Navigating Creator Governance: A Human-Centered Design Approach to Multi-Platform Creators’ Practices

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Ma, Renkai
- Graduate Program:
- Informatics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 26, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Dongwon Lee, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Xinning Gui, Major Field Member
Priya Kumar, Major Field Member
Yubo Kou, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Anne Hoag, Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- creator governance
content creation
content moderation
content creator - Abstract:
- Social media platforms have fostered a “creator economy,” where content creators develop their self-employment and careers through online content creation. However, the creator governance structures imposed by these platforms present challenges. Creator governance encompasses both the top-down power of platforms and the bottom-up influence of creators, involving formal rules, and collective decision-making and practices. My dissertation addresses the gap in understanding how creators navigate these governance designs and how these designs can support content creation practices. Through three chapters of empirical studies, my dissertation provides human-centered insights into creators’ lived experiences with creator governance. First, creators manage their creative practices, career growth, and success through platform prioritization, content synchronization, and cross-platform audience engagement across multiple platforms, highlighting a creator ecology they configured. Second, I explored the justice implications of creator moderation that creator governance embodies, emphasizing the need for multiple justice principles such as retributive, procedural, and restorative justice and outcome fairness to be designed in creator governance. Third, I further examined the children’s online safety expectations embedded within creator governance, emphasizing the importance of safety education, transparent communication, and stakeholder-driven design to ensure safe content creation for children’s content consumption while supporting content creation practices. Through this dissertation, I aim to contribute to the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), creator economy, platform governance, and children’s online safety through a comprehensive understanding of creators’ lived experience with creator governance. I am to provide a human-centered view for future studies that promote trustworthy and safe online platforms and further inspire collaborative efforts to ensure that this aim benefits more stakeholders in an environment where online creativity and governance coexist harmoniously.