#Answerusyoutube: predatory influencers and cross-platform insulation

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 (Burgess & 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 (Marwick, 2021) as a substitute is troubling and ineffective.

KEYWORDS:

• Harassment
• platform retreat
• Mini Ladd
• predatory influencers
• YouTube

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the following people for their help making this project possible—for their support, editing assistance, guidance, and care: Dr. Anastasia Salter, Rachel Berryman, Adrianna Burton, Daniel Heslep, and LM Davenport. So much gratitude to each of you. The author would also like to thank the Feminist Media Studies editorial team and the anonymous reviewers who provided key insights into improving this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, PB, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. The term “grooming” is often associated with legal discourse regarding sexual meetups and explicit messaging and should be qualified. In this study, I use “grooming” to refer to the practice of cultivating any kind of inappropriate sexual relationship (including digitally) with minors and underage fans.

2. Wording changed to reduce searchability of user’s personal account.

3. The name of a prominent drama YouTuber who publicly targeted Thompson.

4. There was a single reply to a comment in the YouTube sample that contained the word minors posted within seconds of video publication.