Post-social media: de-platformed users’ challenges to belong in ‘corpo-civic’ spaces

Abstract

For content creators that use nudity and sexuality as a form of expression, networking and as a source of income, community membership is key. Yet, access to that community is constantly under threat due to content or account removal, known as de-platforming. Through interviews with content creators who had experienced de-platforming, this paper explores their ‘corpo-civic’ relationship with Instagram and TikTok, hybrid locations caught between a work and social space mirroring these platforms’ hybrid nature, between corporate ownership and public use. In doing so, we reflect on the challenges of aspirational creator work and its related difficulty in building, managing and engaging communities in precarious spaces, especially when threatened with de-platforming and relying on a hybrid friend/customer relationship.

For content creators that use nudity and sexuality as a form of expression, networking and as a source of income, community membership is key. Yet, access to that community is constantly under threat via de-platforming, or the removal of content or accounts from social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok (Are and Briggs, 2023). In this paper, we explore the ways in which content creators at risk of de-platforming rely upon social media as both social and workspaces, asking what happens when their access to communities is threatened.

The initial premise of social media platforms like Facebook relied on users being able to see, find and connect with friends and like-minded people in digital spaces, often across spatial and national divides (Baym, 2015). As more of these platforms and spaces developed, the social media communities they hosted became particularly significant for sex working, LGBTQIA+ and sex-positive users, who understood them as ‘safe spaces, where people who have felt alone or weird for large parts of their lives finally find “their” people’ (Tiidenberg and Van der Nagel, 2020: 160). Thanks to the visibility, self-expression and networking opportunities the intersection of sex and social media provide, Tiidenberg and van der Nagel argued that platformised sexual expression can be crucial towards social change, for example, towards abating taboos around sex, sexuality and identity. Further, Nolan Brown (2022) argued that the rise of subscription platforms like OnlyFans, thanks to which for the first time ‘people with a truly diverse array of body types, looks, races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, and kinks had direct access to the tools of porn production and distribution’ is democratisatising sexual tastes by means of catering for and including different demographics.

The visibility of bodies and sexuality can assume a lucrative dimension for marginalised content creators, who rely on online communities to express themselves and form social bonds, but also for the financial rewards associated with brand partnerships and product promotion (Glatt, 2022). A part of the creator economy, where solo entrepreneurs earn a living by creating content, engaging with communities and promoting products and services through platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Patreon, Facebook, and Twitch (Cotter, 2021), sexual social media have allowed sex workers and/or LGBTQIA+ and sex-positive creators to stop relying on third-party managers, helping those previously excluded by hiring practices in mainstream traditional and adult entertainment to perform and create content (Easterbrook-Smith, 2022) and providing opportunities for flexible, creative work outside the traditional nine-to-five (Glatt, 2022).

Many of these creators make ‘body content’, creative content for bodies or about bodies which can blur the lines among the making of art work, sex work and social media content (Willcox, 2024). Like Stegeman et al., we call them sexual(ity) creators, understanding ‘sexual(ity)’ as ‘an overarching term to refer to sex workers, nude and sexual content creators, as well as those whose content involves sexual expression and education’ (2024, p.2). By using this term, we highlight the heightened challenges these creators face, recognising that they engage in different labour with varying levels of stigma ‘without morally separating those who express themselves sexually from those who perform sexual labour’ (ibid).

However, the same creator economy generating opportunities for flexible and aspirational work has also resulted in widespread precarity for creators, and for sexual(ity) creators in particular. Firstly, creators’ success depends on visibility metrics such as views, likes and comments (Garcia-Rapp, 2017), an engagement afforded by an ‘algorithmic boss’, (Duffy, 2020: 103) that shapes and structures not just employment, but also peer-to-peer interactions. Indeed, whilst the economic value of reaching large audiences is significant (Baym, 2015), the outcomes are not necessarily stable and lucrative working environments for creators (Duffy, 2020).

Some feel this precarity is a consequence of corporate firms’ attempts ‘to will a community into existence just by calling a website, a company intranet, or a hashtag a community’ (Tiidenberg and Van der Nagel, 2020: 141) by commodifying digital social interactions towards earning revenue (Baym, 2015). And while having the option of earning revenue from their social interactions may be a welcome prospect for some creators (Glatt, 2022, 2023), aspirational, identity-based creator work is also time-consuming and reliant on platform governance, so much so that creators can only create content and develop the online bonds that allow it to thrive through the rules, tools and affordances offered by their platform of choice (Are et al., 2024). These rules can be blunt instruments threatening sexual(ity) creators’ access to their communities, making work, connection and education opportunities strictly tied to a stringent platform governance (Are and Briggs, 2023).

To understand how sexual(ity) content creators under threat of de-platforming experience work and community engagement on Instagram and TikTok, this paper is structured as follows. We review relevant literature describing three different but interconnected hybridities: expression and work, highlighting power imbalances between users and the corporations that allow them to create content; community and work, examining community formation and maintenance for creators through key constructs of social identity and employment-related intimacy; and the spatial hybridity arising from the corporate and civic nature of social media. In each section, we explore the challenges such hybridity poses to online belonging for content creators at risk of de-platforming, before introducing the study itself, its methodology, findings and conclusion.

