Content creation allows many online social media users to support themselves financially through creativity. The “creator economy” empowers individuals to create content (i.e. lifestyle, fitness, beauty) about their interests, hobbies and daily life. Social media platforms in turn moderate content (e.g., banning accounts, flagging and reporting videos) to create safer online communities. However, Black women, femme, and non-binary people content creators have seen their content disproportionately suppressed, thus limiting their success on the platform. In this paper, we investigate Black femme content creators’ (BFCC) theories about how their identities impact both how they create content and how that content is subsequently moderated. In our findings, we share the perceptions participants felt the algorithm constrains Black creators to. We build upon Critical Technocultural Discourse studies and algorithmic folk theories attributed to Black women and non-binary content creators to explore how Black joy can be prioritized online to resist algorithmic monoliths.
Citation
Gianna Williams, Natalie Chen, Michael Ann DeVito, and Alexandra To. 2025. Why Can’t Black Women Just Be?: Black Femme Content Creators Navigating Algorithmic Monoliths. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 108, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713842