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Hollywood writers and actors recently showed they can take on powerful media conglomerates toe-to-toe. After going on strike in the summer of 2023, they won better wages, more transparency from streaming services, and safeguards so that their work is not exploited or replaced by artificial intelligence.
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But the future of entertainment extends far beyond Hollywood. Social media creators, also known as influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers, vloggers, and live streamers, entertain and inform a large portion of the planet.
Over the past decade, we have mapped the contours and dimensions of the global social media entertainment industry. Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, these creators fight to be seen as artists worthy of basic labor protections.
Platform policies and government regulations have proven capricious or negligent. Meanwhile, bottom-up efforts by creators to organize collectively have failed.
Living on the edge
According to Forbes, the “Top 50 creators” in total have 2.6 billion followers and have earned about $700 million in earnings.
But the profits social media stars make are the exception, not the norm.
The livelihood of many fashion, beauty, fitness and food creators depends on agreements negotiated with brands that want these influencers to promote goods or services to their followers.
However, across the creative economy, people of color and those who identify as LGBTQ+ have encountered prejudice. Unequal and unfair compensation by brands is a recurring problem: a 2021 report reveals a roughly 30 percent pay gap between white creators and creators of color.
Then there is what creator scholar Zoë Glatt calls the “triple bind of intimacy”: marginalized creators are at greater risk of trolling and harassment, earn lower advertising rates, and are expected to divulge more personal details to generate more participation and income.
Add to these precarious conditions the vagaries of volatile online communities that can turn beloved creators into villains in the blink of a text or a post, and even the world’s most successful creators live on the brink of losing their livelihoods. .
Rumors of solidarity
Unlike their counterparts in legacy media industries, creators have not embraced collective action easily or successfully, as they operate from their bedrooms and fight for more visibility.
However, some creators recognize that the power imbalance between the bedroom and the boardroom is a underlying issue that requires a bottom-up initiative.
The Creators Guild of America, or CGA, which launched in August 2023, is just one of many successors to the original Internet Creators’ Guild, which closed in 2019. Paradoxically, CGA describes itself as a “services organization.” professionals”, not a labor organization. union, but claims to offer benefits “similar to those offered by unions.”
There are other movements afoot: A group of TikTok creators formed a Discord group in September 2022 to discuss unionization. There’s also Twitch Unity Guild, a program launched in December 2022 for networking, development and celebration and includes a dedicated Discord space. In response to rampant bias in influencer marketing, creator-led companies like “F–k You Pay Me” are demanding greater fairness, transparency, and accountability from brands and advertisers.
Twitch streamers are already seeing some of their organizing efforts pay off. In June 2023, after a year of repeated changes to streamer fees and brand deals, the company capitulated in response to backlash from its top streamers threatening to leave.
But none of these initiatives have yet achieved the legal status of unions like the Writers Guild of America.
An invisible labor class
Meanwhile, most governments have failed to provide support or recognition to creators’ rights.
To date, the Federal Trade Commission is the only US agency to introduce regulations tied to the work of creators, limited to disclosure guidelines for advertising and sponsored content.
Although the European Union has operated at the forefront of technology and platform policy, creators barely receive a mention in the organization’s laws.
The success of the 2023 Hollywood strikes could be just the beginning of a broader global movement for creators’ rights. But for this new class to access the full breadth of their economic and human rights – to borrow from the movie Jaws – we will need a bigger ship.
* Academics from the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and the Queensland University of Technology.
2023-12-15 08:00:00
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