Expression and work in the creator economy

Social media content creation presents aspirational characteristics which became particularly sought-after by those previously excluded from cultural production, fame and success: by removing the barriers of access to traditional creative work relying on editorship and publishing, users like sex workers, working class people, BIPOC, disabled and LGBTQIA + users, or those outside the Global North could suddenly create content, have the opportunity to go viral and pursue the goal of making their passion their job (Easterbrook-Smith, 2022; Glatt, 2022; Nolan-Brown, 2022). Indeed, while until a short time ago the mainstream media dominated the means of production and distribution of media content, with audiences acting as mere consumers, now other players – for example, amateurs, non-profits, activists, educators etc. – can produce and distribute content via digital means (Jenkins and Deuze, 2008).

Audiences and creators can be both producers and users of social media content, a phenomenon described by Bruns (2008) as ‘produsage’ and by Beer and Burrows (2010) as ‘prosumption’. Initially created by Toffler (1980) to show the hybridity of workers’ roles in the post-industrial society, internet prosumption is an asset for companies who harvest and mine the data created by produsers for financial gain (Beer and Burrows, 2010). Prosumption can result in the ‘outsourcing work to users and consumers, who work without payment’ for corporations wishing to reduce the cost of their labour (Fuchs, 2011: 297). ‘Capitalist prosumption’ is, for Fuchs, ‘an extreme form of exploitation’ (ibid: 298), making socially mediated, platformised communications a trade-off: users are subject to the constraints of Big Tech’s management and surveillance of spaces and to the uncertainty of not knowing their audience (Baym, 2018), but they, and particularly stigmatised groups, can express themselves and interact with people they may not have had access to offline (ibid; Tiidenberg and Van der Nagel, 2020).

Because of this trade-off, the creator economy’s blend of self-expression, community and work can be seen as a replication of types of expression and passionate work already seen in the offline mainstream media and creative industries (Jenkins and Deuze, 2008). For instance, offline work in the arts sector is viewed as passionate work, relying on the artist’s passion for their job rather than on the income they earn from it: as such, work in the creative and cultural industries – of which content creation is part of – is seen as endemically precarious and unpaid, and therefore exclusive and only accessible to specific social classes (Brook et al., 2020).

While the convergence of usage and production has partly democratised and broadened the experiences reflected in media content, media companies have kept consolidating their power by managing access to production channels (Jenkins and Deuze, 2008) – with media companies now being embodied by digital platforms. As Nieborg and Poell (2018) argue, the platformisation of the creative industries means that big platform corporations dominate the space, simultaneously enticing content creators to join through new features and promises of visibility while forcing them to grapple with continuous changes in platform governance, from the way content is curated and distributed to pricing strategies.

These variables affecting creator labour mean that, for Deuze (2006), digital culture can at once foster community and be fuelled by the isolation of working for oneself through virtual, remote means. And while work in the offline creative industries was already lonely, precarious and piecemeal, the social media creative economy ‘powered by a neoliberal ethos of self-commodification, the recasting of independent employment as “entrepreneurship,” and an oversaturated supply of talented hopefuls’ (Duffy et al., 2021: 2) amplifies many of the creative industries’ existing challenges: over-work becomes the price to pay for self-expression, visibility and earnings (Glatt, 2022). Similarly to traditional media producers, content creators – and specifically those from under-represented demographics – joined the creator profession to get paid to do what they loved (Duffy, 2017). Instead, they found themselves working for exposure and visibility, performing increased relational labour with audiences never to achieve that financial stability they so craved (ibid), highlighting the challenges embedded within the hybrid relationship between passion and work.

Working with communities under threat of de-platforming

In this precarious working scenario, sexual(ity) creators face additional challenges: their content puts them at risk of de-platforming, therefore stripping them of their hard-earned online visibility, identity and income (Are and Briggs, 2023) and making the management of their expression, passion and communities far from simple.

When creators sign up for a social media account, they agree to abide by community guidelines (Paasonen et al., 2019), which act as in-platform laws, governing presence and behaviours in digital spaces to both preserve user safety and platforms’ own public image and earnings (e.g. Gillespie, 2010; Goanta and Spanakis, 2020). Community guidelines are enforced at scale through algorithms designed ‘to afford or restrict visibility’ (Bishop, 2019: 2590). Algorithms change, often in response to public outcries, or to follow new criminal laws (e.g. Blunt et al., 2020; Goanta and Ortolani, 2021 etc.), banning certain types of content or behaviours and affecting particularly sexual(ity) creators’ ability to connect with others and to support themselves online. For these groups, the most significant legal driver for change in recent years has been FOSTA/SESTA, a 2018 exception to the United States’ Telecommunications Act 1996.

