Abstract
Existing research emphasizes the precarity of workers engaged in the exchange of goods and services through digital platforms. Yet few studies have systematically examined how racial discrimination shapes the opportunities of platform workers. Here, we focus on influencers, or people who monetize content on social media platforms. Drawing on a mixed-method analysis of 1,082 posts crowdsourced by the @InfluencerPayGap Instagram account, we document three findings. First, while most influencers in our sample received monetary payment for sponsored campaigns, rates are significantly lower than expected based on industry estimates. Second, social media metrics are racialized to justify paying influencers of color less than white influencers. Third, influencers of color are less likely than white influencers to receive monetary compensation or succeed in their negotiations with brands. Contrary to the rhetoric of fairness and democratization promoted by digital platforms, these dynamics reproduce racial domination and undermine collective action among social media influencers.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 7212-7235 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | New Media and Society |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2024 |
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: The first author received funding from the Sorbonne Université-Paris Institute for Advanced Study Chair on “Major Social Changes,” and the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England; the second author received funding from the Stanford Graduate Fellowship. Both would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support. The authors would like to thank Xiaolu Ji and Yu Gong for superb research assistance; Rachel Bergmann, Kaiping Chen, Tian Yang, and the participants of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) 2022 Annual Meeting; the Communication Work-In-Progress (CWIP) group for many helpful comments and suggestions; and to the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England, Sorbonne Université-Paris Institute for Advanced Study Chair on Major Social Changes, and Stanford Graduate Fellowship for research support. This analysis would not have been possible without the groundbreaking work of Adesuwa Ajayi and the anonymous contributors of the @InfluencerPayGap project. We are very grateful to all of them and hope this analysis does justice to their efforts.
Keywords
- Influencers
- compensation
- discrimination
- platform labor
- racial capitalism
- social media
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Communication
- Sociology and Political Science
