YouTube search algorithms force beauty vloggers to change how they speak.

Evidence

Like broadcast television before it, YouTube is delivering eyeballs to advertisers. These audiences, according to Bishop, are deeply gendered, with femininegendered channels focusing on beauty, fashion, cosmetics, and lifestyle. Noncompliance to these standards risks the symbolic violence of platform invisibility (Bishop, 2018a, p. 70). In this volume, Bishop chronicles how the speech recognition algorithms that YouTube uses for closed-captioning are utilized to determine searchable keywords for each video. A beauty guru who wishes her videos to be easily findable must slow down her speech and clearly enunciate: smoky eye. MAC Cosmetics. Urban Decay Naked Eye Palette (Bishop, 2018b). Thus, we must ask to what extent algorithms are shaping not only celebrity online, but self-presentation itself. — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe, 1199

Categorization

• XREF: Directly continues this volume’s ch2 finding that auto-captioning serves few languages — here it’s about the speech-enunciation discipline the same algorithms impose on creators. — connects to: Algorithms reinforce existing tastes rather than challenging or expanding them — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 709; Communication distortion stems from asymmetric positions between producers and audiences.; YouTube’s authenticity is a staged ruse built on domestic intimacy — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 121
• QUESTION: Does enunciation-for-captioning flatten dialects and regional accents of non-native English speakers disproportionately?

Broader Connections

• Communication distortion stems from asymmetric positions between producers and audiences. #expands (0.82)
• YouTube’s authenticity is a staged ruse built on domestic intimacy #complicates (0.80) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 121
• Algorithms reinforce existing tastes rather than challenging or expanding them #exemplifies (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 709