The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) made internet and social media platforms legally liable for hosting content that promotes sex trafficking and commercial sex (Coombes et al., 2022). The net result was that platforms began to over-censor sex-related content (Are, 2020; Paasonen et al., 2019, etc), with a devastating impact on sexual(ity) creators, many of whom have had their content or accounts removed or hidden since, affecting both their earnings and self-expression (Are and Briggs, 2023; Cotter, 2021).

When social media platforms believe their rules have been broken – as is often the case for the demographic we focus on (e.g. Blunt et al., 2020; Haimson et al., 2021) – users are de-platformed. On a work level, de-platforming immediately voids all opportunities for aspirational labour, since it renders the key elements necessary for content interaction – namely, the ability to reach audiences, store and replicate content and messages and to interact – unavailable (Baym, 2018). On a personal level, the loss of a profile can feel devastating, because the creator’s work is largely about the deliberate and creative construction of a digital identity and community, which are voided by de-platforming (Are and Briggs, 2023), leading to a strong sense of social isolation and precarity (Glatt, 2022). Further, the de-platforming of stigmatised groups leads them to distrust their own communities, whom they fear may have reported them to platforms (Myers West, 2018).

In the offline world of work, when membership of one or more work communities is removed (e.g. following job loss), employees can experience low self-esteem and a severely disrupted sense of self (Allan et al., 2021; Sverke et al., 2002), which can also be facilitated and amplified by organisational changes, ‘such as changes in the organization’s identity or culture or major changes in job contents and the way work is performed’ (Eilam and Shamir, 2005: 417). These factors all play out in the creator economy: that is, lack of belonging felt by de-platformed sexual(ity) content creators due to their apparent incompatibility with platform rules; confusion and disruption following changes in community guidelines or algorithmic distribution; low self-esteem and disrupted sense of identity upon de-platforming (e.g. Are and Briggs, 2023; Blunt et al., 2020; Goanta and Ortolani, 2021 etc.); and, crucially, both fear of and loss of access to communities that allowed sexual(ity) creators and their communities to feel seen and heard, and to push societal boundaries towards social change (Myers West, 2018; Tiidenberg and Van der Nagel, 2020).

Although most content creators are pushed towards building and engaging with a following (Baym, 2018) towards what Papacharissi calls ‘storytelling of the self’, or negotiating and navigating the presentation of their personae to multiple audiences in hybrid public / private spaces, (Papacharissi, 2015: 136), sexual(ity) creators must simultaneously construct and project an appropriate social identity to find like-minded others and build an audience while battling to present themselves appropriately depending on technological affordances and social contexts (Marwick and boyd, 2010). And since for budding and professional content creators, artists and public personalities alike the online friend also becomes an online audience, the boundaries of intimacy can be difficult to draw in spaces where work and home collide.

Intimacy can be found in social media spaces, even when the various parties are unknown to one another. Parasocial relationships are formed when members of an audience develop feelings of connectedness to a performer/creator, relationships which can become more meaningful when audience members or followers are given the chance to comment or engage with the creator and when the creator explicitly shows vulnerability (Thelwall et al., 2022). These bonds bring both social and financial rewards to creators: the stronger the feeling of connectedness, the more likely it is that followers will make a purchasing commitment (Reinkainen et al., 2020).

Yet, parasocial relationships are rarely discussed from the point of view of influencers or content creators, with whom unknown members of their community can also form parasocial bonds which may turn sour (Mardon et al., 2023). Indeed, particularly for users identifying as women, this mediated, ambivalent intimacy of sharing personal, relatable content with audiences can also become exploitative.

Firstly, building communities can be taxing, as Baym idea of ‘relational labour’, or the ‘ongoing, interactive, affective, material, and cognitive work of communicating with people over time to create structures that can support continued work’ attests (Baym, 2018: 19). Secondly, sexual(ity) creators must constantly renegotiate one-to-one and public communications boundaries to avoid breaking platform rules (Soronen and Koivunen, 2022; Ye et al., 2022). For example, platforms like Instagram penalise posting ‘implicit solicitation’, or the combination of an (undefined) sexual element such as suggestive pictures or words with an offer of communications via direct message or a link, meaning creators must maintain relationships with their audiences / customers without being seen to be infringing sexual solicitation or nudity and sexual activity policies (Instagram, n.d.) . This way, the joint pressure of earning a living and policing interactions lies solely on sexual(ity) creators, creating uncomfortable power dynamics with their viewers, who are often from more societally dominant demographics (Soronen and Koivunen, 2022; Ye et al., 2022).

Further, the intimacy creators build with audiences can be weaponised against them through practices like doxxing, or the sharing of the creator’s private personal information online, which can put targets at risk of offline harm (Glatt, 2023), or malicious flagging, whereby one or more individuals report creators for incorrect violations of platform rules, for which sexual(ity) creators are more likely to be de-platformed and therefore lose their income and connections (Are, 2024). These challenges, which Glatt calls the ‘intimacy triple bind’, take a higher toll on marginalised creators like those posting body content:

‘(1) these creators face complex systemic technological, sociocultural and commercial exclusions that impact their visibility and income-generating opportunities; (2) they are therefore under increased pressure to rely on audiences directly for financial support via crowdfunding platforms like Patreon, and tipping apps such as CashApp, Buymeacoffee and Venmo; (3) however, for these creators, who are already at high risk of hate, harassment and doxxing, the imperative to perform relational labour required for the audience-dependent income model comes with higher risks to their mental health and safety, in the form of weaponised intimacy from both hostile and enamoured audience members’ (Glatt, 2023: 13-14).

