Women were excluded from financial independence historically, causing a significant gender gap in financial literacy. Financial decision-making was based on households where women were deprived of contribution, as they were not allowed to act as the main account holder and were seen as dependents in the formal financial system. However, informal communities were formed, sharing intimate knowledge in alternative ways of personal finance. In the online Web 2.0 environments, social media platforms, namely Instagram, could serve as new forms of learning environments for financial literacy through informal peer-to-peer learning and therefore become a virtual extension of existing 'saving communities' in real life. The paper highlights the existence of a small but thriving personal finance community on Instagram and provides evidence of the volume of content related to personal finance, debt, and saving money on the platform.

The emergence of female financial influencers created a sense of virtual togetherness where women felt safe to seek peer support and share personal stories. This paper proposes four-phase research using netnographic immersion journals (Kozinets, 2022), an online survey, and semi-structured interviews and will present the early findings from data collection beginning in March 2023. It proposes a networked perspective addressing technical, social, and cultural components (Selbst et al., 2019) in relation to the formation, expansion, and evolution of female financial influencing on Instagram. This study responds to the wider conference themes of revolutions by examining social barriers to seeking financial support at the intersection of feminist studies, the digital divide, and financial literacy.

To “unlock the potential” of influencer marketing, industry literature suggests that companies need to find the “right” influencer at the “right” price. Without these good matches, they say, influencer marketing loses its authenticity and its effectiveness. In this paper, I examine a growing group of algorithmic intermediaries known as Influencer Marketing Platforms (IMPs) which position themselves as a technological solution to this need. How do these platforms’ technical infrastructures construct markets for influencer labour, and what are their consequences for the life chances of workers? I argue that the sociotechnical infrastructures of gig economy platforms bound, segment, stratify and moralize gig labour markets. To capture how sociotechnical infrastructures shape the life-chances of workers in the gig economy, I propose the concept of “judgment infrastructures”: a constellation of sociotechnical devices which platform organizations employ to facilitate and automate judgment about the monetary and social worth of work and workers in the gig economy. Drawing on ethnographic walkthroughs, platform documentation, interviews and walkthroughs with influencers who use IMPs, I demonstrate how IMPs construct and stratify the market for influence through (1) gatekeeping and differentiated inclusion, (2) matching and differentiated visibilities, and (3) valuation and differential pricing. With this framework, I hope to provide useful tools for understanding how sociotechnical infrastructures produce and automate economic inequalities in digital labour markets.

Numerous studies have shown digital platforms commodify social reproduction labor. How social media platforms and the influencers’ activities intersect with the field of social reproduction has received scant academic attention. This study explores platform capitalism's expansion to the domestic sphere in the semi-peripheral socio-economic context. Fifty semi-structured interviews with influencers, their business partners, and other stakeholders in Slovenia were conducted. Results show that social media influencing intersects with the social reproduction sphere in two different ways, depending on whether the household is time- or money-poor. Time-poor households employ influencing to find an optimal temporal equilibrium between influencer activities and household responsibilities. Money-poor households employ influencing as a side hustle besides regular employment to have one household expense less. These two groups converge as they all create content "on the go" while completing social reproduction tasks. Influencing is peering into the cracks between work and leisure, creating a novel dimension of time: monetized leisure. Under the traditional 8-8-8 rule (work, leisure, sleep), only 8 hours were paid. With influencing activities on social media, leisure gets monetized, resulting in more hours of work and passive income. Our study shows that influencing activities on social media in Slovenia are less about getting paid to do what you love, as demonstrated by Duffy (2017) and more about getting paid to care for those you love. The study contributes to the varieties of platform capitalism and to the de-westernization of platform and creator studies.

This study examines how MCNs (Multi-Channel Networks) intervene in the platform economy by manufacturing influencers. Previous studies have explored the emergence of influencers and creators from various perspectives, including platformization, creative labor, and algorithmic power. However, little attention has been paid to another crucial player – MCNs which incubate and train influencers on an industrial scale. MCNs are firms and organizations that collaborate with influencers to facilitate the production, promotion, and monetization of creative content. They serve not only as incubators for micro-entrepreneurs and influencers looking to establish their businesses, but also as a key intermediary between influencers and other stakeholders on platforms. This study combines in-depth interviews with documented lawsuits to explore the role of MCNs in the platform economy, as well as their relationships with influencers. The findings suggest that MCNs significantly shape the platform economy through three strategies: manufacturing influencers, spreading industry lore, and exploiting creativity. On one hand, MCNs help established influencers maintain their success and reduce the risk of creativity while exploiting the labor of aspirants who struggle to enter the platform economy. As such, they constitute a power imbalance by providing business for successful influencers and increasing precarity for ordinary influencers. On the other hand, MCNs continue to expand their business scopes to meet the needs of various stakeholders, mainly platforms, advertisers, and brands. Consequently, MCNs have the ability to facilitate the relationship between these actors, industrialize aspiring influencers, and determine who can participate in creative labor.

Building on previous analysis of the “gangsta” identity on social media, this paper investigates the criminal persona as a visibility strategy in influencer culture, observing how the deviant online celebrity is framed and leveraged by different media in the current cross-platform ecology. To this end, we look at the cases of two Italian influencers with criminal backgrounds whose fame exploded during the lockdown: Algero Corretini, aka “1727WrldStar” and Massimiliano Minnocci, aka “Er Brasile”. These personalities are examples of what we identify as “bandito influencers”, where the Italian word “bandito” has the double meaning of “street thug” and “banned” from a specific site or group. Combining literature from criminology, celebrity studies, and internet studies, this chapter aims to fill a range of gaps: on the one hand, from a cultural criminology perspective, the online dynamics of celebrification and the link between crime and influencer culture have been scarcely investigated; on the other, celebrity studies and media studies addressed the theme of criminal deviance labelling primarily in relation to legacy media. With our account, we also wish to contribute a more localised perspective on the Italian context, which appears to be understudied from some of these perspectives.