image more interesting rather than less. As an early visualization of digital tourism, Sightsmap raises a question that has become considerably more important in the age of travel influencers: who gets to see the world; and, consequently, who gets to construct its image for everyone else?

Contemporary travel content often makes international mobility appear almost frictionless. Creators move from Bangkok to Paris, spend a weekend in Istanbul, “discover” villages in the Caucasus, or work remotely from Bali. Borders are rarely protagonists in these narratives. Travel appears primarily as a function of curiosity, money, and individual choice. But a British, German, or Japanese travel creator and an Afghan, Pakistani, Nigerian, or Syrian creator do not encounter the same world of borders. They may look at the same map, but the map does not offer them the same possibilities.

This matters beyond tourism. If travel influencers increasingly participate in constructing how destinations are imagined by audiences who may never visit them, unequal access to international mobility also produces unequal opportunities to participate in the production of the global tourist imaginary. Passport privilege can, in other words, become representational privilege.

The Unequal Geography of Global Mobility

The passport is one of the most consequential yet normalized mechanisms through which states distribute international mobility. Research on visa regimes shows that globalization has not produced a uniformly borderless world. Instead, borders have become more permeable for particular populations. Czaika, de Haas, and Villares-Varela (2018) demonstrate the persistent differentiation built into international visa regimes, while Mau and colleagues (2015) describe the resulting hierarchy as a “global mobility divide.”

For holders of powerful passports, this divide can remain almost invisible. International travel may require little advance planning beyond purchasing transportation and accommodation. For others, the same journey can involve consular appointments, proof of employment and income, bank statements, travel insurance, accommodation reservations, substantial fees, and uncertainty over whether permission will ultimately be granted. 

The costs of this system are themselves unequally distributed. Recchi, Deutschmann, and Gabrielli (2020) show that visa costs impose disproportionate burdens on travelers from poorer countries. Neumayer (2006) similarly demonstrates how visa restrictions allow states to regulate access to foreign spaces selectively rather than simply opening or closing borders to everyone equally.

Spijkerboer’s (2018) concept of a global “mobility infrastructure” is particularly useful here. International movement depends upon a network of laws, airports, consulates, transportation systems, technologies, financial resources, and administrative categories. This infrastructure enables some people to move quickly and predictably while making movement considerably more difficult for others.

A powerful passport therefore represents more than convenience. It is a form of mobility capital. And in the age of social media, mobility capital can become cultural capital.

Who Constructs the Tourist Gaze?

Urry’s (1990) classic concept of the “tourist gaze” challenged the idea that tourists simply encounter destinations as they are. What travelers consider beautiful, authentic, exotic, romantic, or worth photographing is shaped by representations they have encountered before travelling. The Sightsmap visualization offers an unusually literal illustration of this process. It does not simply tell us where tourists went; it records where a particular population of digitally connected travelers chose to photograph and geotag their surroundings. Research using geolocated tourism data has since demonstrated both the usefulness and the limitations of such digital traces: different platforms capture different tourist practices and populations, meaning that no single dataset can straightforwardly represent tourism itself (Salas-Olmedo et al., 2018).

Social media has nevertheless dramatically accelerated the circulation of the tourist gaze. Before visiting Cappadocia, travelers encounter thousands of images of hot-air balloons at sunrise. Bali appears through temples, beaches, rice terraces, and infinity pools. Paris is repeatedly condensed into a recognizable repertoire of balconies, cafés, streets, and monuments. Travelers subsequently reproduce many of those images themselves.

Instagram therefore does not simply document tourism. Research suggests that it participates in the co-creation of destination image: tourists, residents, tourism organizations, and influencers continuously produce and reproduce visual understandings of places (Iglesias-Sánchez et al., 2020). Influencers occupy an especially interesting position within this process. Their authority depends partly on the appearance of personal experience. Unlike conventional tourism advertising, influencer content often presents itself as an individual encounter with a destination: this is what I saw; this is what I discovered; this is what you should experience.

Yet these narratives necessarily involve selection. Landscapes are chosen, neighborhoods included or excluded, encounters edited, and experiences organized into coherent stories. Research examining influencer representations of destinations such as Iran demonstrates how social-media creators can reshape destination images by foregrounding particular dimensions of everyday life, hospitality, culture, and perceived authenticity. (Saeidi Motahar et al., 2021)

A constructivist perspective makes the significance of this process clearer. Destinations do not possess internationally shared meanings independently of representation. Their identities as “dangerous,” “romantic,” “authentic,” “undiscovered,” or “adventurous” are socially produced and stabilized through repeated narratives and images. Travel influencers increasingly participate in this meaning-making. The important question, then, is not simply what they show. It is who gets to travel enough to become an authoritative narrator of the world in the first place.

