From influencers to market accounts: Dehumanisation and rehumanisation in algorithmic creativity

This article examines marketing accounts (营销号)—a form of depersonalised, high-volume content production that has become structurally central to China’s short-video economy yet remains undertheorised in existing scholarship. Operating through algorithmic optimisation, multi-channel network (MCN)-mediated workflows, and metric-driven circulation, marketing accounts represent a production logic in which content is systematically decoupled from individual identity: no stable persona, no accumulated social capital, no affective relationship between operator and audience. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with individual operators, MCN strategists, and outsourced editors on Douyin and related platforms, this article develops an analytical framework centred on two interrelated operations: dehumanisation—the systematic withdrawal of human presence from content production across registers of identity, agency, and cultural judgement—and rehumanisation—the strategic reinsertion of minimal human markers at points where their absence undermines circulation, governance compliance, or audience engagement. Together, these operations constitute the logic through which platform capitalism simultaneously extracts value and maintains cultural credibility: dehumanisation ensures scalability and efficiency; rehumanisation provides the affective credibility and cultural fit that automated production alone cannot sustain. The article argues that marketing accounts illuminate a broader transformation in cultural production under algorithmic governance—one in which the organising question is no longer who speaks, but how much humanity is necessary to keep content circulating. China’s compressed platformisation and MCN-mediated production ecology make this logic unusually visible—but the conditions it reveals are structurally available wherever algorithmic distribution and automated content production converge. In doing so, it calls for a reorientation of platform labour scholarship beyond the human creator as its primary unit of analysis, and highlights the role of tacit cultural knowledge—irreducible to algorithmic replication—as the constitutive limit of automated content production.