Managing visibility on YouTube through algorithmic gossip

“So far, YouTube beauty communities have been examined as they curate microcelebrity (Senft, 2008) and perform entrepreneurship (Duffy, 2017), and intimately connect with their followers (García-Rapp, 2017).”

“Creators were preoccupied with expectations about how the algorithm would handle their content, perceiving manipulation on its reach without noti fi cation, an assumption supported by their experiments with content and belief in ‘ algorithmic gossip ’ (Bishop, 2019).”

“Burrell et al. [10] note that algorithm control strategies are often collectively developed and acted, leading to considerable social utility.”

“Mitigating this bias in an informed manner would involve extensive work since YouTube’s API ranking measures are both opaque by design and subject to change (see Bishop 2019).”

“…takes place in a complex ecosystem of policies, algorithmic recommender and demotion systems, automated detection tools and human enforcement (Bishop, 2019; Diaz and Hecht-Felella, 2021; Goanta and Ortolani, 2021), I frame fl agging and de-platforming as moderation assemblages , or ‘ the…”

“While algorithms tend to be more flexible on content creative platforms, there are commonalities with those on ‘regular’ gig work platforms (Bishop, 2019; Velkova and Kaun, 2021).”

“Potential control moves were discussed on the online forum, in a process what Bishop (2019) refers to as algorithmic gossip .”

“In response to these emerging issues, HCI research is investigating how workers reconfigure their identities [23] and, in the process, making the underlying bottom-up efforts more explicit (e.g., algorithmic gossip used by creative workers on YouTube [12]).”

“To gain more visibility, the vloggers on YouTube often produce advertising-friendly content, such as makeup tutorials, to interweave into their daily vlogs (Bishop, 2019).”

“…stereotypes; Black creators share community knowledge (Arthur, 2021; Duthely, 2022; Sobande et al., 2020) or gossip about algorithmic visibility (Bishop, 2019; Peterson-Salahuddin, 2024); Jewish creators foster counter-publics against antisemitism (Divon & Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2022); and…”

“Our everyday cultural practices on these platforms are responsive to and shaped by these algorithms (Striphas 2015, Bucher 2017, Gerrard 2018, van der Nagel 2018), which are also sometimes gamed, critiqued and subverted by users with vernacular expertise (Bucher 2018, Bishop 2019).”

“…zu optimieren, indem sie algorithmische Funktionsweisen über Alltagstheorien – „folk theories“ bei Eslami et al. (2016) oder „algorithmic gossip“ bei Bishop (2019) – antizipieren oder indem sie beispielsweise ihre Inhalte in Zeitfenstern teilen, in denen möglichst viele ihrer Follower online…”

“, as involving algorithmic gossip (Bishop, 2019) circulating in the community of producers.”

“…to communicate with their audiences and conduct promotional activities; (2) a critical discourse analysis (Wodak and Meyer, 2016) of in fl uencers ’ gossip (Bishop, 2019; Cotter, 2019) on Instagram, based on materials on top-ranking in fl uencers ’ Instagram accounts, personal websites, and…”

“…of BIPOC experts in the web-based search is that social media platforms may float content by White contributors to the top of web searches, related potentially to internally biased algorithms 86,87 and the discrimination and reduced attention that BIPOC individuals’ content may receive.”

“For example, creative entrepreneurs and in fl uencers develop strategies for working with algorithms to sustain their fi nancial interests on arts-and-crafts e-commerce sites and social media, respectively (Bishop, 2019; Cotter, 2019; Klawitter and Hargittai, 2018).”

“Among others (see, for example, Andreou et al., 2018, 2019), one such effort is our own Australian Ad Observatory project, which draws on a browser-based data donation approach to investigate how Facebook ads are targeted to Australian users (Burgess et al., 2022; Angus et al., 2024).”

“Algorithms, or automated content processing and sorting systems (Bishop, 2019), are increasingly being deployed to manage information and content at scale and make important decisions across different fields, from healthcare to human resources, from insurance to the criminal justice system…”

“Influencers in the global South must negotiate with these limitations – the informational architecture and affordances of social media that are inherently trained to favor practices, identities, and cultures in the global North (Bishop, 2019; Bucher, 2012).”

“Furthermore, social media scholars are increasingly examining content creation in digital platforms run by diverse social groups (Bärtl, 2018; Bishop, 2019; Matias, 2019).”

“This sense-making process often plays out socially, which researchers have called attention to with terms like ‘folk theories’ (e.g. Eslami et al., 2016; Siles et al., 2020) and ‘algorithmic gossip’ (Bishop, 2019).”

