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Decolonial Discourse in Postcolonial Contexts: How YouTubers Negotiate Audience Tensions, Platform Governance, and State Influence

Dipto Das, Bryan Semaan

arXiv:2608.26351v1cs.HCcs.CY

TL;DR

The paper asks what is required to sustain Bengali decolonial discourse under layered sociotechnical constraints. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with YouTube creators, it finds that audience tensions, platform governance, and state-linked regulation shape discourse viability and require continuous negotiation work.

  • Problem

    Existing research has examined identity work and expressive possibilities online, but less is established about how decolonial discourse remains visible, viable, socially legitimate, and politically safe under layered constraints.

  • Method

    The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 YouTube creators residing in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan and analyzed their accounts inductively.

  • Results

    Creators sustain discourse through relational labor, boundary work, and infrastructural practices while negotiating fragmented publics, unequal platform governance, and state-linked political risk.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    Decolonial expression in this setting is selectively sustainable: creators’ adaptations shape which narratives audiences encounter and which content remains viable.

  • Takeaways & Limitations

    The study is not directly generalizable across postcolonial contexts and does not examine platform algorithmic systems; its participants also lacked gender diversity and were predominantly university educated.

Abstract

from arXiv · show

Decolonial discourse on online platforms is often framed in terms of creator motivations and expressive possibilities. In this paper, we examine what it takes to sustain such discourse under layered sociotechnical constraints. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with YouTubers engaging in Bengali decolonial discourse, we analyze how audience publics, platform governance, and state influences shape what becomes sayable, visible, and viable. We show how fragmented postcolonial identities among audiences produce legitimacy policing, harassment, and coordinated backlash, requiring ongoing relational labor from creators. At the platform level, differential monetization, opaque moderation, and copyright regimes reorganize which publics are economically viable and reinforce existing hierarchies. Further, intermediaries such as multi-channel networks mediate regulatory pressure, introducing political risks and constraints on participation. In response, content creators engage in strategies of negotiation, including boundary work, infrastructural improvisation, and multi-platform distribution. Overall, our findings highlight the layered dynamics of decolonial discourse in postcolonial contexts and the continuous work required to sustain it in platformed environments.

1 INTRODUCTION

The paper examines how Bengali YouTubers sustain decolonial discourse when visibility, economic viability, political safety, and social legitimacy are constrained by audiences, platforms, and sociopolitical conditions.

  • YouTube enables creators to challenge dominant historical narratives, foreground local perspectives, and reinterpret cultural meanings through multimodal expression.These practices can engage colonial histories and their continuing effects while reclaiming cultural identity and epistemic authority.
  • Producing decolonial content does not ensure that it remains visible, economically viable, politically safe, or socially legitimate.The analysis therefore shifts from creator purposes to the social, infrastructural, and political work required for continued production.
  • The Bengali geocultural context spans Bangladesh and parts of India and has been shaped by colonial rule, Partition, marginalization, war, and nation formation.These transformations divided Bengal along religious and territorial lines and contributed to Bangladesh’s formation.
  • The study treats decolonial discourse as a situated collective practice involving creators, heterogeneous audiences, platforms, intermediaries, collaborators, and political institutions.It asks how Bengali YouTubers negotiate audience tensions, platform governance, and state-linked pressures across transnational postcolonial publics.
  • Semi-structured interviews examine how 15 YouTube creators in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan navigate audiences, monetization, moderation, copyright, and political uncertainty.The analysis considers both encountered constraints and the relational, rhetorical, infrastructural, and risk-management practices used to remain active.
  • The paper does not aim for generalizability, instead examining how decolonial discourse is negotiated within a specific sociotechnical and postcolonial context.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

The literature review situates decolonial discourse within relational identity work, contested digital publics, and platform governance that structures participation through economic, policy, and political arrangements.

