Of Legal Forms and Influencers: A Marxian Legal Critique of Social Media Terms-of-Service Agreements

This project explores terms-of-service (TOS) agreements between social media platforms and content creators to better understand the relationship between law and social domination in a platformised economy. I focus on YouTube’s TOS and related monetization programs. While Marxian scholars have theorized exploitation and alienation in content creators’ work, they generally have not situated these relationships within a Marxian legal framework. However, to Marx, the juridical relationship, particularly the legal postulation of a distinction between the subject and object of labour, was constitutive to capitalist exploitation and its impersonal, abstract form of domination. From this premise, I first illustrate the disjuncture between the legal construction of the platform-creator relationship and how commodity production is organised. The legal relationship represented by YouTube’s TOS is a copyright license for the use of discrete video content submitted by creators. However, the labour process is one of continuing work to produce both the use-value of the video content to advertisers and its use-value to platform consumers/users. I also suggest that this disjuncture is integral to naturalising exploitation and alienation in platform work. The experience of the platform’s users is one where production and consumption appear as a creative social interaction, and thus where concrete labour reveals itself through a diaphanous commodity. However, the TOS and its incorporated rules regarding ‘authenticity’ in user interactions with the platform also discipline the work of content producers as socially necessary, abstract labour. The TOS works to sublimate the duality of abstract and concrete labour so that the work relationship appears mediated only by the manifest social relations between content producers and their audiences rather than by structured practices of exploitation and alienation.