Although the communities creators build can mitigate these challenges, highlighting the importance of user networks in precarious work such as content creation (Goetz and Boehm, 2020), Meisner (2023) found that their constant need to orient their online lives towards their audiences can eclipse connections, bonds and solidarity with other creator workers, creating a fragmentation among these users which worsens their feelings of isolation in the face of adverse platform governance.

Having examined sexual(ity) creators’ hybrid relationship with expression and work, and with community and work under threat of de-platforming, it now becomes relevant to understand how social media platforms as hybrid spaces may affect content creators’ work and social bonds.

‘Corpo-civic’ spaces and ‘post-social’ media

Privately owned platforms have now been incorporated into our lives, meaning that their use as intermediaries for human connection has become normalised (Baym, 2018). However, the word ‘platform’ itself has multiple uses, betraying different understandings of how communities and companies might view these spaces: it paints social networks as egalitarian entities giving everyone a voice; it makes them appealing advertisers; it positions them as neutral, ‘a vehicle for art rather than its producer or patron’ transferring liability onto users and it enhances platform power through opacity (Gillespie, 2010: 358).

Since we are interested in understanding how sexual(ity) creators navigate and understand the role these conveniently named spaces play in their personal and working lives, the notion of ‘corpo-civic’ spaces is useful to explore how Instagram and TikTok generate, foster and shape communities. Borrowing from ‘third’ space theory (Humphreys, 2007; Oldenburg, 1999; Svensson, 2018), which examined the importance that spaces between work and home such as shopping malls and cafés have towards community formation, Are (2020) defined social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok as ‘corpo-civic’ spaces: liminal, hybrid spaces performing important civic functions such as hosting gathering and facilitating self-expression despite their corporate ownership.

Just like ‘third’ spaces such as malls and cafés are crucial towards the development of communities and the strengthening of society offline (Bruns, 2008), social media spaces ‘host gatherings beyond home and work, where people are on a level playing field and discuss topics informally’ (Are, 2020). As such, platforms present ‘public square’ functions in that they are accessible to everyone wishing to express themselves and formulate ideas and engage with communities (ibid) while also acting as corporate entities owned by billionaires, profiting from user data and advertising, and trying to limit the damage of bad publicity (Gillespie, 2010; Paasonen et al., 2019). Further, they are workspaces for a great number of users, who rely on them to conduct their business (Duffy et al., 2021; Glatt, 2022). Instagram and TikTok can therefore be understood as ‘corpo-civic’ spaces, a hybrid public and private, professional and personal setting (Are, 2020).

Platform rules and affordances can aid or hinder belonging in ‘corpo-civic’ spaces, something that has become apparent in the rivalry between this paper’s research sites, Instagram and TikTok. In 2022, Instagram users staged several protests against the social network’s decision to afford more visibility to short-form video, interpreted by audiences as a way to ‘copy’ its rival, TikTok (Silberling, 2022). These users reported a sense of community loss and of feeling bombarded with promotional and celebrity content instead of seeing posts by the user communities they chose to follow (ibid).

Instagram’s progressive morphing into TikTok and the Chinese social network’s exponential growth brought various commentators to predict the end of ‘social’ media (Figueira, 2022; Ongweso Jr., 2022), arguing spaces are turning into less communal, more top-down communication experiences. Figueira (2022) described TikTok as a ‘filmic’ rather than a social channel: its focus on viral, entertaining content makes it a broadcast tool more than a communal one, where creators talk to audiences instead of engaging with communities. This, for Ongweso (2022), marks the end of social media, making platforms a place for earning money more than to create communities – ‘corpo’ more than ‘civic’, professional more than personal. Consistently with Baym (2015) then, while internet spaces were already creating communities before the commodification of digital social interactions, and communicating on them was inherently social, mainstream platforms’ monopoly over digital spaces has resulted in a few tech giants turning something users were already doing – socialising digitally – into profit, becoming part of a larger economic disempowerment where work and interactions are out of users’ control.

It is this complicated relationship between the social and the professional, with platforms as ephemeral community and work intermediaries for sexual(ity) creators at risk of de-platforming, that we seek to examine through this paper, which answered the following research questions:

RQ1: How do sexual(ity) creators de-platformed by Instagram and TikTok describe their experiences of working on these platforms?

RQ2: How do sexual(ity) creators de-platformed by Instagram and TikTok describe their relationship with their communities on these platforms?

RQ3: Which social media platform affordances facilitate or hinder the formation of communities on Instagram and TikTok?

Methods and analysis

To answer the research questions, we carried out 12 virtual, ethnographic, semi-structured interviews asking participants about their experiences of de-platforming and their relationships with platform communities, adding follow-up questions to expand on their stories.

