UNSEEN x Rankin

I was contacted by the fabulous team at Rankin about a project that was initially for Hunger Magazine, it was entitled Unseen and covered the topic of being shadow banned on social media. As I had just had an article with Forbes come out, I wanted to share more about my story as I have actively worked with Google and YouTube between 2018-2020. I was a Beta Tester for many of the newer YouTube features, from Shorts, to the Upload System, to the Music Library. I had the opportunity to ask the algorithm team a lot of questions relating to the system that was introduced in 2016 on YouTube, where you would be unable to contact your subscribers unless they used the bell function to doubly subscribe. 

This to me was a massive error, because people had organically found content, and fell in love with the creator. Now, the only time you would see recommendations is if the algorithm knew how to show the creator. For YouTube, they had no LGBT data that positioned trans people in the right places, so all the trans content creators from before 2016 had to decide whether they wanted to do trending content and sensationalistic content, debate and news reactions, social justice content, OR take a back step. I took a back step, I don’t comply to things I do not want to do. If you can not just create something that inspires you and hope that someone finds it, I’m not gonna participate because it’s not a fair distribution nor is it actually that profitable. The whole system was designed to maximise the ad rates and link content together, and if it doesn’t understand you or it thinks your content is in anyway unsuitable for ads, then it won’t show you.

Mainstream media has now accepted social media creators as a form of celebrity, and as of 2018, there’s been a cross section of talent agencies working with these influencers, and what has happened is there has been a massive increase in content creators who are willing to do anything to be seen as famous, and that has changed the climate for both artists and audience members, there’s no longer a trust because there is such a vivid amount of dishonesty when it comes to sponsorships, filters and intention when creating dramatic content. Many of the old school creators have now identified this and have put into the ethos that there’s a concept called ‘Shadow Banning’, which can happen to some degree if your account has posted content not suitable for adverts, or that breaks community guidelines. But it’s more of a restriction of exposure than a ban and you have full control over how to fix it. 

This project was very interesting to me because when I heard that there was hundreds of entries, I thought that there was a chance for me to step in and explain from the perspective of someone who sat for four hours with the algorithm team at YouTube and quizzed them on how my content wasn’t being linked into the beauty playlist, and if there was a concept called shadow banning. And the answer is no. Any person can go viral for doing whatever it is in that moment that’s being shown, and if you correctly provoke people to interact with you then boom, you’re pushed to the front because they make more money.

But that is not the same thing as being selectively blocked from having an audience, and it’s really a fascinating insight into the mindset of people today, because many feel that they are unjustly prevented from being famous. That’s the real data in this exhibit. Why are so many people invested in this idea that they deserve to be famous? I think it’s a very interesting piece of information and I thought it was worthy to be involved to collate that. I think it’s an insight into the value of being famous and the choices you make to attain that, do you want to provoke people for that end goal? And why is that end goal considered valuable? So lots of questions and an interesting piece of work.

The team at Rankin interviewed me and I took inspiration from the graphics and created my own version. They featured my Skull transformation in the exhibit which is now live in London. Check it out here - https://theunseen.site/