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Despite opaque automated systems and few formal channels for participation, YouTubers navigate algorithmic governance on the platform through a strategy we call user-generated accountability: the generation of publicity via content creation to reveal failures, oversights, or harmful policies. Through an analysis of 250 videos, we identify common strategies, concerns, and targets of accountability. Creators primarily upload vlogs that acknowledge the platform's positive aspects, even as they express concern with YouTube's policies, automated enforcement systems, poor communication practices, and discrimination against certain creators or content. In publicizing critiques of platform operations, videos enroll creators and audiences as active stakeholders in platform governance that can coordinate actions to draw the company's attention to matters of concern. We argue that user-generated accountability practices offer a productive starting point for understanding how platform governance disputes come to be and how systems might be shaped or rebuilt to better serve the needs of competing stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2018, transgender YouTuber Natalie Wynn (aka ContraPoints) released "The Aesthetic," a video in which she explored the social pressure placed on trans women in the public eye to pass. Taking this video as a starting point, I analyze trans beauty influencer Gigi Gorgeous's early transition vlogs in which she details her experiences with cosmetic surgery. The narrative Gorgeous constructs in these vlogs, I contend, employs transnormative discourses that center an internal struggle with gender dysphoria. However, I complicate this narrative by placing Gorgeous's vlogs in conversation with Wynn's vlog where she recounts her own experience with facial feminization surgery, pointing to the external pressures she faces to conform to beauty norms. I contextualize these narratives within the literatures on aesthetic labor and social media influencers to explore how Gorgeous and Wynn's desires to pass and to be beautiful are informed by their status as highly visible trans women working in the cultural industries. By theorizing passing as labor, I argue that beautification practices such as cosmetic surgery are investments that trans women in the public eye make in the hopes of attaining social and economic capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video bloggers, also known as vloggers, continuously create and share authentic videos on popular platforms like YouTube. Travel influencer vloggers (called vloggers in this study) influence their audience by sharing their trip experiences and giving reviews about destinations and travel brands. This study employs aconstructivist grounded theory approach of 35 YouTube vlogs from 21 vloggers through a3-phase theoretical sampling. The theorizing process resulted in the development of Vloggers' Approaches and Practices (VAP) Theory by identifying the main approaches as content (CA) and objectives (OA), the two main practices of travel influencing (TIP) and vlogging (VP), and their relationships. The theoretical and managerial contributions can be important for scholars of influencer marketing, and practitioners that work with vloggers like destination marketing organizations (DMOs), hotels, tour operators, and transportation services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International social exchanges have always been important to China's cultural soft power and image construction overseas. This study focuses on an internationally renowned mega influencer Li Ziqi and her vlogs on YouTube. These orchestrated vlogs tell stories of rural Chinese life and construct a desirable traditional Chinese rural culture for netizens at home and abroad. Informed by framing and cultivation theory, this study examines how user-generated content on national images can affect social media users' perceptions of reality. Content analysis is used to analyze the visual portrayals of Chinese rural culture, including its customs and values, aesthetics, and cultural and scenic places in Li's vlogs. Discourse analysis is further used to examine user comments and demonstrate her vlog content's impact on user perceptions of Chinese rural culture. This study sheds light on how a complex and hybrid national image with 'Chineseness,' and a personal image with self-Orientalized and performed 'soft but independent' Chinese rural female image, is constructed by a social media influencer Li Ziqi with affective associations. At a conceptual and practical level, the findings of this study contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussions on how China engages with the globalized world through cultural diplomacy from the bottom-up, while existing research primarily takes a top-down approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

YouTube is currently becoming one of the main international platforms for amateur creators attempting to attract followers through a multiplicity of audiovisual content and engagement strategies based on search and algorithmic recommendation systems. In many cases, this environment, and especially its users, try to adapt to a celebrity network pattern on the basis of the construction of seemingly authentic and close relationships, leading to relevant phenomena such as parenting vlogs. This kind of content is focused on the presence of intimate moments that reflect the daily life of influencers or micro-influencers, capturing large numbers of followers, as well as important communication and information strategies. From this perspective, and through a quantitative content analysis of 1,034 videos and more than 900 viewing hours on two very popular YouTube family influencer channels, this study explores the degree of intimacy portrayed in their video content as performative strategies that configure the profiles’ post through interactions with followers, brands, and self-promotion. The results suggest that the degree of intimacy shown in this content becomes a performative process for these family youtubers, whereby the more intimate the exposure, the more popular the information offered to the user. In short, this type of content prioritizes the routines of the youtubers, who include their closest family members and friends as a means of attracting attention, while dedicating their time to interacting with brands (advertising) and recording, editing, and submitting a vast amount of personal and private information on the platform (dissemination) in a sort of promotional–private performativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]