 I'm a clinical professor at USC Anberg in School of Communication and Journalism. I'm also a business scholar here at BKC and Institute for Rebooting Social Media. Thank you all for joining us today for our RSN speaker series and I'm here to introduce our speaker for the day who's a friend, a colleague and very much a co-conspirator in this new field of creator studies that we've been carving out. So a brief introduction and then I'll turn it over to you. Dr. Zoe Glepp is a feminist media scholar with interest in platformized creative industries and labor, social media and influencer cultures and digital ethnographic methods. She is a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England where she is currently working on her first book, Demonetized, Inequality, Co-option and Resistance in the Influencer Industry. She is also co-founder of the Digital Ethnographic Collective and an interdisciplinary group exploring intersections of digital culture and ethnographic methods and is currently in the process of setting up a new research network for scholars of social media content creators. Watch this space. Yes, yes we and without any further ado thank you so much for joining us today and after this we will have time for Q&A both in-house and online. Thank you David, thank you, thank you. Well thank you so much for having me. It's really nice to be here. Thanks David for inviting me. I really hope that you'll find this interesting. I'm just down on the road at Microsoft in the social media collective so I think there's probably quite a lot of connections and relationships between those two groups. So it's nice to come here and just like get more involved with what's happening here. So today I'm doing a talk which I'm calling we all have the power to create the world we want platforms creators and the co-option of social justice narratives. I'm drawing on two pieces of research for this talk firstly my PhD research which I finished my PhD at the London School of Economics about four five months ago which was a very long-term multi-year ethnographic study of the influencer industry in London particularly thinking about labor platformized creative labor and inequality in the influencer industry and that involved a lot of offline and also online field work. I also became a YouTube creator myself and I did a lot of interviews with creators of a very wide range of genres. Oh okay it's fine and then I'm also drawing on a chapter that I co-authored with Professor Sarah Vanneweiser for the Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities which was about the branding of intersectionality. So I'm kind of bringing those two things together in this talk today. I hope that you find it interesting and I hope that we'll have some interesting discussion afterwards. I know David is also working in in some similar areas thinking about similar questions at the moment so I feel like there's a lot of overlap between the work that we're doing. Okay, is it working? Right, so in January 2018 I attended my first offline field work event. I was very lucky to get access to this particular field site it was the Creators for Change Summit which was run by YouTube. These are the Creators for Change Fellows who were there that year this was in 2018 and the Creators for Change program was basically a program well I'll tell you it says here it was set up in September 2016 it doesn't exist anymore but it was set up then to support the next generation of emerging creators using their voice for good on YouTube with a wide range of topics including hate, xenophobia and extremism as well as race and gender. The fellows were eligible to pitch to receive funding to support and support from YouTube to film projects in line with their weekly initiative and every year they had a summit in a different part of the world. This year the summit was in London and for the summit YouTube basically flew the fellows as well as other interested stakeholders like people working for NGOs and policy experts to London to hear and participate in talks and to network with each other. I just I got access to this event through like a very a chance it was very lucky basically my supervisor was invited Sonia Levyston she was working on policy stuff and she didn't want to go so she was like do you want to go and I was like yes that sounds great. So it was my first experience going to an event that was run by a platform and it's very difficult to get access to those kinds of spaces so I kind of saw it as a real opportunity to like meet some of the creators that I wanted to enlist as participants for my field work. So on the first day I showed up at 9.30 to the oval space in Bethnal Green which is like a very trendy part of East London. What struck me immediately was how fashionable and branded the space was. We were in a large room with high ceilings on one side there was a bar where attendees of the summit could get very good quality coffee with of course a choice of cow soy and almond milk. Fancy green juices, kits to breakfast foods like chia seed pudding which I feel has kind of gone down in trend this now but at the time it was in the higher trending all for free. There were very expensive looking gold reusable water bottles for attendees to take rather than plastic or paper cups giving the impression that YouTube is an eco-minded and conscientious organization in line with the marketing of the event. The walls were white and slick graphic art and video screens showcasing YouTube's videos. On one wall there was a large YouTube play logo that the attendees were taking pictures of but in front of for their social media feeds. I found words like privilege wealth slash exclusive and corporate running through my mind. I looked at the program for the day at the top there was a blur of outlining creators change creators for change as a global initiative that supports creators like you creators who are tackling social issues and promoting awareness tolerance and empathy on their YouTube channels because no matter what kind of videos we make we all have the power to help create the world we want. The program also contained information about food coffee and artwork providers for the event with blurbs outlining their ethical credentials for example the catering company was described as an award-winning social enterprise that showcases the culinary talents and cultural heritages of migrant and refugee women and the coffee provider I thought this was really religious um playing to transport and employ people affected by homelessness that's not ridiculous um bringing people together by tackling homelessness one espresso at a time like who said that was a good idea much like giving out the reusable water bottles the decision to use these ethical providers and to present them prominently in the program struck me as part of a very concerted marketing effort on part of YouTube to paint themselves as deeply transport I felt a general skepticism that only became more pronounced as the day went on that the creators for change initiative tried to deal with a bizarre casual array of issues without actually putting these issues into conversation with one another um programmed to strongly steer away from any controversy or disagreement between the attendees and encouraging impassioned but safe and very self-congratulatory exchanges about empowerment and changing the world through media and this isn't to say anything negative about the the fellows themselves who were all doing really great work but it was more about like why is YouTube wanting to do this right we can see similar logics in the marketing around pride month when platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Twitch display their commitment to the LGBTQ plus