“This unpredictability seems to be tied to a suspicion that the system is generally non-transparent (Bishop, 2019a, 2020; Ma and Kou, 2021) and has potentially become erratic even to software developers who once have invented the code, as a beauty CC argues: “That’s why the algorithm is a constant…”

“…and discipline aspiring influencers into commercially viable genres through professionalization, thereby limiting cultural production to the dictates of brands, and influencers themselves to the “promise” and “precarity” of platform visibility (Bishop, 2019, 2021; Duffy et al., 2021; Lobato, 2016).”

“, 2020), not knowing fully what underlies these recommendation systems (Bishop, 2019), and users’ own admissions of not having sufficient technical knowledge (Dogruel, 2021).”

“…peer-to-peer communications underpinning workers’ own strategies for understanding and negotiating algorithmic systems and their constituent parts, Workers in gig or alternative arrangements must constantly contend with opaque algorithmic systems (Bishop, 2019; Burrell, 2016; Cameron et al., 2021).”

“The “algorithmic gossip” (Bishop, 2019) performers share is thus marked by inherent information asymmetries (Rosenblat & Stark, 2016).”

“Drawing on imaginaries of algorithmic gossip (Bishop, 2019), these practices of self-amplification seek to amplify the visibility of one’s content within Instagram by using the popular feature of Stories.”

“To reconcile platform moderation’s clandestineness with aspirations for visibility, many creators turn to algorithmic gossip , communally shared and socially generated information about algorithms and visibility (Bishop, 2019, p. 2590).”

“We built on similar studies on digital content creators practices to prepare our interview protocol (Bishop, 2019; Duffy, 2017; Hund and McGuigan, 2019).”

“…on the work of in fl uencers explores how they gain agency under algorithmic systems and emphasises practises centred on platforms (Cotter, 2019; Duffy and Meisner, 2023), platform-mediated relationships within in fl uencer communities (Bishop, 2019; O ’ Meara, 2019) and audiences (Glatt, 2023).”

“, 2020), diversify the sources of their information and increase their income, which are dependent on acquiring online attention (Klawitter and Hargittai, 2018; Bishop, 2019).”

“more visibility on social media feeds [2, 3, 7].”

“This system is examined via concepts such as the algorithmic self (Pasquale 2015) and algorithmic gossip (Bishop 2019), which influence how creators engage with their imagined audiences (Bhandari and Bimo 2022).”

“We found that, in line with previous work surrounding precarious yet onerous creator work (Are and Briggs 2023; Bishop 2019; Duffy 2020; Glatt 2022), creators saw GenAI more as an opportunity to lighten their workload than as a creative aid.”

“This was often evident from explicit discussions among users about devising strategies (Bishop 2019) to make content more prominent on platforms such as Twitter (now X) or Instagram, e.g., by retweeting or liking threads or leaving multiple comments under important posts in order to ’boost’ them.”

“…focuses on creators’ interactions with platform policies and procedures like content moderation and demonetization (Caplan and Gillespie, 2020), and the ways “algorithmic gossip” is used as a collaborative tool by creators to mitigate risk on algo-rithmically organized platforms (Bishop, 2019).”

“Content creators also share and discuss their experiences with algorithms, namely “algorithmic gossip,” to collectively refne their strategies in promoting content consumption [4].”

“…literacies and listening closely to the stories of knowledge sharing and parental talk that comes through in parents’ conversations (see Dogruel, 2021 on folk theories of algorithmic operations; Bishop, 2019 on algorithmic gossip , and; DeVito, 2017 on exogenous sources of algorithmic knowledge).”

“This included monitoring the algorithmic gossip, which is ‘ communally and socially informed theories and strategies ’ related to algorithms that are shared and implemented to increase visibility within a social media platform (Bishop, 2019: 2589), around content moderation of sexual content.”

“Such research can illuminate ‘communally and socially informed knowledge about algorithms and algorithmic visibility’ (Bishop, 2019, p. 2590) when it is otherwise difficult to get platforms to explain why content performs a certain way.”

“However, users are not passive recipients of these structures; they actively navigate, manipulate, and resist them in creative ways (Bishop, 2019; O ’ Meara, 2019).”

“…by their experiences of living out non-normative sexual and gender identities while being collectively informed, as re fl ected in the notions of platform imaginary (van Es and Poell, 2020) and algorithmic gossip (Bishop, 2019), by other users and popular understandings of platform governance.”

“Moreover, a growing body of research examines the social relations that characterize creators’ work (e.g. Bishop, 2019, 2025; Bleier et al., 2024; Duffy et al., 2021, 2024; Duffy and Wissinger, 2017; Edeling and Wies, 2024; Postigo, 2016).”

“While they engage in algorithmic visibility practices (Abidin, 2021; Bishop, 2019; Bucher, 2018), the platform supports this vernacular creativity (Burgess, 2006) to further strengthen the community building practices.”

“Instead, they continued to rely on algorithmic gossip (Bishop, 2019) and folk theories (DeVito et al., 2017; Myers West, 2018) while developing their own theories (Caplan & Gillespie, 2020), learning “by their mistakes,” and having their content removed by algorithmic moderation.”