  • 2.1 Postcolonial Identity Manifested as Contested Publics: Postcolonial identities are relationally negotiated through categories such as religion, ethnicity, language, and nationality shaped by colonial histories and Bengali social fractures.These negotiations can involve overlapping or competing affiliations including Bengali, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Hindu, and Muslim identities.
  • 2.1 Postcolonial Identity Manifested as Contested Publics: Digital publics evaluate and regulate discourse, helping determine which identity expressions are considered legitimate, authentic, or acceptable.Boundary policing can target speakers whose identities or positions are judged not to fit audience expectations.
  • 2.2 Decolonial Discourse as Platformed Cultural Production: Decolonial discourse critically engages colonial histories and their effects while reclaiming autonomy over self-definition and ways of knowing beyond colonial frameworks.Online communities provide spaces to contest dominant narratives and articulate alternative understandings of culture, history, and belonging.
  • 2.2 Decolonial Discourse as Platformed Cultural Production: Online platforms support self-expression, community formation, collective sensemaking, identity affirmation, solidarity, and challenges to exclusionary norms.In postcolonial societies, these practices can involve collaborative reinterpretations of history and challenges to hegemonic narratives.
  • 2.2 Decolonial Discourse as Platformed Cultural Production: YouTube introduces distinct affordances for decolonial discourse compared with text-based or discussion-oriented platforms such as Reddit and Quora.Prior work has examined creators’ motivations and video practices for reclaiming cultural narratives and reimagining communities.
  • 2.3 Platform Governance as a Structuring Force on YouTube: Monetization differentially values audiences and regions according to advertising markets, while moderation systems determine what content is permissible, visible, or monetizable.Moderation processes are often opaque and inconsistently applied, making platform decisions difficult for creators to anticipate or interpret.
  • 2.3 Platform Governance as a Structuring Force on YouTube: Copyright systems complicate transformative production, and MCNs introduce additional power asymmetries in visibility, revenue, and dispute resolution.Larger or better-resourced channels may benefit more from intermediary relationships than smaller creators.
  • 2.3 Platform Governance as a Structuring Force on YouTube: Platform governance structures participation through monetization, moderation, copyright, algorithmic visibility, and intermediary institutions.These mechanisms organize how content is produced, circulated, and sustained within YouTube’s broader political economy.

3 METHODS

The study uses qualitative interviews and grounded theory-inspired analysis to examine how Bengali YouTubers navigate audience, platform, institutional, and political constraints.

  • 3 METHODS: The study focuses on sustaining decolonial discourse on YouTube within the Bengali geocultural context and its layered sociotechnical constraints.The constraints arise from audience publics, platform governance, and state-linked intermediary pressures.
  • 3.2 Interviews: Researchers interviewed 15 creators residing in Bangladesh, India, or Pakistan who actively produced content related to Bangladesh, India, and/or Pakistan.Participants represented genres including political explainers, journalism, satire, travel, social interviews, public reactions, and media reactions.
  • 3.2 Interviews: Participants were identified through purposive and snowball sampling, with recruitment continuing until theoretical saturation.The first author’s contextual familiarity informed recruitment and interviewing.
  • 3.2 Interviews: Fifteen in-depth semi-structured life-history interviews were conducted between Summer 2020 and Summer 2022.Questions addressed content-creation trajectories, audience interactions, platform policies, and ways participants maintained presence and engagement.
  • 3.2 Interviews: Interviews were conducted remotely in Bengali, English, or Hindi/Urdu according to participant preference and connectivity conditions.Participation was voluntary, uncompensated, and based on verbal consent for audio recording.
  • 3.3 Data Analysis: The analysis followed an inductive, grounded theory-inspired process of open, axial, and selective coding.The researchers developed themes concerning audience, platform, and state constraints and creators’ negotiation practices.
  • 3.3 Data Analysis: The analysis did not calculate inter-coder reliability and explicitly treats findings as shaped by participants’ experiences and the researchers’ interpretive lens.The authors’ positionalities and scholarly orientations are acknowledged as part of the reflexive analysis.

4 RESULTS

The results show that sustaining Bengali decolonial discourse requires relational, boundary, and infrastructural work across transnational audiences, unequal platform economies, and political risk.

  • Bengali YouTubers navigate a layered sociotechnical environment shaped by transnational audiences, platform governance, and state-linked regulation.Their practices include relational labor, boundary work, and infrastructural work to maintain audience ties and sustain circulation.

4.1 Audience Publics as Sites of Postcolonial Tension

Audience publics actively express and enforce postcolonial tensions, making creators’ legitimacy depend on identities, histories, and cultural forms. Creators sustain participation through relational support and careful adaptation of self-presentation.