community spotlighting prominent creators and announcing fun new features and tools it's usually very like very fun very colorful these are pictures that I took during my field work when I was at VidCon London yeah VidCon London 2019 at these events there's always like these backstage areas that are put on by platforms and they're kind of exclusive spaces that you have to get an invite into where platforms try to kind of sell themselves to the creators so in my PhD I wanted to understand what the actual lived experiences and labour conditions for content creators are beyond public perceptions and industry discourses or marketing so my research was driven by two core research questions firstly what are the distinctive socio-cultural technological and commercial factors that shape the experiences of content creators working in the influencer industry and secondly which creators are able to gain visibility and success and conversely who is systematically excluded from opportunities so of course my research is striving to understand the ways in which identity categories such as race gender ability sexuality in class impact creators ability to gain success in this space. In line with other critical and feminist scholars I found that contrary to the highly celebratory industry discourses the position social media platforms as diverse and meritocratic there are complex and compounding exclusions and inequalities emerging around these different socio-cultural technological and commercial structures and in the next few slides I'm going to give you an overview of some of my findings that kind of outline some of the labour conditions in the industry so firstly technological inequalities marginalised creative space algorithmic discrimination which is well documented and I feel like people here probably know about this literature I'm finding it as a process whereby certain content identities and positionalities within the platform economy are de-prioritised from recommendation in an industry where visibility is key to success so for example LGBTQ plus YouTube creators have faced widespread demonetisation over the years thus supposedly not being advertiser and family friendly although platforms deny that that's the case so scholar carolina r for example has written extensively about the negative impacts of shadow banning on creators deemed not safe for work like poll dancers and by pot creators routinely report that their content is not recommended widely on the grounds of race you might remember this story which where Naomi Nicholas Williams who is an Instagram model kept getting this photo taken down when she wasn't showing any more skin than many other creators show who weren't getting taken down and it caused quite a lot of protest on the platform so in this video essay you might recognise Khadija Mboway she's quite a big video essayist or breadtuber she discusses the colourism that she experiences as a darker skin black woman on YouTube where audiences implicit bias towards micro skin creators in turn become algorithmic bias that determines who is seen and not seen on the platform so as she says in the video these algorithms are simply just doing their job if you mostly watch content by creators who are on the beige spectrum that's all it's going to keep feeding you as Sarah Veneweiser and I argued in our chapter in the book creator culture which was edited by David and Stuart Cunningham platforms algorithms are designed to render some content more visible than others and the logic of this asymmetry is based on profitability which leads me to the next set of inequalities which are commercial inequalities you might recognise Victoria McBrath also known as in the fro she's like a very high-profile british lifestyle beauty influencer who does a lot of brand deals with like huge designer brands so one of my interviewees is Jo Burford who at the time was the head of creative solutions at top tier influencer marketing agency whaler she's now there the UK head of community at tiktok I feel like I need to reconnect with her because that's very interesting so I asked her she was actually the only influencer marketing person that I interviewed she had so many interesting things to say but I was just like I have to talk to you more formally I asked her if she thought that there was diversity problem in influencer marketing and she said that there's a great deal of diverse talent on social media platforms but are they being monetised are they the ones that get picked for panels I think that mainstream brands have a hell of a lot more to do I think that a lot of them have an unconscious bias towards safe campaigns and when I say safe I mean pretty blonde girl holding my product sitting on the beach they've seen it work before and they want to do it again and even when marginalised creators do get selected for brand campaigns they're often paid considerably less if at all and it's important to just say here that there are many ways that content creators won't make money and indeed they're told to diversify their income streams because it's such a precarious job but brand deals are still by far the biggest source of income for creators so if you aren't able to get brand deals or you don't get much from brand deals then it's very hard to survive as a content creator so in a Guardian article Nicole Ockford who's the founder of the Creators Union which is a organisation in the UK explained that LGBTQ plus creators disabled creators plus-sized creators and black and brown influencers are constantly being asked to work for free according to a 2018 study of YouTube that some of you may have read 97% of all aspiring content creators on the platform did not make it above the US poverty line at $12,000 a year with only 3% making a living wage so within this context a study conducted by MSL in the Influencer League in 2021 found that in the USA there is a stark racial pay gap in the influencer industry as high as 35% between white and black influencers which according to the agency vastly overshadows the racial pay gaps in any other industry which is quite recoverable and statistic so outside of the occasional diversity initiatives during Pride Month and Black History Month me and Sarah argued that this is an advertising driven industry that makes visible the most profitable creators those who do not disrupt the neoliberal status quo white, straight, male, middle-class, heteronormative, cis-gendered and most importantly, ground-friendly we also see industry what I mean by industry inequalities is these things that I noticed when I was doing fieldwork at industry events this is a picture that I took at Summer in the City in 2018 which this is the creator meeting if any of you have been to these kinds of events like people fans queue up because they want to get a picture with their favorite influencer so so conventions like Summer in the City and VidCon which is the big one I also went to VidCon in LA or Anaheim a couple of times I think people need that yeah yeah VidCon in Anaheim is huge it's like 75,000 people go to it Scythia is a bit smaller but it's still the biggest one in the UK and I went there three times during my fieldwork so they're really important spaces for content creators they're not only are they opportunities for creators to interact with their fans and also other creators which is like a really important networking opportunity but also industry people like talent managers people who work for platforms and very importantly like marketing executives who get to choose which creators to invite on brand campaigns but I found that there were really complex intersections here between economic opportunities and what we might call that cultural fit so it became really clear over