When Passport Privilege Becomes Representational Privilege

The connection does not require an assumption that Instagram or TikTok deliberately privileges particular nationalities. The mechanism is more mundane. Consider the conditions necessary to build a career around international travel. A creator able to enter dozens of countries without obtaining visas in advance can respond quickly to cheap flights, tourism-board invitations, brand collaborations, and emerging destinations. Travel can be frequent and spontaneous. Content can consequently be produced at the regular pace demanded by platform economies.

A creator requiring visas for many of those destinations faces a different production environment. Trips may need to be planned months ahead. Applications cost money. Passports may remain at consulates during processing. Bookings can be required before a visa decision is known. An application may simply be rejected. Mobility advantage can therefore become a content-production advantage.

Successful content generates followers and commercial opportunities; those opportunities finance further travel; further travel produces additional content. Passport privilege does not determine who succeeds as an influencer, and creators from the Global South are neither absent nor passive within digital tourism. Wealth, class, language, domestic mobility, and platform access further complicate any simple North–South division.

But nationality still structures the administrative conditions under which cross-border content can be produced. This is also why Said’s (1978) much older question of representational authority remains relevant. Orientalism was concerned not merely with whether Western descriptions of other societies were accurate, but with the unequal power to classify, describe, and produce knowledge about them. 

Digital tourism is obviously not equivalent to nineteenth-century Orientalism, and every outsider representation of another society should not be interpreted as domination. Yet the underlying questions remain surprisingly contemporary: Who moves? Who observes? Who narrates? And who appears primarily inside somebody else’s narrative?

From Unequal Mobility to Political Grievance

The political significance of this inequality lies partly in its visibility. Social media places radically different experiences of globalization on the same screen. One person documents spontaneous weekend trips across borders; another spends months assembling documents for permission to visit a single country. Research on passport discrimination suggests that mobility restrictions can be experienced not merely as administrative inconvenience but through questions of dignity, recognition, and unequal treatment. (Yasin et al., 2024)

It would be too strong to argue that these experiences produce populism. Visa rejection does not turn someone into a populist, and travel influencers do not cause nationalist politics. The relationship is more indirect. Populist narratives frequently acquire force by translating complicated structural inequalities into morally intelligible conflicts: ordinary people against privileged elites, the nation against external institutions, or those who are excluded against those perceived to benefit from globalization.

Mobility inequality provides unusually tangible material for such grievances because it exposes one of globalization’s central contradictions. The contemporary international order celebrates openness, connectivity, and circulation while continuing to distribute the practical freedom to move largely according to nationality.

Digital platforms make this contradiction particularly visible. Research on social-media populism has shown how online communication can transform perceived exclusion, foreign influence, and national grievance into politically resonant narratives (Ragragio, 2022). Mobility inequality can enter the same discursive environment, particularly where unequal treatment becomes interpreted through wider debates over Western privilege, sovereignty, globalization, or national dignity. Travel influencers do not create this inequality. They can, however, inadvertently become some of its most visible symbols.

The Politics Behind the Picture

This brings us back to the illuminated Sightsmap. Its brightest areas should not be read simply as a hierarchy of beautiful or interesting places. Nor can they straightforwardly be interpreted as a map of passport privilege: population, tourism infrastructure, platform adoption, wealth, connectivity, and the particular demographics of Panoramio users all shaped what became visible. But that is precisely the point. Maps of digital visibility are produced by social conditions. They do not simply mirror the world.

The same is true of contemporary travel influencing. Calls for greater diversity among travel creators are worthwhile, but representation cannot be separated from the conditions under which representation is produced. If some creators face substantially greater obstacles simply to reach destinations, the imbalance cannot be solved entirely through more inclusive influencer campaigns or changes in platform policy.

Part of the inequality exists before anyone opens Instagram. It exists in visa regimes, consular practices, passport hierarchies, income inequalities, transportation networks, and the broader infrastructure governing international movement.

A constructivist reading of travel influencing brings these elements together. Influencers do not merely reflect an already existing tourist world. Through repeated images, narratives, classifications, and recommendations, they participate in constructing that world; helping determine which destinations become desirable, which places appear dangerous or welcoming, and what counts as an “authentic” experience. But the opportunity to participate in this construction is itself structured by unequal mobility.

The digital tourist gaze therefore tells us something larger about globalization. The freedom to see the world and the power to represent it are not entirely separate privileges. Those who can cross borders most easily are particularly well positioned to narrate what lies on the other side. The question raised by that old map of illuminated photographs is therefore still worth asking: when the world becomes an image, who gets to take the picture?

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(*) Zeynep Temel is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at Marmara University, Istanbul, and is currently based in Shanghai conducting research for her doctoral dissertation. Her research interests span inequality, platform capitalism, popular culture, and gender, with a regional focus on East Asia. She works on how economic and political structures shape everyday practices, identities, and moral expectations, particularly through attention, consumption, and labor under contemporary capitalism.

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References

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