Visible Labour
This type of labour is done publicly online—like livestreaming or influencing—and focuses on self-performance and personal branding.
Visible digital labour
Who are the workers who do essential jobs like moderating content, creating fanworks, or training AI, but are rarely recognised or fairly paid?
Hidden/invisible/crowd workers
They are the professionals who build, design, and maintain digital platforms like Shopee or TikTok. Who are they?
Tech workers
The term describing uncompensated, future-oriented work undertaken in the anticipation of professional opportunities in the digital economy
Hope labour
This labour is often unpaid and done with the hope of future success. Many influencers take this path, working first and getting paid later.
Aspirational labour
These workers clean up toxic content to keep platforms “safe,” but are often psychologically affected and remain largely unseen.
Content moderators
This term refers to the kind of labour that creates the systems and conditions where other digital work happens. What is it?
Structural labour
These workers are exposed to disturbing content for low wages, leading to severe mental health issues.
Content moderators
This system decides what content appears on your feed. It’s driven by data, early engagement, and can hide content that doesn’t follow trends.
Algorithmic visibility
Name two consequences faced by hidden digital workers due to their lack of formal recognition or legal classification.
Lack of legal protections and no access to mental health support
(Also acceptable: low pay, no minimum wage, no job title, burnout, trauma.)
This is the term for how companies like TikTok or Grab profit from tech workers' system designs and users' engagement, rather than traditional product sales.
Digital capitalism
This type of automated control system allows digital labour platforms to manage 'non-employees', creating an illusion of choice while subtly steering behaviour towards platform goals.
Algorithmic management
This type of labour is often done by women creators, where they must stay emotionally positive, caring, and available—just to remain visible.
Gendered emotional labour
According to Dorschel’s third wave of research, digital labour includes not just creators and gig workers, but also these often-overlooked contributors, such as content moderators, warehouse staff, and e-waste recyclers.
Infrastructure workers
This popular e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia relies on tech workers to design its flash sale systems, recommendation algorithms, and mobile shopping interface.
Shopee
Activities like fashion blogging and beauty vlogging that simultaneously produce economic value while being expressed as enjoyable and emotive describe what?
Blurred boundaries between labour and leisure
What does it reveal about platform power when TikTok creators are demonetised or lose features like livestream and shop links due to vague violations like “unoriginal content”?
Platforms have hidden control over income and visibility, making creators vulnerable.
What was the purpose of International Journal of Labour Research’s new social contract?
Recognise all digital labour as real
Equal rights for creators, moderators, and gig workers
If platforms profit, workers should be protected
According to Dörschel (2022), tech workers often experience this class condition — they differ from low-paid digital workers because they have more autonomy, higher pay, and social status, but also differ from owners because they don’t control capital. What is this condition?
Contradictory class location
This process involves transforming economic resources, including user activity, into 'datafied inputs' that are refined into 'data doubles'.
Datafication and commodification