going to quite a few of these events that the kind of core community of creators that always got invited to these events were predominantly white middle class creators working across a range of different types of genres but that was usually the demographic and one of my key participants Taha Khan he was the powers coordinator at summer in the city which meant that he was the person who invited creators to come and sit on panels and he was the person who chose who those people were and he was someone who felt really passionately about increasing the diversity of the UK creative community but he really struggled to make that happen over the years he gave he said it really well and well I thought it was really interesting in an interview I did with him he said sorry for the big quote there were a couple of non-white creators who would come to city and just feel very alienated and not want to come again what was happening was that the entire cohesive social groups from white communities were coming so you had all of the white lobby creators all of the white gaming creators but then when it came to diversity people were being plucked from very different social groups so they didn't have any friends and it created a bad dynamic in the green room and what was worse than this was that a lot of in the first year that I was doing fieldwork in 2018 there was a particular rupture with this because a lot of black creators were finding that the people who were working as stewards which was like a volunteer role they didn't recognise them because they weren't fans of theirs so they weren't letting them into the green room and there was like issues with creators getting stopped at the door and having to get out there ideally all this kind of stuff so it was just like a very bad vibe basically for these creators. Taha said that these social barriers led him to feeling that facilitating a more meaningfully diverse UK creative community was a lost cause and so his mission changed to simply getting any smallish up-and-coming black or brown creator on a panel because then there on the website and marketing people just look at the website so even if he was not able to create significant sociocultural change at least he could use his power to try and help minority creators to gain access to coveted economic opportunities in the industry. As with other creative industries informal hiring practice are deeply entrenched in online video it's more about who you know and not what you know and we see this all the time if you think about the importance of collapse you know that's like such a fundamental thing in this industry sharing audiences with other creators so networking is really an absolutely essential way in which creators access work and income and as whilst GIL has argued about previous or legacy cultural industries this informality raises grave concerns for equal opportunities exacerbated by the lack of transparency in the process and then finally we have audience inequalities so as many scholars have noted the careers of social media content creators live or die by their ability to cultivate and invest in audience community so they really try to to practice what Nancy then calls relational labor which is basically cultivating an intimate and authentic persona which you've also written about feel like you're in my line of sight so David's written about all of this too and that's really important content creators it's like you know most people studying content creators agree that it's like a very fundamental and interesting thing about this type of labor that kind of intimate relationship that creators have with their audiences but the tolls of managing these audience relationships is higher for marginalised creators especially those who make not safe for work content or critical leftist and feminist content who are much more likely to be targeted ridicule hate harassment and doxing in her book how to stay safe online say api wo wo draws on a sad but unshocking set of statistics so women are 27% more likely than men to be harassed online lack women are 84% more likely to be harassed than white women then being a 71% rise in online disability abuse and 78% of lgbtq plus people have experienced hate speech online so to give an example you may or may not recognise Ash Hardell who's probably the most famous trans non-binary creator in the western context they released this video titled trauma transphobia and the internet why I left for two and a half years in 2021 I think this video is released in which they talked about the extensive trolling harassment and doxing that they've been subjected to which actually caused them to leave for two and a half years Ash is an example of a creator who has a very strong audience community and encourages intimacy by self-disclosure but they describe how YouTube's algorithms recommended their videos to transphobic audiences which means that the self-disclosure intended for their own audience became ammunition for anti-fans so in this video I say they say I'm worried that by opening up and sharing my story and confessing to some of my personal self-doubt and struggles in the process folks may try to weaponise those disclosures against me later so I found that there's a catch-22 here for marginalised creators who find themselves in what I call an intimacy triple bind. These creators face systemic technological and commercial exclusions as I've talked about in the previous slides so they therefore have to rely more heavily on crowdfunding as their model for income generation which means it's really important that they perform this relational labour and have the compulsory audiences that want to support them financially but for these creators who are already at high risk from hostile audiences performing this relational labour can open them up to further harms in the form of weaponised intimacy so I want to return here now to to what platforms are doing right so in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd we saw anti-racist and intersectional politics move from the margins and into mainstream discourse with the heightened global visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement alongside many other industries this moment gave rise to impassioned conversations about racial inequality in the influencer industry and some of the dynamics that I've talked about in the previous slides gained a lot of attention wider attention in the industry. At this time it was halfway through my PhD I noticed a radical shift in how platforms were framing themselves diversively no longer as neutral vessels to content as Tolton Gillespie posited in his influential argument politics of the article sorry the politics of platforms in 2010 in 2020 social media platforms felt obligated to release statements publicly supporting Black Lives Matter unlike the creators for change program and pride month marketing that I mentioned earlier at this time platforms actually took accountability for the role that they were playing themselves in perpetuating racial inequalities amongst creators and users so for example um Adam Merceri the head of Instagram posted this letter titled ensuring Black voices are heard uh to Instagram's blog on the 15th of June 2020 in which he acknowledged the irony that Instagram as a platform stands for elevating Black voices while simultaneously being a space where Black people are often harassed afraid of being shadow banned and disagree with many content takedowns further he highlights how Instagram is striving to be inclusive to other groups such as LGBTQ plus people and body positive activists that have been historically marginalized on the platform and several longer-term initiatives emerged after that point but sought to