The careers of social media content creators, or influencers, live or die by their ability to cultivate and maintain an invested audience-community. To this end, they are encouraged to practise relational labour (Baym, 2018) to build authentic self-brands and intimacy with audiences. Drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study of the London influencer industry (2017-2023), this paper examines relational labour through an intersectional feminist lens, foregrounding the ways in which structural inequalities shape relationships between creators and their audiences. This research found that the tolls of managing audience relationships are higher for marginalised creators—especially those who make critical leftist and feminist content—who find themselves on an uneven playing field in the challenges they face as well as the coping strategies at their disposal. Creators employed four key tactics to navigate relational labour and boundaries with audiences: (1) leaning into making rather than being content; (2) (dis)engagement with anti-fans through silence and digital self-harm; (3) retreating into private community spaces, away from the exposure of public platforms; and (4) turning off public comments. Marginalised creators find themselves in an intimacy triple bind, already at higher risk of trolling and harassment, yet under increased pressure to perform relational labour, adversely opening them up to further harms in the form of weaponised intimacy. Findings highlight the individualisation of risk and harm as a structural norm in the influencer industry, raising serious questions about the lack of accountability and responsibility that platforms show towards the creators who generate profit for them.

#Vladdydaddy is a popular internet meme that emerged during the 2016 elections in the United States on 4chan and Twitter to characterize the perceived submissive behavior of Donald Trump towards Vladimir Putin. The meme re-emerged on TikTok in the days leading to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, gaining a new meaning. This paper is part of a larger research project with the objective of identifying and scrutinizing various forms of social media memetic participation in response to human tragedies, such as the Russia-Ukraine war. In this paper we focus on "DM memes" as a creative sub-meme of #Vladdydaddy. Drawing from theories of memetic participation (Milner, 2016) and imagined intimacy (Greenwood & Long, 2011) for the analysis. The findings suggest that the DMing Putin meme emerges as a collective coping mechanism to fulfill an emotional need through the construction of imagined intimacy. The strict censorship laws within Russian borders underscores the significance of exploring seemingly trivial online discursive practices as courageous in a political context that can carry grave consequences offline. In doing so, we bring to the forefront the global community of creators who take a firm stance towards the current political climate in Russia.

This paper investigates the changes in digital practices of intimacy during the COVID-19 social distancing period in the UK, and whether these transformations have persisted in the ‘new normal’. The study employed a mixed-methods approach, collecting quantitative and qualitative data from 824 adults who used dating apps during the pandemic, and conducting 60 in-depth interviews. The study aimed to understand the digital intimate practices of heterosexual and LGBT+ communities during and after COVID-19.

First, we describe (using both descriptive statistics and excerpts from participant interviews) the changes to practices of digital intimacy during COVID-19. Second, we will explore the distribution of these changes among communities. In particular, we describe the differences between heterosexual and LGBT+ respondents, and between white and ethnic minority respondents. Third, we explore how these changes have endured after COVID-19. In particular, we will explore how changes to what people look for in their app use endured or returned to ‘pre-covid’

The paper concludes by arguing that dating app's increasing status as health actors, particularly during a pandemic, necessitates more research in this area. This study provides insights into how digital practices of intimacy have transformed during COVID-19 and whether these transformations have endured in the ‘new normal’. Understanding these changes is essential to adequately support people’s emotional and sexual well-being during and after a time of crisis.

For many, mapping platforms are enmeshed in everyday experiences. We navigate, locate, and move through the world with the help of their locative affordances. Consequently, these platforms have an intimate awareness of our movements and location history, and this information is valuable for advertisers. One way that platforms can track and share this information is through geofences, commonly used by companies to send targeted advertisements directly to platforms. Geofences are virtual perimeters established around target locations that act as a digital tripwire, marking who and what crosses its threshold. Digital mapping platforms like Google Maps broker this location data to third-parties (Bui, Chang, & McIlwain, 2022).

This paper examines two applications of geofences as intermediaries of locational data. The first is the use of geofences by the property platform, CIVVL, that applies geofences to facilitate and accelerate the tenant eviction process. The second is Hawk Analytics, a locational data broker that geofences abortion clinics and sells the locational data from the clinic’s clients to anti-choice organizations, in jurisdictions of the United States where such healthcare is illegal. In our analysis of locational data, we apply the concept of platform intimacies (Rambukkana and de Verteuil, 2021; Ley, & Rambukkana, 2021) to understand the techniques through which geofences access private locational details. This paper examines the spatial relations the geofence enforces and how this often-unregulated informational infrastructure can be applied to weaponize location data. We argue that the geofence enables an extractive relationship with intimate platform knowledge while it enforces hegemonic notions of trespass and belonging.

In 2020 TikTok saw an influx of new users, looking for a sense of relief in the face of overwhelming loneliness, and found some palliative comfort in the sense of intimacy entailed in engaging with the works of microcelebrities. At the same time many new users became creators on TikTok, saw incredible growth, and quickly found themselves navigating a larger scale of demands on their attention and on their affects than they’d ever experienced, or, usually, expected. The purpose of this paper is to examine and describe the specific demands on the affective labor and attention of content creators on TikTok, the ways in which those demands tend to exceed what the creators themselves are comfortable with or capable of sustaining, and the challenges and limitations that prevent creators from setting, communicating, or maintaining boundaries around their labor, relationships, or personal and professional lives. I investigated these questions by participant observation and a series of interviews and explore answers in an ethnographic and autoethnographic framework. Audience members treat the emotional experience of creators as an open resource in two ways: 1) externalization, placing difficult emotional experiences in the creator’s hands with the expectation that the creator will do something about it, and so the audience member doesn’t have to; and 2) extraction, soliciting the public performance of an emotional reaction to material of the audience member’s choice. The dehumanizing experience of being treated as vending machines for intimacy is an ongoing psychological harm that, to some extent, all microcelebrities endure.