Interview Series: Surveillance Capitalism, Public Sphere, and Digital Regimes | Interviewer: Gokhan Colak

Influencer Culture, Creative Labor, Authenticity

Alice Marwick’s conceptualizations of micro-celebrity and self-branding examine how authenticity is produced within influencer culture. In your research on influencers, creative labor, and particularly the representation of marginalized identities, at what points do you observe this discourse of “authenticity” becoming empowering, and at what points does it turn into an exploitative mechanism?

For marginalized creators, authenticity is a double-edged sword. In both my research and professional experience as a content creator, authenticity is a contentious strategy. You need to simultaneously prove authenticity while also accept that you’re going to be scrutinized by a platform’s algorithmic recommendation system and audiences alike. This becomes complicated when your identity becomes a brand.

How do you convey “realness”when working and speaking with audiences that may be conditioned to devalue or distrust you? And how do you “keep it real” while simultaneously working to build your platform? As a disabled content creator, I encountered this all the time: DMs asking me to “prove” my disability. I would often finding mutual creators on the subreddit pager/IllnessFakers, where 200,000 members hope to expose disabled and chronically ill creators for “faking it” because they were showing their disability too much.

In this case, authenticity became damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Sure, social media and content creation platforms are spaces where disabled and other marginalized creators can communicate and work, but it doesn’t mean that we still don’t encounter ableist ideas about who gets to do the work and whose work is valued. Authenticity is complicated, and for many creators, it’s more of an “idea” than a reality.

Digital Activism, Platforms, Sustainability

Zeynep Tufekci argues that while activism in the digital age has gained speed, it often lacks organizational depth. In your analyses of micro-activism shaped through disability, body politics, and everyday experiences on platforms such as TikTok, how do you evaluate the capacity of this form of visibility to generate long-term political transformation?

In the first big wave of social media and content creation platforms (late 2000s, 2010s), Internet spaces were hubs for marginalized communities to challenge mainstream narratives about political existence and current events. (Definitely not just something unique to disability communites!) Twitter, especially, was an important tool for various disability communities.

Hashtags served as indexing tools to link different conversations together. Movements like #CripTheVote, #PowerToLive, and #DisabilityTooWhite catalyzed important conversations about ableism, racism, and political power. It also brought other people into the conversation. The hashtags weren’t gatekept behind closed doors. While these hashtag movements weren’t always “big,” they also brought attention to every day experiences about disability and political change.

However, the enshittification of Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform in 2022 really dissolved disability communities and organizing on the platform. In this case, micro-activism becomes a verybprecarious circumstance and isn’t always possible when the platform removes protections for hate speech or is filled with spam bots. This doesn’t mean people aren’t organizing on other platforms, like Bluesky or TikTok, but the centralized hub of advocacy isn’t the same.

Affective Publics, Emotional Labor, Public Sphere

Zizi Papacharissi’s concept of affective publics suggests that the digital public sphere is constituted through emotions. In your work on TikTok narratives, personal storytelling, and the visibility of marginalized bodies, how do you define the boundary between the solidarity- producing potential of emotional publics and the instrumentalization of emotional labor?

For many disabled creators, the personal truly is political and embodied. Digitally mediated work like content creation, influencing, and livestreaming aren’t just about obtaining social, economic, and cultural capital for disabled creators who monetize their labor. There’s also an embodied, emotional feeling to this work. In my research and personal experience as a disabled creator who made disability-centric content, emotional appeals and advocacy become central to creative work. That boundary is often murky and messy. This can differentiate based on the type of creative labor you engage with, but the instrumentalization of emotional labor can contribute to some of the authenticity negotiation problems I spoke about in a previous response. Yes, disability advocacy and self-branding can help build awareness and support creators from an economic standpoint, but at what cost?

Public Relations, Ethics, Public Interest

Grunig’s normative theory of public relations proposes an ethical model of communication based on dialogue and reciprocity. From your perspective at the intersection of critical PR and activism, particularly within a platform-based visibility economy, to what extent do you believe such symmetrical and ethical communication models are feasible in practice?

I’m thinking about these very questions in some new projects about what authenticity means in creator culture now that GenAI tools are pervasive in platform economies. For instance, in one forthcoming book chapter I’m working on, I examine the labor of human influencers who promote GenAI Technologies through false storylines and personae. This is becomign increasingly common on platforms that prioritize short-form content and e- commerce, such as TikTok and Instagram.