Qualitative, ethnographic research interviews consist in the researcher asking open-ended questions to elicit rich responses from participants, and are commonly used to ‘explore the meanings that people ascribe to actions and events in their cultural worlds and how they express that in language’ (Roulston, 2022: 13). As is common in ethnographic interviews, we asked participants open-ended questions to make sense of their space, time, events, people and activities, and then we qualitatively analysed the data (ibid). Since researchers often participate in the settings they study when carrying out ethnographic interviews (ibid), the first author participated through her own ongoing observation of and fieldnotes on her experiences of content creation and community engagement on Instagram and TikTok, which informed this research’s design, its inclusion criteria and main questions (Are, 2022).

Factors such as ‘study aim, sample specificity, theoretical background, quality of dialogue, and strategy for analysis’ helped determine our sample size (Malterud et al., 2016: 1756). Malterud et al. (2016) suggest that six to 10 participants are enough to describe the narrow, specific experiences such as those described in this paper, gathering users de-platformed in similar circumstances. We decided to cap the sample at 12, when interviews stopped generating new material.

Because the dataset producing this paper’s findings was connected to a wider study on malicious flagging and de-platforming, our inclusion criteria were indeed narrow: participants had to have experienced content or account deletions on Instagram and TikTok and negative comments on their posts, mirroring Are's (2022) experiences of flagging and de-platforming. We recruited them through a blend of targeted outreach to users in the first author’s network who had posted about having been affected by malicious flagging, and of onboarding through a cross-platform call for participants shared across the first author’s Instagram, Twitter and TikTok profiles, which have a combined audience of over 400,000. Before confirming onboarding, participants were vetted for their experiences and were chosen only if they met both inclusion criteria. Following the interviews, they were paid £50 for their time and expertise.

Participants were all over 18 years of age and based in the countries where most of the first author’s social media following lies: the United Kingdom (6), Italy (2), the United States (2), Ireland (1) and Australia (1). Most of them used multiple social media platforms, with an overlap amongst those who used Instagram and TikTok for both personal and professional reasons.

The data we collected from them was then transcribed and subsequently analysed through thematic analysis (TA), a qualitative method requiring minimal data organisation and allowing researchers to identify, analyse and report themes or patterns within data (Braun and Clarke, 2006). TA describes data in rich detail, providing insights into lived experiences, which is particularly relevant when conducting research on stigmatised communities (ibid). Themes are then developed through researchers’ coding, and often reflecting data collection questions (ibid).

The data collected through the interviews was rich, lengthy and nuanced, leading the authors to conduct a preliminary analysis, to then analyse the responses collected through two further rounds of data analysis and to split findings in different papers.

This study presents a set of limitations. Critiques of interviews find this method leaves too much room for researcher bias, both in choosing which questions and follow-up questions to ask and in the framing of answers (Roulston, 2022). In the case of this study, the choice of interviewees can be both a consequence of legislation that has brought platforms to over-moderate sexual content post-FOSTA/SESTA (Paasonen et al., 2019), generating similar experiences of de-platforming, but also a reflection of the user demographics in the first author’s network of sex-positive, queer followers, with whom she engages from the positionality of a white, bisexual, cisgender woman with experiences of digital censorship. However, consistently with previous research on creator communities and de-platforming (Are, 2022; Bishop, 2019; Cotter, 2021), the specific experiences of creators are often the only type of information we have about platform processes, making users experts in their experiences and, therefore, valid participants to feature in studies like ours.

Results

Working under threat of de-platforming

Participants showcased different relationships with and uses of social media platforms. Ten out of 12 participants used Instagram, seven out of 12 used TikTok, with five out of 12 using both. Two participants claimed to also use Twitter, which was outside the scope of this paper.

Those we interviewed mainly used Instagram and TikTok for two different reasons: work or self-expression. However, their responses often showed the boundaries between the two were blurred. It is perhaps therefore better to present the two poles of their social media use as a continuum: while some participants claimed to earn money directly through platforms – for example, through brand partnerships or through sales originating from their social media posts and presence, which several participants linked to ‘huge boosts in sales’, – others viewed Instagram and TikTok as a portfolio or business card, something that cemented their status as experts, thought leaders, creatives or workers and that was therefore still necessary towards their working lives. This means that while they didn’t earn money directly through platforms, their presence on them was indirectly linked to their earnings. Those who used platforms for self-expression rather than for work also aimed at gaining access to earning opportunities by further cementing their creator persona, adding that even though they were not currently earning money through platforms, their social media activity was a ‘stepping stone’ towards it.

Still, participants’ stories showed a great discrepancy between the aspirational, entrepreneurial promise of social media success and the reality of full-time content creation, both in terms of living under threat of de-platforming and in terms of actual earnings achieved, in line with work by Duffy et al. (2021). For instance, participants expressed disappointment with access to or earnings from in-platform creator rewards systems, such as the TikTok creator fund, the earnings from which a participant called ‘a pittance’. ‘Although I don't see my social media as a source of income’, argued another creator, ‘I still think that every work should pay off, especially when I bring so many views and so many people to the platform’. These experiences reflect media reports on the Fund (Jackson, 2021), finding that even creators with millions of views and hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers either do not have access to it or only make a few pennies or cents from it. This reflects earlier work on the challenges of ‘prosumption’ or 'produsage’, which often results in exploitation (Beer and Burrows, 2010; Bruns, 2008; Fuchs, 2011) because the lines between user and producer are blurred enough for platforms not to recognise creators’ worker rights.

