CREATOR CARTELS AS EMERGENT PLATFORM GOVERNANCE

Abstract

Creators frequently collaborate to share knowledge of and strategies for countering negative experiences of platform governance, including around issues of harassment, copyright enforcement, and censorship. In some cases, they have tried to craft more formal arrangements like creator unions, but these have failed to find stability in the platform economy, which operates differently than traditional labor-employer relationships. We point to a different form of collaboration that casts creators as economic rivals that often have directly competing interests rather than as workers with shared interests. To this end, we propose the concept of creator cartels, understood as contingent alliances between creators leveraged to produce beneficial policy and economic conditions. Taking up a critical media industry studies framework, we analyze the struggle between competing creator cartels invested in Twitch’s policies regarding gambling streams, especially the events that played out in September 2022 as anti-gambling streamers threatened a boycott, pro-gambling streamers leaked damaging information about their rivals, and Twitch ultimately decided to curb the forms of gambling creating conflict between many of its highest profile creators. The gambling saga shows that creators ally and collude with each other to produce mutually desirable outcomes, leveraging audiences and advertisers to influence the platform economy. We contend that creator cartels represent a novel organizational practice that both responds to and harnesses platform power, representing a promising area of inquiry for researchers interested in community governance and the conditions of platform labor.