The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism

User-Created Content

Author:Jessica Roberts
Edited by: Gregory A. Borchard
Book Title: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism
Chapter Title: "User-Created Content"
Pub. Date: 2022
Access Date: April 13, 2022
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks,
Print ISBN: 9781544391151
Online ISBN: 9781544391199
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781544391199.n422
Print pages: 1687-1690
© 2022 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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User-created content, also called user-generated content, describes various kinds of content produced by
Internet and social media users. Generally, user-created content is created by the user of a product or
platform rather than the product or platform itself, represents a creative or original contribution, and is shared
online and made accessible to other users. Content created by users has come to account for or shape much
of the information, images, and videos that users encounter online, whether via social media or other sites.
The relationship between user-created content and journalism is complicated, as user-created content can
contribute to journalism, compete with it, or be used to promote and disseminate it. This entry describes the
history of user contributions, defines various types of user-created content, explains the relevance to and
influence of user-created content on journalism, and discusses criticism and concerns about it.

History and Types

The Internet, and social media in particular, was not the beginning of user contributions to public information.
Newspapers had published letters to the editor and radio stations had allowed listeners to call in for years
before the Internet was invented and widely adopted. Notably, the Oxford English Dictionary was written
by public contributions in the 19th century. Amateurs had created their own newsletters, books, and radio
broadcasts, particularly before the professionalization and regulation of those media. However, the Internet
provided a platform that allowed users to contribute more easily and quickly than before, allowing more people
to participate in information creation and leading to a massive increase in user-created content. Manuel
Castells (2007) called this “mass self-communication” (p. 238) because every user was able to communicate
to everyone else.

Cheap portable cameras, easy-to-use blogging platforms, and other technology made the work of capturing
content and putting it online more accessible. From the late 1990s into the 2000s, a great deal of all kinds
of content was being created by users. Blogging platforms allowed users to easily post personal reflections
or comment on everything from the news to sports to their favorite shoes. Flickr, Snapfish, and other photo-
sharing sites provided platforms for users to share hundreds of thousands of photos and even organize
them with geotags and other tags that could make them useful to others. Many of these functions were
later incorporated in tools such as Google’s image search, which identifies the content in photos without
user labor, and Twitter, which utilized hashtags to organize related information. YouTube provided the same
possibilities for video sharing, creating a giant library of video content from amateurs, ranging from highly
produced and edited amateur movies to recordings of users simply talking into the camera. Wikipedia,
launched in 2001, provided a platform for users to collaborate in creating a massive online encyclopedia that
was free to everyone and reflected the combined knowledge of users. Advocates promoted the value of mass
participation, but most studies have found that less than 20% of users create content, and the vast majority
only lurk and consume content.

Some sites allowed users to post links to news stories, creating curated news feeds reflecting the interests
and opinions of users, rather than the editorial judgment of professional journalists. Reddit is perhaps the
strongest example of a site that is built entirely by users posting stories. On curation sites, users generally
do not report and write their own news stories or post their own photos or videos (although that also
happens) but post stories or items from professional news organizations’ websites and other online sources.
These feeds are somewhat similar to the social media news feeds that users see, which are created by
algorithms that select among the stories posted by a user’s friends and other accounts they follow. Similarly,
news aggregators, such as Google News, present users with lists of news stories generated by algorithms’
interpretations of other users’ behavior. In these cases, users are not directly—or even consciously—creating
content but are nonetheless contributing to how content is filtered and selected.

User-created content also took the form of memes, mash-ups, fan fiction, and other activities in which Internet
users took existing material, whether from professionals or other users, and remixed it to make something
new, for comedic, critical, political, or creative purposes. In some cases, users simply organized information
to provide context and perspective on reporting produced by professional journalists, but that kind of analysis
or commentary can certainly constitute an original contribution. Axel Bruns called these users produsers and
described the process of creating content in this way as produsage, in which users produce and use content.

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By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, social media had grown significantly, becoming a central
place for sharing content created by users. Several social movements, including protests against Iranian
elections in 2009 and the Arab Spring in 2010–2011, made use of social media tools to organize and
spread messages about their movements. While in some cases the significance of social media in aiding
protests was later questioned, certainly the ability of the public to create original content that differed from the
professional news media, particularly in countries where the news media was state-owned or state-controlled,
gave an international platform to the movements.