Whether they earned money through Instagram and TikTok or not however, their presence on them resulted in complicated feelings of trepidation, worry, and even loss that users expressed particularly when discussing experiences or threats of de-platforming. One participant told us they were ‘pretty financially dependent on Instagram’, and that they would like to pivot to using the platform as their sole source of income but that it was ‘obviously very insecure, [because of] the way that it is run – like the way they give people violations and remove their accounts’.

Most of those who used platforms professionally claimed to be fully or largely financially dependent on social media platforms, arguing they ‘physically can’t do another job’ that matches their schedule, abilities and skills as well as content creation does. They found Instagram and TikTok crucial for regular and last-minute work such as booking events, covering for performers, selling their products or promoting their services, similarly to Coombes et al.’s (2022) findings with regard to sex workers with a disability, who could ‘minimize in-person contact and the potential to establish passive income streams that can be lifesaving during chronic health flare-ups or extended hospital stays’ – something that was voided upon de-platforming.

Participants’ discussions around working as creators were therefore strongly centred around money and opportunity loss. A participant told us: ‘I lived only off my Instagram profile, which gave me a salary, allowed me to buy food, pay bills, rent. When it was deleted, I was like, “What do I do? I can’t find a good job in one night.”’ Others claimed to have lost work contacts, with a participant sharing that he even had to pay a brand back upon de-platforming: ‘I had promised than on X day I would have published one post, four stories and a live for a brand that paid me for it, and then I couldn’t do it, I felt like I had to pay the brand back and send the product back, saying sorry’. Creators felt that having been de-platformed or being under threat of de-platforming affected their work opportunities, leading brands to stop partnering up with them.

While all participants showed true passion for their content creation and self-expression work, and expressed gratitude for being able to access apps like Instagram and TikTok to do what they loved and reach like-minded people, it is clear that working under the ‘algorithmic boss’ (Duffy, 2020: 103) caused them great distress originating from precarity and instability. In line with findings from our previous study on the wellbeing impacts of de-platforming (Are and Briggs, 2023), financial instability, loss of work and/or fear to lose work caused participants to experience negative emotional effects such as loss of identity.

Overall, our participants argued that the platforms mediating the creator economy lack care towards them and their rights as workers. They demanded that content moderation was seen ‘as a workers’ rights issue’.

This insecurity mirrors aspects of the economic instability and exclusivity of the offline creative industries (Brook et al., 2020); however, in line with Duffy et al. (2021), this type of social media entrepreneurship requiring a form of self-commodification has an added layer of job insecurity due to platform governance (Are and Briggs, 2023), which is enhanced by users’ need and fear of their communities (Myers West, 2018).

Negotiating community intimacy under threat of de-platforming

All participants, whether they earned money through platforms or not, claimed to have created or joined communities through Instagram and TikTok, meaning that the community aspect of these platforms was as crucial to participants as their earnings prospects. These platforms played an essential role in the social lives of sexual(ity) creators, helping them find friends and partners as much as work.

Various sexual(ity) creators we interviewed shared that Instagram and TikTok were crucial towards their coming out and gender expression experiences, helping them find communities of like-minded, supportive peers.

‘[TikTok] was the first app where I posted any type of content with me wearing feminine clothing and it was received well’, said a non-binary femme presenting participant. Several participants told us the apps were crucial towards their transitioning: their networks provided support and encouragement towards their gender expression, so much so that participants referred to their networks of online friends and followers on Instagram and TikTok as ‘lovely’ people who were always there for them. Because of this, the threat of de-platforming and of losing those friends, supporters and even memories felt terrifying to participants, as one of them explained:

‘I was trying to not go in dark places, I was thinking, “This is just an Instagram account.” If I go in my archive, I can see stories and photos of me, with my friends, with my family which especially with some people I don’t talk anymore. Sometimes I have these moments where I want these pictures again, and if Instagram deletes my account, I can’t see them’.

Follower networks can become crucial towards rebuilding a profile after de-platforming, as shared by a participant: ‘That’s when I understood I had a real community: I opened my new profile, and within a day I had 10,000 followers, so I told myself I had 10,000 trusted people who loved me’. The use of the adjective ‘real’ in this case reflects the amount of followers who followed the creator to their back-up account, a sizeable yet much reduced number of users compared to their original profile. Indeed, although creators often keep a back-up account to direct others to in case of de-platforming, this account tends to have a much smaller following, therefore resulting in reduced work and networking opportunities. Further, several participants shared examples of even losing their back-ups shortly after their main accounts, meaning that the precarity of platform governance follows them as much as their ‘real’ community, resulting in a feeling of being hunted down by the platform.

