STRATEGIC (IN)VISIBILITY: HOW MARGINALISED CREATORS NAVIGATE THE RISKS AND CONSTRAINTS OF ONLINE VISIBILITY

Abstract

Online creators need their content to be ‘seen’; visibility on platforms can provide financial, social, and representational benefits. A lot of vital research has been done on how creators try to enhance their visibility on platforms and struggle with the threat of invisibility. But, especially for marginalised creators, platformised visibility is not without risks. This paper attends to these risks and creators' tactical use of (in)visibility to manage these. Drawing on 27 interviews with creators - online sex workers, LGBTQ+ activists, sex educators - we outline the harms of hypervisibility and users’ tactics for strategic invisibility. These interviews showcase how hegemonic norms hyper- and invisibilise marginalised groups, and how these dynamics are reproduced and institutionalised on platforms. We find that marginalised creators face serious risks from their platformised hypervisibility, not just their invisibilisation. Yet within the structures of platforms these creators still find ways to manage these risks and engage with strategic invisibility. Tactics of resistance exist across groups of marginalised creators. As such, our analysis shows the need to not just gain insight into how creators maximise visibility, but also into how they seek particular types of visibility, as well as strategic invisibility.