#Answerusyoutube: predatory influencers and cross-platform insulation

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the summer of 2020, dozens of high-profile influencers in videogaming entertainment were accused of sexual harassment and predatory behavior. Among them, popular gaming YouTuber Craig Thompson (username Mini Ladd) confessed on Twitter to sexting minors but resumed uploading content to his YouTube channel one month later, resulting in public outcry. Thompson’s return to YouTube, as a case study, illustrates how predatory influencers can manipulate technical affordances across social media platforms to insulate themselves from accountability and maintain their revenue and audience. Drawing on data scraped from Twitter (34k tweets) and YouTube (62k comments and video network data), this article uses a mixed-methods social network analysis (Jean Burgess and Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, 2016) to map the public effort to deplatform Mini Ladd. This case study explores issues of cross-platform insulation and audience manipulation by demonstrating how a predatory influencer: 1) censored keywords in his comments to obfuscate criticism; 2) optimized YouTube’s video algorithms to avoid references to his scandal; and 3) upheld harassment towards his young fanbase. Ultimately, I argue that YouTube’s policies are ill-equipped to manage the networked practices of predatory influencers and that the platform’s reliance on morally motivated networked harassment (Alice E. Marwick, 2021) as a substitute is troubling and ineffective.