The dependence on these same follower networks for community-building and financial gain also meant that participants had to negotiate their self-presentation on and engagement with their communities, choosing how much or how little to share to avoid threatening their presence on platforms (e.g. by creating fully private accounts for friends and family, or back-ups to resort to in case of deletion).

Participants seemed uncertain as to how to negotiate their relationships with their communities, which were at once friends, helpers, customers, followers, and their connection to the social world. Similarly to Baym’s (2018) modern musicians, they were painfully aware that their hybrid relationship with their followers was necessary for them to thrive in their creative field, but that it could turn sour, resulting in harassment and potential de-platforming when receiving enough reports (Are, 2022, 2024; Glatt, 2023; Myers West, 2018). Several participants shared examples of their followers turning against them, particularly following the turning down of advances:

‘I think I was a bit naïve, had a bit of an innocence that I built this little community where we talk about mental health, or just going live, and if anyone's got anything to say we just say it. I gave a little bit too much to that group people, who started feeling that they had more of a relationship with me than they actually did in real life, and I rejected a couple of advances from people on there, and it turned sour, and then it just got malicious’.

In this sense, our sexual(ity) creators were mindful that their own ‘storytelling of the self’ (Papacharissi, 2015: 136) had to be appropriate for both the platform and their followers, with whom they had to maintain enough intimacy to remain connected, but not too much intimacy. Indeed, they felt they had to preserve a form of distance from audiences, to avoid leading them on, making them angry or providing too much information that would make creators more vulnerable to flagging or doxxing. This burden, like Ye et al.’s ambivalent intimacy (2022) and Glatt’s intimacy triple bind (2023), fell disproportionately on women, queer and sex working users, who felt certain follower relationships could add a layer of vulnerability to de-platforming.

Participants’ nuanced use of platforms as both aspirational workspaces and community engagement spaces can therefore be understood by adapting the concept of platforms’ ‘corpo-civic’ role in their lives beyond social media regulation, given that users described Instagram and TikTok as spatially ambiguous, ‘third’ locations in between their work and home. But while the notion of platforms as ‘corpo-civic’ spaces focused on their governance, ‘to create a balance between platform duties and user expectations’ (Are, 2020), it appears that their hybrid nature affects participants’ relationships with their communities too. The simple action of ‘being active’ on social media can work to strengthen parasocial relationships and build community, but inevitably there are connected commercial interests that are sometimes kept opaque and that are, at present, under-researched. Our participants’ experiences seem to show a financial and emotional dependence on those parasocial relationships even from the celebrity/performer/creator’s perspective – and not just from the audience member/follower side – due to those connected earnings.

Participants in this study have, consciously or subconsciously, chosen not to separate the poles of their work and personal life on Instagram and TikTok, and their relationship with the platforms is also corpo-civic: like in a traditional workplace, their presence on social media is aimed towards earning a living, but human, social bonds and relationships are formed in the process, together with an identity and, particularly for stigmatised groups, a community they sometimes struggled to find offline (Tiidenberg and Van der Nagel, 2020). Therefore, it becomes difficult to define what came first: some users joined platforms with the aim to express themselves and were then able to make a living out of it; others joined with a strategy to use platforms as portfolios, networking tools, content creation intermediaries, and then formed social relationship on the back of it. Yet, no matter the initial aim of joining, platforms’ corpo-civic nature has meant that their existence and roles are deeply entrenched within participants’ financial and personal lives. Because of this, losing access to these hybrid work/life spaces can be crippling, particularly for stigmatised creators (Are and Briggs, 2023).

Re-evaluating creators’ lives on ‘post-social’ media

Participants who used both Instagram and TikTok towards earning a living, network-building, content creation and self-presentation hinted at each platform performing a different function in their life. They understood Instagram as a place of work and self-expression but, crucially, they identified it as a platform where they spent years making personal and professional connections, and therefore they viewed it as the ‘place’ where their community lies. Because of this, losing their original account – even when a portion of their followers would follow them to their back-up – felt emotionally and financially devastating. Conversely, participants found TikTok to be a broadcasting tool to reach broader audiences, like a channel, consistently with Figueira (2022) and Ongweso (2022).

This highlights how different affordances bring forth different uses and different communities within platforms, showing how these can affect users’ understanding of and future permanence on a site (Are et al., 2024). None of the participants mentioned having conversations or fostering a community on TikTok, which they only described as the platform where they had their largest audience, or that allowed them to be discovered by non-followers. Instagram was instead where they connected with friends, family and their close networks instead, a space where they could exchange ideas, as a participant highlighted:

‘My [Instagram] profile also became somewhere where people can exchange ideas, so much so that they’ll reach out to ask me what I think about a specific current affairs issue, or even to ask for personal advice about couple dynamics. It's really beautiful that a set of people knows that they can come [to my profile] and come back each time because they view it as a safe space’.