In the United States, some movements effectively created awareness through the use of hashtags and user
posts. The Black Lives Matter movement and #MeToo campaign spread through social media, in the latter
case, as thousands of users sharing their personal experiences with sexual abuse and assault on social
media. Some have questioned the effectiveness of users’ online shows of support for social movements and
the extent to which they translate into deeper engagement, however. The term slacktivism was coined to
describe the desire to appear socially engaged without contributing materially, whether through a physical
presence at protests or donations to needy causes.

As new tools evolve, the definition of user-created content may evolve as well. Twitch is a livestreaming
service primarily used by gamers to broadcast their game-play feeds. In 2019, Twitch claimed 3.7 million
monthly broadcasters and 15 million daily active users. Although the majority of streamers play video games,
there is an increasing number of channels dedicated to charity fundraising and education. While it is difficult
to ascertain the income made by streamers, estimates claim that the top 10 streamers may be bringing in a
combined $20 million annually. Streamers may have a variety of sources of income, including sponsorship,
donations from followers, affiliate links, selling merchandise, and tournament winnings. Twitch partnerships
are also available by invitation. This type of user-created content is different in that users stream live, rather
than creating and sharing static content that can be viewed long after it is created.

User-Created Content and Professional Journalism

Not all content created by users is relevant to public information or journalism aside from competing for
users’ attention. Most individual social media posts might be considered to fall within the category of user-
created content but are not relevant to a wide audience and would not be considered journalism by most
widely accepted standards. In terms of information of public interest, user-created content can range from
independent, random acts of citizen journalism, such as witnesses who record and share videos of police
misconduct, to coordinated reporting efforts organized or overseen by journalists, as in the crowdsourced
reporting done by The Guardian (UK), National Public Radio, and CNN’s iReport.

One of the earliest examples of citizen journalism took place before the widespread use of the Internet. The
video taken by George Holliday of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King was shown on local
television news stations in Los Angeles in 1991. That video sparked an outcry against police brutality and riots
when the officers were eventually exonerated. Videos of police abuse recorded by users remained a common
theme on social media for decades.

Interest in and research about citizen journalism peaked in the first decade of the 2000s, when tools to
capture and share news content first became widely available and adopted. Nonprofessionals are often the
first and sometimes the only witnesses to major events, and when they are carrying phones with embedded
high-quality cameras and Internet connections, they are uniquely positioned to document newsworthy events.
In the first decade of the 21st century, citizens played key roles in reporting several major stories, such
as the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, the 2005 London Tube bombings, and shootings of unarmed
citizens by police. Videos and images captured and shared immediately online by citizens provided firsthand
documentation of significant events and gave a voice to many participants in news stories.

Citizen journalism was heralded as an opportunity for nonprofessionals to participate in the creation and
selection of news content, upending journalists’ roles as gatekeepers. Books such as Dan Gillmor’s 2004 We
the Media and Scott Gant’s 2007 We’re All Journalists Now reflected this enthusiasm. Proponents of citizen
journalism saw the control exerted by a few professionals over the news agenda as problematic and hoped
that bringing more contributors to the process would lead to news coverage that was more representative of
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the general public’s issues and concerns. Critics of citizen journalism pointed out that nonprofessionals may
lack training and awareness of ethics, while others noted that the term citizen was problematic, given the
particular legal status it implies.

While many professional journalists were skeptical of, or even dismissive of, citizen journalism, there were
some efforts to take advantage of public contributions. Participatory journalism, and especially crowd-
sourcing, describes these more coordinated efforts, in which the collective efforts of a group of users are put
toward completing a task or generating content. A notable crowd-sourcing effort organized by journalists was
the work by The Guardian (UK) to acquire hundreds of thousands of pages of expense reports of members of
Parliament and publish them to the web with a request for readers to help identify which documents merited
further examination. Within hours, the newspaper’s readers had reviewed nearly half the documents. The site
Talking Points Memo similarly posted on its site hundreds of Department of Justice documents it had received
as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and sought reader participation in reading the documents to
identify important information.