One such creator went viral in late 2025 for claiming her Ph.D. advisor stole her research. But when other creators looked into it, there were many inconsistencies between what she was telling audiences. What her content showed. The creator claimed she was a sociology phd student, but there was no concrete evidence that she was even enrolled as a university student, and all of her videos featured the same GenAI product. Like consumers in the early 2000s with print advertising, we’re currently experiencing an authenticity overload, where audiences are oversaturated with information, and it’s more diffuclt to tell if a creator’s “realness” is actually genuine. This has some dangerous implications for symmetical and ethical brand communication in the creator economy. Why should I invest in a product, idea, or belief if I can’t prove that it’s authentic? I believe we’re entering an authenticity collapse, where there is little distinction between fact and fiction. İt’s all about how platforms, brands, and creators can profit from spectacle, even if that spectacle isn’t rooted in reality.

Algorithms, Visibility, Inequality

José van Dijck’s “platform society” approach argues that digital platforms are not neutral tools but normative structures. Based on your research into algorithmic visibility, content moderation, and the experiences of marginalized communities, which aspects of platform design do you see as most actively reproducing social inequalities?

Platform companies also want to accrue the biggest possible profit. If they believe the presence of disabled people will turn brands and audiences alike away, and drive down their profits, they will not prioritize disability visibility. This is also the case for other marginalized groups across race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Platforms reflect dominant social values and beliefs about who we should see and who holds power. İf disabled people are devalued and pushed out of physical public and labor spaces, this will be reflected into the platform’s design and algorithmic recommendation systems—the latter which ultimately shapes visibility and participation in digital publics. It’s not that an algorithmic recommendation system is doing something new when it censors or decides to remove protections for disabled users. They’re drawing on previously existing ideas and beliefs that ultimately come from the contexts they’re designed and created in.

Academia, Activism, Public Knowledge

Considering your work that brings together influencer culture, digital activism, disability studies, and critical communication scholarship, what do you see as the most urgent responsibility of academia today: to document these practices, to critique them, or to develop directly transformative interventions?

I think this is ultimately an industry issue. Communication and media scholarship is truly behind other sibling fields (e.g., anthrolopology, sociology, English and cultural studies, gender studies) when it comes to disability centered research. İn the last five years, there has been one job in North American higher education that specifically called for expertise in disability and communication/media studies. I’m focused on that context because that’s where I live and work. I would imagine it’s a similar issue across other geopolitical contexts. We won’t be able to document, critique, or develop interventions if universities and industries aren’t investing in disability studies. And not just “studies of disabled media users or workers,” but disability critique as central to knowledge making and creative practices that can contribute to worlds where EVERYONE counts.

Disability Studies, Everyday Life, Counter-Narratives

In your research on the representation of disability, body politics, and everyday experiences on digital platforms, how do you construct counter-narratives to the “inspirational stories” so often reproduced by mainstream media? Do you believe these counter-narratives are genuinely capable of producing transformation within the digital public sphere?

I think disabled creators’ engagement with platform affordances can absolutely challenge ableist narratives and tropes such as the “tragedy” of disability, supercrips, and inspiration porn. In my research on disabled TikTok creators pushing back against algorithmic suppression and heightened harassment, I found that creators used play and strategic engagement to both bring attention to social issues while also pushing back agains the idea that disabled people need to be saved or need pity from nondisabled audiences.

In North American culture (the geopoltical context I create, research, and write from) disabled people are historically pushed out of public life and are not seen as “equals” or even “human.” So platforms definitely offer an avenue to support communities, bring people together, and challenge these harmful, ableist mediations (though people may still face ableist harassment or suppression).

Digital Ethnography, Researcher Positionality

In the context of your research with influencers, TikTok communities, and marginalized groups, how should the ethical positioning of the researcher be rethought within digital ethnography and qualitative analysis? What limits and responsibilities have your own studies Revealed to you in this regard?

Nondisabled researchers often ask me, “Can I research disability and creators if I’m not disabled myself?” I think-at least in North American academia—there is this belief that you must be disabled yourself in order to write and research about disability. But lived experience does not automatically mean you are an academic expert in that subject. I’m not here to poliçe or control what other scholars are writing about. Moreover, I believe disabled scholars, who are underrepresented in academia, should not be left to do the labor of disability research. İ do think researchers need to bring an ethics of care to their work. There’s a difference between writing and researching and theorizing lived experiences. Disability isn’t a monolith, and i don’t claim that my theoretical and ethnographic work is the end-all-be-all of disability media studies. We need a multiplicity of voices, findings, and ideas. And we need to be responsible when we do that.