tackle racial inequalities such as the YouTube Black Voices Fund in 2020 which was a multi-year program dedicated to supporting and funding Black creators on the platform and TikTok took a similar strategy with its Black creator trailblazers program in 2021 designed to nurture and develop 30 talented emerging Black creators musicians and artists in order to celebrate the Black community on the platform so what can we make of all this I've been really like racking my brain over the last few years about like what does it mean that there are these we know what the the labor conditions are for creators we know there's inequality that is perpetuated in many ways we also know that platforms seem to be trying to respond to those issues and that seems like a good thing right like we it's it's good it seems to be good but I still have the had this feeling that it was like but is it really you know is it really changing is it actually getting better is this a good thing that's happening right now in the industry and more most importantly does it actually mean positive change for marginalized creators right so whilst on the surface level these platform diversity initiatives appear to be commendable when we look closer we can see that they couch social change within a commercial system that through the spectacular visibility of diversity an approach that buys into the all too familiar values of individualism positivity and a can do attitude rather than anything that would hurt the bottom line platforms and I just want to add a side note here that I know people who work at these platforms who are really committed to increasing diversity and really do care a lot but here I'm more interested in like stepping back and looking at the whole the structure as a whole right so as Faith Day has argued about YouTube Black we need to distinguish Black YouTube on the one hand which he defines as a reflection of an African-American cyber culture and hashtag YouTube Black on the other which is a reflection of corporate culture and she points out the creators selected for YouTube Black were already popular Black YouTube celebrities those who do not disrupt the status quo or deal with overtly political topics Francesca Sabande has done really amazing work if you're interested in this topic she coined the term woke washing in 2019 to describe the various marketing campaigns that draw on feminism anti-racism and social justice to market and sell products as she argues this type of strategy upholds the neoliberal idea that achievement social change and overcoming inequality requires individual ambition in consumption rather than structural shifts and resistance what unites all of these initiatives is the reactive way in which corporate culture responded to the popular and political energy behind Black Lives Matter in 2020 they utilize anti-racism and intersectionality as a branding exercise only when they have something to gain from it and not at other times so this is content creator Nathan Z he put he had a video this video here oh you can't see the bottom here but this video was called Black Lives Matter It's Trendy Now which he released in 2020 and he said we're in a phase where it's basically like there's a monetization of Black Lives Matter a modification of Black Lives Matter there's something profoundly amiss when it becomes financially and reputationally advantageous for corporations to critique their own privilege in the capitalist, racist and misogynist system by branding themselves as committed to social justice causes at times when consumers expect them to do so platforms accrued social cultural and economic capital oh my notes are huge on this page in 2020 it became a financial necessity for companies to speak up about Black Lives Matter but as the momentum behind the movements simmered down at least temporarily so too did the branding response so it's not really in the economic interest of private companies to challenge the very power structures upon which they thrive the fickleness with which companies picked up these issues and dropped them once the public appetite complained speaks to the way in which the branding of intersectionality operates as all surface and no substance the politics of anti-racism and intersectionality are co-opted as of the near for change but not at the cost of profit so as Nathan Z puts at the end of his video just a reminder for some people who are going to be done after this week and never have to think about Black people again until the next time this blows up some of you guys can do that and the rest of us are still going to be Black in the 2017 lecture Angela Davis reflected on the fundamental disconnection between capitalism as a structure and the progressive intersectional politics of anti-racism and feminism and I just wanted to share her words in closing if we stand up against racism we want much more than inclusion inclusion is not enough diversity is not enough and as a matter of fact we do not wish to be included in a racist society we say no to hetero patriarchy then we do not want to be assimilated into a misogynist and hetero patriarchal society if we say no to poverty we do not want to be contained by a capitalist structure that values profits more than human beings in the current moment we're seeing a significant rise in the commodification of social justice discourses it's tempting to believe that this marks progressing society in as much as intersectional politics have become so mainstream that even corporate culture has jumped on the bandwagon but initiatives like YouTube Black steer away from the strong anti-capitalist sentiment in the Black Lives Matter movement instead embracing neoliberal discourses that fuse positive social change with exceptionalism and capitalist accumulation as I've argued today in a capitalist society where major corporations trade on their images of defenders of social justice anti-racist messages have become yet another commodity to be packaged by marketing of PR executives incapable of providing any meaningful challenge to existing iniquitable relations thank you all right I should have put my twitter and my email address again but then I thought it felt a bit a bit um I don't know well we know how to party people online obviously but obviously we can also forward your emails from here but um you are a youtube creator after all so we can still track you through your performances on youtube or your community on youtube so um I'm gonna um thank you again for coming and um I know a big portion of the room here um personally but also know that they're already fluent in creator-lish um but I don't know who's online so I'm gonna um if you don't mind I'd like to do just a little bit of basic round clearing to say how are you using the terms influencer creator and content creator interchangeably or do these need something different yeah well it's a good question an age-old question that we like to talk about 15 years now um I whenever people ask me this I always point them towards um I think these are just my eyes funny I always point them towards um Sophie bishops have you read her article was it in real life magazine um it's called name of the game I think I can share it if anyone's interested but it was just like it was a great piece she should really publish it as an article for general article but she talks about this distinction between like create content creator and influencer and she says it's funny how like these different terms people get really caught up on like one meaning one thing and the other meaning something else but actually they're basically describing the same job both content creators and influencers make money they they put content online they make money through different revenue