Professional journalists sought user contributions in other ways. One of the first steps in allowing users to
contribute to news was the addition of comments sections to news stories that were posted online. Journalists
are increasingly influenced by the audience, even if the audience is not directly involved in the creation of
content. Many professional news sites feature most read or most shared stories, which are lists based on the
behavior of other users in viewing, reading, and sharing stories. In this way, users are influencing the creation
of news feeds by their behavior on the site.

It is important to distinguish between sites that are curated by a human who exercises news judgment
and sites that are algorithmically aggregated based on user behavior online. The increasingly sophisticated
audience metrics provided by online news can shape the behavior of journalists. New roles, such as
engagement editor, social media editor, and audience editor, have been adopted in newsrooms to respond
to audience data. While this might not strictly be considered user-created content, news produced by
professional journalists may be increasingly user-shaped content. Some have argued that social media
activity amounts to citizen journalism, but mostly citizen journalism appeared to have been displaced or
subsumed by social media. In 2015, CNN dropped its iReport site, which had allowed citizens to upload
original content and instead began sourcing stories directly from Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, using the
hashtag #CNNiReport.

User-created content has been viewed as a competitor to professional news media outlets or at least a threat
to the authority journalists asserted over information and the financial viability of news organizations. User-
created content is cheaper to produce and generally freely available, thus undercutting professional news
media’s control of the market. Many social media posts are links to professional news stories, which generate
ad revenue for social media platforms when posted there, but not for the news outlets that reported the
stories, unless users click through to the original source. As more advertising moved online and the news
industry lost significant revenue, many daily newspapers closed or moved to online-only editions, while social
media platforms often profited from the reporting newspapers had done.

Criticism
Although users may experience benefits from creating content, including potential emotional benefits from
participating in crowdsourced projects and other similar efforts, much of the work done by users results in
content that is served to other users by social media platforms and sites to generate revenue. The labor of
users is uncompensated, and the content they create is used to sell ads and glean data from users, which can
also be sold for marketing purposes. A political economic perspective might note the exploitative nature of this
system. All social media users are somewhat exploited in this way; the value they receive is free access to
the site, but in return their data and attention are sold, and the content they create, whether directly or through
likes, comments, and shares, is shown to other users to attract their attention. Meanwhile, the apps and sites
they use are designed to demand and keep their attention, and there is increasing evidence that heavy users
of social media are more likely to be depressed.

Some content creators are compensated, and this also creates problematic incentives in the system.
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Influencers who receive benefits for promoting products are expected to disclose those relationships, but
may not do so consistently. YouTube personalities who generate revenue from advertising depend on high
numbers of views to make more money, so they are incentivized to create content that is more outrageous
and likely to go viral. This often means appealing to the audience’s biases and anger and trying to post videos
immediately following a news story, rather than attempting to confirm facts and discuss them rationally.

User-created content also raises questions about ownership and intellectual property rights. It may be difficult
for users in a digital environment to maintain control over the use of the content they have created. Some
efforts to address this include the creation of Creative Commons and public copyright licenses that allow a
creator to give other users the right to share, use, and build upon content they have created.

On some platforms and social media sites, user-created content appears alongside and competes with
content from professional news organizations, companies, and others. YouTube features channels from
individual YouTube personalities but also major network shows and programs, such as HBO. The distinction
between users and professionals is sometimes clear and other times not so obvious. In some cases, the
presumed authenticity of a citizen report can be used to mislead audiences. For example, some prominent
media personalities who have made a career of media agitation, brand themselves as “citizen journalists,”
when they are effectively media professionals with strong ideological positions, entirely dedicated to shaping
media campaigns, who might be more properly considered entrepreneurial journalists.

Finally, the constant flow of information of all kinds places a strain on the capacities of users and especially
voters to access, judge, and respond to information. The vast library of content online means that voters
have more choice and information than ever before, but it also challenges their cognitive abilities, creating
confusion, fatigue, and stronger emotions like anger or outrage.

See also Audiences; Blogs and Bloggers; Citizen Journalism; News Aggregators; Participatory Journalism;
Social Media

Jessica Roberts

• social media

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781544391199.n422
10.4135/9781544391199.n422

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