Social Media as a Creative Industry: Labour, Workplaces, Markets

Social media platforms have provided new employment opportunities for creative content producers all over the world. They connect content-hungry users with savvy producers to provide highly engaged experiences for these stakeholder groups. But the process of creating content is relentless: producers have to produce regularly, align with algorithmic determined interest areas, have no set start and finish times, have no union representation and are required to align with the terms and services of these platforms to continue to operate. This chapter highlights the practices and surrounding industries of social media content producers by exploring the precarious labour models, the role of agencies and the new content production models that are created by online content producers.