streams and she was for her she was saying that it's really a gendered thing where influencers denotes a certain type of culture which is like feminized and vapid and vain it's to do with products and stuff whereas content creator kind of evokes this like artistic creative like positive associations more often associated with male genres she argues I think that's a great piece but basically I use them interchangeably I just use the terms that the creators use but they tend to use content creator in in public facing context and influencer in like industry facing contexts so just to by the way I'm still asking these at the beginning of all my research interviews I can't wait till the day when I don't have to ask the questions but just to differentiate these would these include game players for example overall live streaming platforms and alternatively are they different from what uh how Hollywood refers to themselves now as creators over in the film television yeah streaming space I would use content creator as a very catchable term to include any like internet-based creator I my my participants ranged very widely including gamers um video essayist lifestyle fitness you know short filmmakers which is a more unusual one all sorts you know daily bloggers and stuff like that I use it very broadly I don't know about the Hollywood question I would like to know what you think about that oh I'll I'll I'll I'll tag that on later I'm not gonna waste we have loads of questions for you by the way so let me just ask you more targeted questions around this particular research um as you're probably more aware than almost anyone in the world actually is the emergence of these new labor rights movements by creators there's a guilds and unions and and and all these organizations that are trying in many ways to try to create more sustainable less precarious conditions both on the platforms but also with the brands and advertising side what do you think about the emergence of these groups what are the challenges that they face will they be effective yes good question um I I think they're very interesting I'm actually writing a piece of for working on a piece at the moment with Sophie Bishop about the the emergence of these unions and stuff I think the language is really interesting like in the UK they tend to be unions or either UK and Europe in America they tend to be guilds and associations which is interesting um and kind of points to the different politics that they they draw on in in what they're doing um but actually I think well I thought that a question you might ask well that someone might ask is so what what should be happening or what should platforms be doing if these things are not effective and my answer would be to actually like recognize and pay attention to those labor organizations because they don't generally I think the only one they did was the internet creators guild which was you know you know about them but they were a guild in from 2016 to 19 uh that was started by Hank Green so like they really had some really big creators on their board and stuff like that so they had the ear of YouTube particularly um but most of these groups are not recognized at all by platforms which seems very problematic um so yes they're doing good things they're doing different things there's a new one that's just started um which is is more to do with TikTok creators um but generally they have great challenges because of the like geographic fragmentation of creators and also the the um regulation like the fact that they're all creators in different countries are living under different regulatory structures um so these companies are based in America but what happens to a creator who's in the UK can they like how do they enact change it's just very fragmented so it's really difficult I always thought it was amazing that YouTube actually came out and announced that they would disregard anything from the German YouTube for good group they came out they put out a statement saying we're not interested in those labor rights so they're raising these small little contingent and fair tube that was Yorga Yorga's brother right he he um he did it was the YouTuber's union and he had a thing called the Fair Tube campaign and he um I acted as a consultant for them um but he um they're an interesting case because they actually attached to IG Natal which was like one of the huge trade unions in Germany uh so they actually were doing it in a real like union union way and YouTube was like no not at all so speaking of platforms um you would now seen the the ways in which the platforms have used the work the creators are already doing these spaces including the marginalized spaces um to then of course draw greater attention to them as a platform it's kind of corporate diplomacy which is not unique to any corporation or this particular field but what role do you possibly see platforms ever playing in trying to advocate for or create greater opportunity or fairness and equitable conditions for these creators while still serving their core capitalist profit mode? I think it's it's very difficult like I mean they they you might have heard about the adpocalypse which was like a big thing in 2017 I think which was when well there have been multiple adpocalypses but the big one was 2017 when um I think um adverts got shown next to like terrorist videos and then all the uh lots of the huge advertisers pulled out of YouTube um and it caused absolute chaos for the creators because basically YouTube tightened up its algorithmic system that determined what should be shown next to adverts which had the terrible knock on effect for especially smaller creators who all got demonetized because it was like not worth the risk for YouTube to put for adverts on those videos because it was very difficult for them to determine whether or not they were uh safe safe advertisers um and I think that I mean I think a lot of people in our field have drawn on that example because it's just it really shows the different stakeholders and how they interact with each other and how they the push and pull kind of factors of those different those three the platforms the advertisers and the creators um I mean the short answer is I guess if YouTube weren't so dependent on advertisers or prioritized creators more over or maybe the balance of that how they prioritized advertisers and creators was different then it would be better for creators a lot of creators felt that that platforms just care about advertisers I mean obviously that's kind of baked into the system isn't it if your your income is coming from advertisers of course you're going to privilege advertisers um but then also I mean maybe platforms could put more pressure on advertisers to actually think about how what kinds of creators they want to partner with not just in terms of like pre-roll ads but in terms of the brand deal I feel like platforms have a lot of power actually to kind of put pressure on advertisers in that situation so we'll open up the questions one last question for you and I don't know if you can speak as fluently but I know you've been you're very aware of Sophie's work in getting the UK has been perhaps one of the few jurisdictions to actually entertain creators as a class of labor and to engage more beyond just kind of these typical advertising endorsement guidelines that every country now has around what creators can't do on the platforms they've actually gone and and entertained a more holistic account of what creators contribute to the economy both economically and hopefully could you speak a little about that sort of process and where that that has where that's at in terms of the parliament and where it's at now but I mean she ran an inquiry with