Weapons of the Chic: Instagram Influencer Engagement Pods as Practices of Resistance to Instagram Platform Labor

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of Instagram influencer "engagement pods" as an emergent form of resistance that responds to the reconfigured working conditions of platformized cultural production. Engagement pods are grassroots communities that agree to mutually like, comment on, share, or otherwise engage with each other's posts, no matter the content, to game Instagram's algorithm into prioritizing the participants' content and show it to a broader audience. I argue that engagement pods represent a response to the material conditions of platformized cultural production on Instagram, where proprietary curation algorithms wrest knowledge and control of the labor process from producers. Cooperative algorithm hacking of this sort, although quite distinct from traditional organizing strategies, responds to the coercive force of the "threat of invisibility" that necessitates constant data production. They represent a collective attempt to exert some control over their "conditions of presence-to-others" and, in so doing, combat precarity and protect wages in the field. In a post-industrial economy where traditional models of labor organizing have struggled to address the conditions of platformized cultural work, I argue that the unusual phenomenon of Instagram engagement pods represents an organic form of worker resistance that responds to the unique conditions of these workers.

Algorithmic precarity in cultural work

“…Fortunately, recent scholarship in the fields of media and communication offers rich insight into platform-specific communities of cultural workers as they navigate the algorithms of various platforms. Often drawing upon in-depth interviews or analyses of community discourses, these studies reveal how socially mediated cultural workers try to make sense of the inscrutable-by-design algorithms that govern YouTube (Bishop, 2020; Caplan & Gillespie, 2020; Cunningham & Craig, 2019; Mehta, 2019), Pinterest (Klawitter & Hargittai, 2018; Scolere, 2019), and Instagram (Cotter, 2019; Duffy & Sawey, in press; O’Meara, 2019; Petre et al, 2019), among others. A constant theme across this research is—rather aphoristically—algorithmic change .…”

“…In 2016, for instance, Instagram abruptly swapped its chronological feed for an algorithmically curated one—a move company reps billed as an effort to prioritize “the moments you care about.” In response, countless Instagrammers reported staggering declines in their likes, comments, and, consequently, incomes (Cotter, 2019; Duffy & Sawey, in press; Petre et al, 2019). Some responded with participation in digitally enabled collectives (O’Meara, 2019); others, meanwhile, described feelings of frustration, having little recourse when it comes to incessant platform change or—to use a Big Tech’s euphemism—“disruption.”…”

#dadtribe: Performing Sharenting Labour to Commercialise Involved Fatherhood

“…It helps drive my engagement up, helps my posts be successful with the algorithm (Carl).Our interviews show that the fathers were also clearly aware and generally supportive of each other, which is confirmed by their posting activities. This might indicate the existence of an engagement pod, which is a “grassroots tactical response […] by which influencers attempt to regain some control over their working conditions within the Instagram ecosystem […] to protect their own interests” (O’Meara 2019, p. 6). One of the functions of the pod is to help raise the visibility of content, but also to share information about the platform and how to manage brand collaborations:[With Instagram friends, we say thinks like,] “have you worked with this brand or that,” you know, helping each other out.…”

“…We find that as influencers, the Instadads perform the expected relational, connective, and emotional labour to maintain their audiences (Baym 2015a;Drenten, Gurrieri, and Tyler 2018;Mardon, Molesworth, and Grigore 2018;O'Meara 2019). As institutional entrepreneurs (Scaraboto and Fischer 2013), they perform cultural work in producing commercial imagery of fatherhood for the brands that they partner with.…”

‘YouTubers unite’: collective action by YouTube content creators

“…In the production of their content, YouTubers usually employ their personality as a central resource, making content creation a highly subjectivised form of labour. Work on YouTube might be described as a form of cultural platform labour, similar to income-based activities on Instagram , Twitch or TikTok (Johnson and Woodcock, 2019; O’Meara, 2019; Stokel-Walker, 2019b). Within the platform economy, there is a basic distinction between local, on-site work activities ( Uber , Deliveroo , Helpling ) and remote, web-based activities ( Mechanical Turk , Upwork ).…”