“However, fewer studies have examined YouTube (Alvarado, Heuer, et al., 2020; Bishop, 2019).”

“Although previous research examines the labor logics of microcelebrity, the influencer economy (Bishop, 2019; Marwick & Boyd, 2010; Mavroudis, 2018), and how racism plays a role in the hierarchy of influencers (Duffy, 2017; Duffy & Meisner, 2023; Stevens, 2021), less attention is given to the ways…”

“Research has explored how users develop these theories through their direct interactions with algorithms [7, 18], algorithmic gossip [3, 43, 56], and social interactions within their communities [32].”

“Capturing these thoughts is important as prior work [4, 18] has shown that the visibility of an individual’s user-generated content can impact what they create or share on a particular platform.”

“Moreover, machine learning algorithms employed by social media platforms to determine what content is made visible and to whom, while kept mostly secret, are in part based on a user’s previous posts and prior engagement with other content (Bishop, 2019).”

“The purpose of this endeavor is to highlight the importance of understanding algorithms at the social level (Seaver, 2017), with particular attention to users ’ algorithmic awareness and practices (e.g., Bishop, 2019; Bucher, 2017; Eslami et al., 2015; Rader & Gray, 2015).”

“Por ello, los creadores deben crear estrategias que resuelvan el misterio y la opacidad que rodea la búsqueda de visibilidad (Bishop, 2019; Caplan & Gillespie, 2020); dicho proceso de búsqueda es un factor clave que explica la inestabilidad y precariedad que experimentan los creadores de contenido.”

“…publicar contenido impuestos por la propia plataforma, sumados a las injerencias externas provenientes del poder político2 (Romero-Moreno, 2019, 2020), alimentan un creciente contexto de censura algorítmica (Bishop, 2019; Gran et al., 2020; Teba Fernández, 2021) que discute dicha utopía digital.”

“…non-instrumental approach to cultural production’ (Petre et al., 2019: 8) and our study has shown how YouTube content creators resort to behaving ‘inauthentically’ on Twitter to potentially be seen in highly competitive social media spaces (Bishop, 2019; Knuutila et al., 2020; Rieder et al., 2020).”

“This leads to influencers being caught in a ‘visibility game’ (Cotter, 2019), trying to negotiate how to make their content visible to appease social media algorithms through engaging in algorithmic gossip (Bishop, 2019), and creates increased precarity for content creators (Glatt, 2021, 2022).”

“Bishop ’ s (2019) ethnography of beauty bloggers and industry stakeholders gives us the notion of algorithmic gossip which highlights the relationality inherent to data re fl exivity.”

“…cultural producers who are minoritized in terms of class, gender, race, sexuality, disability, etc. have long faced dilemmas around visibility and invisibility in relation to platforms (Bishop, 2019; Duffy and Hund, 2019; Duguay, 2019; Glatt and Banet-Weiser, 2021; Petre, Duffy and Hund, 2019).”

“The scholarship on algorithmic practices in creator cultures focuses on the process of algorithmic knowledge production and how it informs platform practices (e.g. Bishop, 2019, 2020), and the tactics to play the algorithmic games (e.g. Cotter, 2019; O’Meara, 2019).”

“Utilising practical knowledge of algorithms (Cotter, 2024) gained through research, experimentation (Magalhães, 2018) and interaction with others (Bishop, 2019), users act tactically (De Certeau, 1984) in ways that contradict and subvert power enacted over them.”

“Por otra parte, Bishop (2019), estudiando vloggers de belleza, encuentra una jerarquía de visibilización asociada a la clase, la raza y los estereotipos de género.”

“…by followers, algorithmic feeds and recommendation systems, or by platform policies and how they moderate what is shared on their sites (Are, 2022; Bishop, 2019; Cotter et al., 2022; Caplan & Gillespie, 2020; Petit, 2022); authenticity and what is an “authentic” personality in performing the self…”

“However, this is purely voluntary, and the development of algorithmic gossip [11] leads to concerns among influencers that using such categories can attract shadowbanning, making it a less than attractive choice.”

“…to posit that algorithmic knowledge can be obtained outside the platform through education, the media, or talking to other people but that it is more commonly obtained through experience within the platform (Bishop, 2019; Cotter and Reisdorf, 2020; De Vito et al., 2018; Lomborg and Kapsch, 2020).”

“…and trans-parency about their governance processes, focusing on the personal experience of users or, even, of the researcher as a user recognises the content moderation and algorithmic expertise of those affected by it (Bishop, 2019), something too often belittled by platforms (Cotter, 2023).”

“For example, Instagramers mutually like and recommend each other’s posts in groups to increase popularity (Victoria O’Meara 2019), and share in-group algorithmic gossip to guess the recommendation system (Bishop 2019).”