Dr Taylor Annabell

(she/her)

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

Current research projects: 

Platform governance, power and expansionary logics 

• Big Tech CEOs, creator culture and network power with Dr Rianne Riemens (Utrecht University) examines when and how eight techbros appear in media for the first six months of 2025, tracing their use of social media, engagement with journalists and creators in podcasts, broadcast and print media, and their public presentations at conferences and events. Based on the content and discourse analysis, we discuss the network power of the CEOs and creators, reflecting on issues of accountability in the media landscape, the multiplicities of identity performances, and political alignments and strategies with geopolitical actors.
• Theorising platform evacuation in digital society with Prof. Crystal Abidin (Curtin University) develops an analytical framework to understand the withdrawal and migration of users on social media platforms as an issue of platform governance. Using the so-called TikTok ban as an illustrative example, we propose stages of platform evacuation: instigation, evacuation memetics, platform remembrance, evacuation leadership and curtain calls, drawing attention to the critical role of creators.
• Governance of prompt cultures with Dr Rebecca Scharlach (University of Bremen) theories prompt governance, exploring how prompts govern interaction and are governed by tech companies. Our analysis of dating apps, social media platforms and gen-AI chatbots grapples with the distinct role prompting plays as an interace of governance and strategy of engagement, and the self-optimising user it interpellates. 
• TikTokification of Netflix with Dr Daphne Idiz (University of Toronto) and Dr Nina Vindum Rasmussen explores the promotional discourse of Netflix to understand issues of convergence and competition in streaming worlds. We address how the company defines itself and its services over time, with a focus on disentangling the discursive construction from interface design and features.

Influencer cultures, monetisation of attention and the creator economy

• Influencing with authority with Dr Rianne Dekkers and Dr Catalina Goanta (Utrecht University) examines how Dutch ministries navigate the social media logics of influencer marketing. Drawing on freedom of information request documentation and social media content from associated campaigns, we analyse tensions that emergence in the turn to influencers to communicate with the public. 
• Live shopping as participatory spectacle with Laura Aade (University of Luxembourg) and Dr Catalina Goanta (Utrecht University) looks at how live-streaming is leveraged for social commerce purposes on TikTok in the Netherlands. 
• Perceptions and expectations of good influencer governance brings together data gathered from 'The Sponsored Scroll' and influencer workshops to think through issues of regulation from two perspectives. First, people who engaged in moderation of influencer content using platform policies at a public festival. And second, Romanian influencers who participated in a workshop about influencer practices in the context of the upcoming EU Digital Fairness Act. 

Memory-making in the AI era

• Memory as Sam Altmans favourite feature considers how the rhetoric and promises of Al systems and tools when it comes to personal memory are disconnected from the language employed in governance documentation and structures of governance itself. It maps the changing contours of players and interventions that the digital has on the distribution of memory: from custodians and prompters to perfectors and producers. 

Biography

Before joining Cardiff, Taylor was a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University School of Law (2023-2025). First with the ERC Starting Grant HUMANads, led by Catalina Goanta, which brought together legal scholars, computer scientists, and other researchers in media and cultural studies, and then with the focus area Governing the Digital Society supported by the Spinoza-funded project led by Prof. José van Dijck.

Earlier, she was a research associate at the University of Leeds and the University of Sheffield for the Generic Visuals in the News project. In 2023, Taylor completed my PhD in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London: The worth of remembering Performances of digital memory work on social media platforms in the lives of young women. She has a Master of Communication Studies and a Bachelor of Communication Studies from Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, where she is originally from.

Taylor is an affiliate member of the Content Creators Scholars Network and part of the Creators & Platform Labor Working Group based at Cornell University, where she was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Communication in 2024.