Racialized Labour, Harassment, and Inequality in Canada’s Platformized Cultural Industries
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Authors
Zuzunaga Zegarra, Daniela
Date
2025-08-27
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
content creation , Platformized labour , Online harassment , Racism , Discrimination
Alternative Title
Abstract
The ubiquity of social media use has facilitated the rise of a new cultural phenomenon: the “influencer” or content creator (Auxier & Anderson, 2021; Bishop & Duffy, 2023; Martineau, 2019). Content creators – a form of microcelebrity – accumulate and entertain their subscribers by posting textual and visual content (Abidin, 2021; Turner & Hui, 2023), and use their “visibility” – measured as the number of followers – to monetize their social media presence through partnerships with brands or the development of their own products (Harris et al., 2023; Reinikainen et al., 2020). Although a relatively recent phenomenon, early reports show that the top global influencers are overwhelmingly white (Gillespie, 2020; Hund, 2023). Research is emerging as to how this racial inequality is produced in social media platforms. In a Canadian context, there is a clear gap in the existing research about the demographics of Canadian influencers, as well as how racialized influencers experience online visibility, and what forms of inequality they may face due to online racism. Therefore, in this doctoral project, I seek to expand on one broad objective: to understand the scope, form and experience of racial inequality among content creators working in social media platforms in the Canadian context by looking at labour practices, environment and specific experiences of discrimination and harassment. By using mixed methodologies, including social media hashtag analysis, survey and interview data, firstly I show how Canadian creators’ communicative strategies are relatively homogenous and tend to reproduce neoliberal rationalities of individualism and commodification, which I argue calls into question the ability of creators’ to change and challenge the form of their labour. Secondly, I demonstrate how online harassment is a widespread workplace hazard for content creators, regardless of identity; however, the consequences of this harassment are qualitatively different for those who have been historically marginalized. Finally, I argue that racism presents in multilateral, dynamic, and simultaneous ways, which compounds negative material and epistemic outcomes for racialized creators in Canada. Thus, this thesis argues that within platformized labour, racism is reproduced in pervasive and subtle socio-technical ways which has consequences of contributing to differential outcomes for racialized creators.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International