"Dialing it Back:" Shadowbanning, Invisible Digital Labor, and how Marginalized Content Creators Attempt to Mitigate the Impacts of Opaque Platform Governance

Content creators with marginalized identities are disproportionately affected by shadowbanning on social media platforms, which impacts their economic prospects online. Through a diary study and interviews with eight marginalized content creators who are women, pole dancers, plus size, and/or LGBTQIA+, this paper examines how content creators with marginalized identities experience shadowbanning. We highlight the labor and economic inequalities of shadowbanning, and the resulting invisible online labor that marginalized creators often must perform. We identify three types of invisible labor that marginalized content creators engage in to mitigate shadowbanning and sustain their online presence: mental and emotional labor, misdirected labor, and community labor. We conclude that even though marginalized content creators engaged in cross-platform collaborative labor and personal mental/emotional labor to mitigate the impacts of shadowbanning, it was insufficient to prevent uncertainty and economic precarity created by algorithmic opacity and ambiguity.