the UK government about influence and labor and drew on a lot of the work of people in our field which supported the idea that this is in fact an important industry that needs to be paid attention to I have I didn't put it in this this talk but some of the statistics the numbers around this industry are just like crazy I think Goldman Sachs had a report like like three months ago half trillion dollars yeah was it half a trillion half a trillion was it not quarter of a trillion half a trillion it's now up to half if you remember the week yeah with no underlying evidence to support it's a pretty number yeah I mean I'm not sure Goldman Sachs ever has to support okay but basically the point of this inquiry was to just make sure that the government the UK government understood how significant actually this industry is in terms of income generation and that it should be treated as a serious cultural industry like other cultural industries in the UK and around the world so they brought a lot of evidence in that supported the types of arguments that we make about about labor about precarity and inequality but I don't know if anything I mean I don't think they've changed anything yet you know I think inquiries they these things are very slow but it's it's it's it's a good sign that a government cares enough to do an inquiry because it's quite a lot of resources to put into it and I assume that might mean that other governments might also start to think about it more seriously well and to that point the new digital services act with the EU just came out with has declared that the platforms have to be transparent when they demonetize creators on platform however they haven't actually asked or demanded the platforms be transparent about how they monetize the creators which that is a whole other set of labor questions because that's always like in these labor movements one of the main kind of demands of creators is always to have more transparency to understand what's actually happening because that's you know a lot of bad things happen in the dark like in these industries like people don't really know what's going on so that's why where you get you know websites like club you pay me where creators put up that is the name that's the name they submit the their experience is working with particular brands and how much they were paid for different campaigns so the other creators can be it's like a glass door kind of thing for creators working with brands so they can see how much should I be asking for but also like did they pay on time what was the contract like you know they kind of created a sharing information to try and overcome some of this opacity all right so let's open it up to the room just trying to represent a few of the folks tuning in from online Laura mentioned the book from dealer Lorentz called extremely online wondering if you have any thoughts or have anything to compliment that are good former visiting scholar Dr. Javari Evans mentioned that he wonders if whether the issue is whether social media is still too many talking to too many and whether there needs to be a digital safe space is created by marginalized folks for marginalized folks and if we're in theory overvaluing the imaginary of safe black creators how many messages reaching everyone versus reaching those who are safe around and also Christine Tran have questions regarding how does questions of ownership came up in your work at all as in did creators fires or imagine to own stakes alongside other creators in the platform companies that profit off of their content creation something connected with our very evidence be any other comments online I think you're over there he's my friend thank you for your questions friends well I think that that that point actually about the having having smaller spaces where where minorities can get together and not feel exposed is a really interesting one and I think that that's actually something that came up a lot when Twitter started to go down the pan and there were lots of new platforms being suggested right I can't remember the name of the do you remember the name of this platform that came up that was like this guy no it was a platform that was suggested by black people all black people kind of and it was like a really really interesting conversations there around how we actually create online spaces that serve for people who want to use them in my in my work that I mentioned here on the intimacy triple bind I talked about how creators often kind of retreat away from public spaces especially when they're at threat of from like harassment and doxing they want to cultivate smaller spaces where they can just be themselves and not have to worry so much so people often use patreon for stuff like that um can you repeat pristine's question um it's about ownership did creators aspire or imagine to own stakes alongside our creators in the platform companies that profit off of their content creation where this ownership fit in the imaginary of creator career that was an aspiration that's a good question actually I've been thinking about this a lot recently because it keeps coming up it came up at our workshop a couple weeks ago have you guys heard of nebula it was a platform that was started in um 2019 I think 19 I heard about it at the time because I was doing fieldwork and some of the creators that were my participants were part of nebula like the first round of people but nebula is basically a platform that's owned by creators um and I've been meaning to look them up again because they've come up like three times in the last week and I think it's a really interesting case study for one of the chapters of my book is about creator resistance and I think like that's a really interesting different model that doesn't you know where where it's like a cooperative basically a cooperative platform but at the moment it's I think it's mostly edge youtubers so the people I know who are really involved with it are like science creators and video essayists um which is cool but anyway yes ownership is an interesting question um but that's that's the best example that I've heard of which I think deserves some further scrutiny all right go around the room see you said some questions if not I've always got more thank you that was a lot of work that you did in this research and that you conveyed to us this is not an area I I know and so I have a pretty naive question to ask you I think you you um you object to systematic bias in the compensation that creators have given and you give us the results of what it sounds like very dramatic an impressive study showing that people color other marginalized creators are not paid the same as other creators are what what is it that you would like to see in terms of the way this the scales or pay scales are defined then it would be based on on market forces alone in other words you know the number of followers number of views number of hours that people view one videos should translate into compensation or there should be some other systematic approach that is not biased and then I think I have another question but it's not a naive question at all it's a really it's really important I think it's very easy to kind of point out the problems and it's much more difficult to actually come up with solutions to some of these issues because they're so complex and multifaceted at the moment the way that brands usually decide how much they pay is based on metrics so like viewer stats you know retention is not just viewers and subscribers it's very fine grained detail about the particularly the demographics of the audience of the person which which raises a lot of questions about about inequity basically um but I think I think the point of my of coming