Automating authenticity: Influencer marketing platforms and the socio-technical stratification of creative gig labour markets

In this paper, I examine algorithmic intermediaries known as influencer marketing platforms (IMPs), which attempt to automate influencer marketing. Contributing to scholarship on inequality in the gig economy, I examine how these platforms’ socio-technical infrastructures construct and coordinate markets for creative gig labour and their consequences for workers. Drawing on ethnographic walkthroughs, platform documentation, interviews and walkthroughs with influencers, I argue that IMPs construct highly stratified creative gig labour markets through three key processes embedded in their socio-technical infrastructure: gatekeeping, matching and pricing. These socio-technical processes facilitate and automate judgment about the economic and social worth of work and workers, placing workers in positions with differentiated opportunities in gig labour markets.