How social media produces “Cheap Europe”: Digital Balkanism and the politics of creator mobility

Digital platforms increasingly mediate how socioeconomic unevenness becomes visible, often recoding structural inequality as consumable value. This article introduces the concept of digital Balkanism to explain how platformed travel content reworks long-standing intra-European hierarchies. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of 108 English-language YouTube videos about Bulgaria, we identify five recurring frames: cheapness-as-freedom, therapeutic pastoralism, discovery, managed difference, and platformed epistemic authority that are recognizable conventions of platformed travel that often operate across other peripheralized destinations. While these frames are not distinctly Balkanist, we identified two higher-order structuring logics that render their articulation in this corpus specifically Balkanist: conditional Europeanness and off-white Europe, which position Bulgaria as “European” yet persistently deficient, and “white” yet conditionally so. Digital Balkanism therefore operates less through overt denigration than through the conversion of this conditionality into epistemic and platform value. The article extends critical platform and decolonial media scholarship by theorizing othering within Europe rather than across a simple West/non-West divide.