at this question from looking at the the kind of compounding nature of the these kind of technological and social and commercial inequalities is to say that like it may seem that just just deciding on brand deals and stuff based on a viewer count seems kind of fair because it's just like well it's just numbers you know but those numbers are impacted by so many other things and those you know it's not like racism for example just pops up in this system it's that racism is inflected and kind of exacerbated in by this system so I feel I don't know in terms of the fine grained details but I feel that brands need to think a bit more carefully about about how they can equitably invite people and compensate people for their labor that isn't really just based on view accounts that I think it's it's more a question of decoupling the income from those kind of metric driven systems and thinking what is the labor that I'm asking this person to do and what value does that have to us as a brand but that might seem naive because I mean that's you know that is how the system works they're trying to measure the output of like the kind of financial value of investing of course if someone has 10 million followers and someone else has 10 followers then they're going to pay more for the 10 million um but that is why this system just kind of perpetuates itself so I don't know if that's a very satisfactory answer but I think I think fundamentally it's about decoupling from that heavily metricly driven way of calculating payment yeah thank you so I I appreciate I appreciate how research can help unearth problems it's it's it's not the job of research to find solutions that's the job of advocacy the research finds problems and helps to find them and that seems like what you are done and have are doing and have done very successfully and I appreciate that I I lose sleep trying to figure based on what you said I'm very troubled on about how one would go about trying to embed values in these kinds of decisions so I'm not advocating at all it should just be open market and just based on metrics like I'm not advocating that at all but I'm also aware of it that there are a lot of white supremacists online who have heavy draws and lots of followers who are very convergently viable and so just by going on market forces things would head in the direction that I personally would find objectionable but I'm also as we as we all know we're funding ourselves at a time when you started by saying that creators got together to think about creating for good for the good of society and right and and and this is this it sounds it sounds altruistic but it's publicized and it's complicated this way the good might be having no Jews from the river to the sea by by many people's accounts and other people's accounts there would be different solutions to very contentious issues once we start placing values into the equations um I wonder if I think it's foreseeable that we gain more problems and solutions in some ways and so I'm interested if you have a response I'm just um I guess I don't know so much of a question except asking if you have a response through this but but uh moving away from objective metrics into valuing uh approaches strikes me as very very difficult and potentially troublesome yeah I'm sure many wiser people have thought of that issue that I uh I wonder if you can help me sleep it well I guess I guess the first thing I would say is that there are values in the system that already exists they're kind of capitalist values but they're I mean there are lots of values that undergird the current system they're just not very overt except actually in the case of these sorts of um campaigns where the values suddenly become very clear though inconsistent over time um yeah it's complicated I mean I think that the the the difficult thing is that these platforms there are certain people who work at these platforms the platforms are based in certain cultural contexts those cultural contexts have very particular politics and culture obviously um but these platforms are used by people across the world so when you have platforms that are trying to kind of promote certain values but they don't necessarily match the values of the very diverse communities of people that are using them it does get very complicated and we can see why in that case platforms of historically tried to avoid um being overtly political or putting very very over values across that aren't very uncontroversial like you know very fluffy kind of nothingy values um but I do find it there there's something that kind of um troubles me when maybe similarly to you in seeing platforms actually making statements about politics because I feel like it's very cynical um but as it happens in this case I agree with the politics that they're promoting um but like I just don't think that they're necessarily the right people to it just feels like it's just a marketing exercise but um I don't know I think this is very complicated but it's an important question for sure I'm sure lots of people have for the record that keeps us up sleeping at night as well so if you want you can hang out with us three in the morning yeah thank you we do have one more question in the room and I have two more questions online I just wonder if we could just uh go through these two blocks and then um so Jordan is asking whether you know any strategies of these marginalized communities to avoid being screened out slash deeper form instead of scaling back their presence online uh TX Watson is asking if you find activists working on marginalization in other how do you think that activists working on marginalization in other contexts empathize with the issues of faced by marginalized creators so empathy from outside and the Jonathan Belek is do you find any unique challenges or opportunities due to creators working across multiple large companies um is it harder because of the fragmented decision making or their opportunities to draw a change by highlighting the difference between platforms yeah well all really great questions um some more of my friends um the I think actually that that question about the fragmented um nature of the platforms is really interesting because I I wrote an article for the international general communication a couple years ago that um which is it's called we're all told not to put our eggs in one basket and there's a subheading that I can't remember because no one remembers the subheading um where I talk about the cross-platform nature of labor in the influencer industry and in that one I was talking much more about the charity and how it's really difficult because they're not employed they're not employees of these platforms they're like freelancers who just work across them um but I never talked about the benefits actually that might come up with that system I mean a lot of creators said that they enjoy the freedom that comes with um not being tied to any given platform and being able to kind of choose which one it's like a kind of free market thing I guess but the choose which one is the most beneficial for them and actually you just sent me yesterday that the tiktok creator fund closing down right which is very interesting but anyway different platforms have different models for how they compensate creators and different kind of opportunities for visibility um and different systems for trying to combat some of the more negative things um but I feel like I don't have time to go into detail about it right now um but now I'm tx's question is there solidarity from other or sympathy was the word sympathy empathy from other yeah how do they see how do they see this I mean tx probably knows more than I do because they just started this new union um and