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Navigating Double Oppression Online: How Alternative Content Creators Maintain Their Ideological Integrity under Algorithmic Bias and Turkish Authoritarianism

Suren, Nora
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Abstract
This dissertation, Navigating Double Oppression Online: How Alternative Content Creators Maintain Their Ideological Integrity under Algorithmic Bias and Turkish Authoritarianism, examines how marginalized digital creators in Turkey, particularly women and LGBTQ+ influencers, sustain their visibility and political voice under conditions of repression. It develops the concept of political precarity to capture the overlapping vulnerabilities creators face at the intersection of authoritarian state power and opaque platform governance. Drawing on 33 in-depth interviews and two years of digital ethnography, I analyze the everyday strategies of what I call alternative content creators—social media users who blend cultural commentary with feminist, queer, and anti-authoritarian politics. These creators operate in an environment where dissent is criminalized, visibility is algorithmically suppressed, and harassment is routine. Their labor is both cultural and political: they navigate algorithmic bias, state surveillance, and digital violence while attempting to sustain livelihoods and communities online. The empirical chapters trace three interrelated dynamics. First, creators adopt strategic visibility, calibrating their expression across low-, medium-, and high-risk practices that balance authenticity, safety, and political critique. Second, I show how networked harassment and misogyny function as state-enabled mechanisms of gendered oppression, disproportionately targeting feminist and queer voices. Third, I analyze how crises, such as the 2023 earthquake and elections, intensify both creators’ political engagement and their vulnerability, transforming them into key communicators of solidarity and accountability while exposing them to censorship, algorithmic erasure, and economic precarity. This dissertation contributes to feminist media studies, platform studies, and digital activism research in three ways. Conceptually, it advances the notion of political precarity to account for the compounded risks of creative labor under authoritarianism. Empirically, it situates Turkish creators within global debates on digital resistance, showing how strategies such as algorithmic camouflage, coded speech, and platform migration emerge as tactics of survival. Methodologically, it models an intersectional feminist ethnography attentive to ethics, positionality, and affective labor in politically sensitive digital fields. By centering the lived experiences of alternative creators, I argue that social media is not merely a space of distraction or empowerment, but a contested terrain where marginalized voices negotiate visibility, risk, and integrity under duress. Their practices illuminate the fragility and possibility of digital resistance in the 21st century and expand our understanding of how cultural workers sustain critique and community within increasingly surveilled and authoritarian contexts.
Type
Dissertation (Open Access)
Date
2025-09
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2026-09-01
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