The Curated Life-World: Algorithmic Coercion and Manipulation in Virtual Content Creation

The rapid growth of virtual technologies and communication platforms in the last two decades has led to the growth of an arena of interaction with an unprecedented global reach, as social media and virtual presence increasingly become an everyday reality and much of individuals’ discussions and social interactions move online. While it is lauded for bringing larger visibility to socially suppressed voices and making expression more accessible, its content-monitoring algorithms are an active determinant in the process of what discourse finds visibility and engagement and, at the end of the day, shape people’s narratives and worldviews. Moreover, the capital and technology intensive nature of social-media platform development has ensured that the origins of these developments have occurred in highly fragmented and concentrated silos led by wealthy nations and have been highly monopolized by corporate behemoths. While usually perceived as "apolitical" or "neutral," these algorithms are often biased toward the social context of knowledge in the societies and companies in which they were developed, as these biases are determined by the training data used and replicated in their results. This article, using Deleuze’s society of control as a foundation, studies the effect of monopolized digital platforms in the context of digital creation and how they lead to censorship and manipulation of creators. The article, through a qualitative, thematic analysis of creators engaged in short-form media content and their decisions, discusses the adverse effects of invisible and opaque algorithms on their self-expression, their engagement with their audience, and their experiences with content production.