Users’ preference towards Instagram for community fostering can be due to their demographic – for example, millennials and Gen Z users who spent years interacting with the app and are therefore more emotionally connected to it – but also due to its in-built tools, such as the ability to write long comments and captions and an algorithm formerly based on showing friends’ content rather than traditionally popular content (Silberling, 2022). In this sense, TikTok affordances such as stitching, responding to comments, shorter comment word counts and its algorithm facilitate virality and discoverability, but, it seems, not conversation. User interactions on TikTok therefore seem to be more about ‘going viral’, while participants expressed viewing Instagram to engage their community.

These different community fostering affordances, blended with users’ ‘corpo-civic’ relationship with platforms, the employment precarity arising from the ‘algorithmic boss’ and their recurrent experiences of de-platforming mean that participants have begun re-evaluating their presence on Instagram and TikTok, a process that is, for them, as painful as it is necessary. Claiming they were not getting a good experience on Instagram and TikTok, a participant told us:

‘Why even stay on this platform if they clearly do not care. My videos are completely harmless… like, yeah, I might twerk… or attempt to… but my videos are completely harmless, but then you've got people going on racist rants, or anti queer rants – they’re fine, there's so much hate speech allowed to flourish on TikTok’.

Part of users’ re-evaluation of their presence on platforms is therefore due to the time spent making content that was demoted and/or de-platformed, in contrast with the lack of action against the abuse they faced. Partly, it also seems to be a critique of platforms’ shift towards even more aggressive advertising and engagement, for example, following TikTok’s push towards a shopping integration or Instagram’s pivot to reels to mimic TikTok’s success (Silberling, 2022). In a participant’s view:

‘I’ve got a feeling that there's gotta be another platform that jumps out soon and takes over from TikTok, because TikTok now is just viciously e-commerce, […] all the top creators are now just selling cheap things for the for the platform, so I think it's probably a bit lost its spark’.

Overall, users’ experiences with Instagram and TikTok’s affordances seem to highlight that, without the necessary care, fairness and rights granted by a more effective and just moderation system, users may wish to take their content, community and presence elsewhere. Although they could not yet envisage where that ‘elsewhere’ would be, perhaps further cementing Instagram and TikTok’s existing pull towards them, our sexual(ity) creators in these ‘corpo-civic’ spaces demanded better of the platforms that mediate both their communities and their work, showing that the shift towards the ‘post-social’ and ‘too corporate’ may be hindering platforms’ own success, drawing communities away (Figueira, 2022; Ongweso, 2022).

Conclusion

This study explored the complex, hybrid work/life relationships experienced by sexual(ity) content creators at risk of de-platforming on Instagram and TikTok. We found that social media’s hybrid ‘corpo-civic’ nature of a workplace fostering community shapes the way users form and rely on bonds on platforms, which are necessary for creators to establish networks and to work, but that result in ambivalent intimacies and fear of community policing (Myers West, 2018; Ye et al., 2022).

Our participants’ stories show that narratives surrounding content creation as aspirational, entrepreneurial work do not always manifest in actual financial earnings, or indeed in any financial stability for sexual(ity) creators under constant threat of de-platforming. And while users found solace with their follower communities, whom they relied on through a form of parasocial bonds to work and to rebuild networks after instances of de-platforming, they also experienced challenges in navigating how to present themselves and how much to share in places where their permanence was not guaranteed. In particular, sexual(ity) creators felt vulnerable in the face of potential harassment and/or reporting to platforms from follower communities (Are, 2024; Glatt, 2023), in a context where platform companies provide very little direct support to the users they claim they wish to protect from harm, and to the communities they claim to wish to foster.

Additionally, we found that platform governance and its affordances greatly affected users’ engagement with and wish to remain on platforms. The stark split between users’ description of their use of Instagram and TikTok highlights that specific affordances – that is, algorithms pushing for virality, and a focus on broadcasting and entertainment which seems to have started on TikTok and that Instagram is now trying to copy (Silberling, 2022) – create a more ‘corporate’ and work-focused space for users, hindering their community-building efforts and pushing them to entertain and sell instead. As a result, participants re-evaluated their relationship with platforms both in terms of their treatment of them as workers – which they understood as poor given the often-arbitrary de-platforming (Are and Briggs, 2023) – and in terms of the visibility of and access to their community, and are considering leaving towards more community-friendly, less aggressively commercial spaces. Indeed, users’ perceptions of platforms as workplaces that are aggressively becoming corporate – through over-moderating content they deem unsavoury, pushes towards monetisation and sales, and due to the apparent benefits of entrepreneurialism through content creation (Glatt, 2022) – put them off from using them altogether. In this sense, we found a stark contrast between users’ perception of Instagram as where their community lies, and TikTok as a broadcast tool, with the ‘corpo’ nature of the social media ‘civic’ space taking over users’ experience in what some commentators have already been dubbing as ‘post-social’ media (Figueira, 2022; Ongweso, 2022).

Future studies may wish to expand on parasocial relationships from content creators’ perspectives, as well as on the relationship between vulnerability and following and monetary rewards. Further research may also wish to develop ‘post-social’ media contrasts and comparisons amongst increasingly mainstream platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, to understand how communities consume or produce content on these platforms in connection (or disconnection) with their communities.