I would like to talk to them about it but um I feel I don't maybe this is an outdated view but I kind of feel like people still see content creators or influencers as like not real laborers quite a lot of the time so there's there's still this this sense that they're just like having fun online um and so maybe they won't maybe they don't get as much solidarity um especially as it's there's this kind of popular view of influencers is just having a lovely time sitting around doing luxurious things getting free gifts whatever you know depends on the genre but like it it seems like a dream job in a lot of ways um so maybe perhaps unions of ride-sharing apps might not feel that much sympathy for content creators but I don't know I don't want to speak for you know it doesn't really make sense to lump whole groups of workers into one thing but I think that is a problem for a lot of creators that they're not really taken seriously and that's what a lot of this work and like the influencer inquiry is trying to do to say look this is actually a really big industry it's a serious form of labor it's really challenging form of labor um and what was Jordan's question sorry I'm really bad at remembering quick thing which is that I'm sure someone has done some research in terms of how other activist organizations not just labor groups but activist organizations have come to understand creators as allies I know that as glad for example has for years given out awards to creators who've been leading the latest evolution and kind of rights challenges in the social media space so I mean they've been splashed on the code of all the advocates and other queer magazines and for rights magazines for years now in this space so I think a lot of activist organizations have yeah moved more rapidly into understanding the social culture and political significance of what these creators are doing you are simultaneously also aligning around that thing Jordan's question tackled the point where you were saying that some creators choose to step back once they find those difficulties if there are creators actually stepping in and finding loopholes and if those loopholes are worth it yeah I mean I think there are a lot of different approaches here for example I heard a lot of like particularly in 2018 when I was first at VidCon in LA I heard LGBTQ plus creators talking about how they had started taking off any like reference to to queer culture in their tags and titles to try and like mitigate algorithmic discrimination so there are a lot of like little small small tactics like that that exist where people try to kind of circumvent the system there are many tactics to do with like trying to fit into more mainstream culture like the chapter I did with Sarah for your book creator culture was all with was about feminist content creators and how they kind of dial back their political the overt political messages in order to still be appealing to brands so there are a lot of things like that they will kind of they all end up hurting the creators in the end because they they they're basically all tactics that involve like not kind of showing your true self in a sense trying to hide aspects of yourself in order to not be discriminated against that's yeah thank you so much for this presentation so so many threads to think about I want to ask something around the transparency I think you raised this point around the transparency of moderation and content moderation and this I feel like this being a push towards content you know transparency and how content moderation and algorithmic injustice is happening but I'm wondering and maybe this is a really optimistic proposal and I wonder if this would come up in any of your fieldwork if there is a push towards transparency around monetization and I you mentioned you know that audiences and the way that audiences are commodified in different ways is largely how content creators make make their money but what would it look like if we were to demand platforms to give us the numbers on how much each audience was worth and like then maybe we'd be able to reflect on how the platforms monetizing or putting placing valuable uh some type of fiscal value on various different groups yeah yeah it's a great question I it would be really interesting and really useful for us as researchers and if we had access to any of these systems or how anything works um yeah that question that that question about advertisers and how they they assign value to different audiences I find so fascinating like this is my little drum that I keep beating at the moment to do with CPMs of cost per mil so like one one creator I don't know how much time we have we're over right oh sorry guys sorry if anyone needs to leave that's absolutely fine um one creator Hannah Wynn who is one of my like really great participants because she like has already thought about all of the things I wanted to ask and have really interesting artists for all of them she's a sex education creator and she was talking to me about how the CPMs of her audience were lower so the amount that advertisers will pay per a thousand views on her videos were a lot lower than her friends um who made science particularly white male friends who made science education content they had compared their CPMs because they have access to it so they individually they know uh how much they're paid per a thousand views on videos and it varies depending on the video um she compared hers to her friends and it was like night and day like she was getting way way lower money per a thousand views on her videos and that was because of the demographic of her audience um but as far as I understand and there are probably other people that get this better than me but I think how that works is like um advertisers bid on slots based on the demographics of the audiences who are likely to be watching those videos right um so and I think that's a very common mechanism in all advertising um which is very problematic but fascinating and she she had what she had done there to try and mitigate that when she had a second channel which was just for like advertiser friendly content so it was her like family vlogs her kind of daily stuff with her kid and this kind of thing she put it separate to her sex education channel because because her the videos on her sex education channel were always getting demonetised because she was talking about sex right because that's not appropriate apparently for a lot of advertisers um even though she feels like a really politically engaged channel that talked about lots of really important things and it had like a million subscribers she was getting more money from her her life like her daily vlogging type channel which only had a hundred thousand subscribers because of that discrepancy but yeah it would be really interesting if we had access it would be fascinating yeah yeah if we could just get creators to share their their data then maybe we could actually do a systematic analysis but yeah so thank you very much Zoey it's been a pleasure and as always we've been trading down this app for a long time now sharing lots of information back and forth thank you all for showing up today and everyone online and I want to hand it over to you because I know we've got some more speakers coming in yes thank you for coming online you who are watching us live now and you were present in the room feel free to come every Wednesday at 12 from 2-1 please be aware of our calendar of the future speakers very very exciting topics social media and beyond and I think again our moderator and our panelists Dr. Zoey Glad I should say if anyone is wanting to talk more or get in touch then please just I mean you can tell me right now or just send me an email