  • Audience publics: Audience publics actively negotiate and enforce postcolonial tensions rather than merely consuming creators’ content.These tensions shape how identity, power, and cultural recognition are expressed in creator-audience interactions.
  • Fragmented publics: Religious and geopolitical distrust led audiences to question creators’ motives and condemn cross-border reconciliation efforts.Muslim creators discussing Bangladesh or India were accused of promoting opposing religious or national interests.
  • Fragmented publics: Linguistic, religious, and national identities became grounds for legitimacy policing, including claims that Bengali critics were insufficiently Indian.Audiences symbolically assigned dissenters to neighboring countries according to perceived identity markers.
  • Fragmented publics: Geopolitical events triggered coordinated backlash, including the loss of 4000 subscribers from a campaign targeting Pakistani channels.Creators consequently calibrated content around the risk that cross-border narratives would be interpreted as disloyalty or foreign allegiance.
  • Fragmented publics: Gendered, classed, and cultural policing constrained participation by targeting women’s public presence and dismissing rural cultural representation as uncultured.These reactions reinforced distinctions between elite and subaltern cultural forms and shaped which representations audiences considered legitimate.
  • Relational and discursive strategies: Creators responded through identity-sensitive presentation, linguistic care, subtitles, and support networks that supplied belonging, safety, and logistical assistance.Participants used culturally appropriate greetings and accents while relying on audiences, friends, alumni, and acquaintances for support.

4.2 Platform Governance as Postcolonial Structure

Platform governance shapes whether Bengali decolonial discourse is visible, economically viable, and defensible through unequal monetization, opaque enforcement, and institutional asymmetries. Creators navigate these conditions by prioritizing audience affinity, developing folk theories, and using infrastructural tactics.

  • Platform governance: Platform policies govern moderation, compensation, and creator recognition, reinforcing geographic, economic, and institutional hierarchies in Bengali cultural production.These policies constrain expressive choices and condition whether marginalized cultural representation remains viable.
  • Differential policies: Differential monetization makes Global North audiences more financially valuable than audiences in Bangladesh and India.Participants linked higher earnings to advertising prices and advertiser concentration associated with viewers’ locations.
  • Differential policies: Opaque and inconsistent moderation, geographic blocking, and copyright claims create uncertainty about who can see content and which materials can be reused.Reaction-video creators were especially exposed to copyright claims, while platform decisions were difficult to clarify or predict.
  • Institutional asymmetries: MCN affiliation creates institutional asymmetries in copyright enforcement, with participants reporting that claims from MCN-member channels receive preferential credibility.Creators described cases where their own content was reused and then claimed against them.
  • Platform governance: Together, platform governance stratifies whose discourse can be sustained, defended, and monetized rather than merely mediating decolonial expression.Participants therefore negotiated audience demands, monetization potential, blocking, and copyright claims in their video-making.
  • Strategies: Creators often prioritize non-monetary incentives, making locally demanded reaction videos to build affinity and gain subscribers despite low revenue and copyright risk.Audience connection and subscriber growth could outweigh lost monetization when videos were popular among Bangladeshi and Indian viewers.
  • Strategies: Participants developed collective folk theories and technical tactics, such as crediting creators, lowering resolution, or making reused footage semi-transparent, to manage opaque enforcement.These practices were intended to reduce the likelihood of copyright claims despite limited policy transparency.

4.3 State-Linked Regulation and Political Risk

State-linked regulation shapes Bengali creators’ speech, collaborations, and infrastructures through anticipatory fear, legal risk, and intermediary oversight. Creators respond by calibrating visibility and distributing work across platforms to sustain participation under uncertainty.

  • State-linked pressures include surveillance concerns, registration requirements, access restrictions, and personal-safety risks.
  • Anticipatory fear of governmental attention leads creators to avoid visibility and calibrate engagement with sociopolitical discourse.
  • MCNs mediate regulatory pressure, becoming institutional conduits through which registration requirements and state oversight shape politically sensitive content.
  • Political risk constrains topics, storytelling forms, collaborators, and production networks before content reaches platform moderation.
  • Creators manage uncertainty through indirect framing, selective collaboration, infrastructural redundancy, and multi-platform distribution.
  • State-linked regulation affects not only what creators say but also how they organize labor, collaborations, and infrastructures.

5 DISCUSSION

The discussion conceptualizes decolonial discourse as selectively sustainable within recursive interactions among audience boundary policing, platform governance, and state-linked political risk. It extends relational-labor and platform-governance perspectives by emphasizing historically situated legitimacy, economic viability, and political survivability.

  • Audience policing, platform governance, and state-linked risk form a recursive arrangement that reshapes speech, self-presentation, collaboration, and distribution.
  • The paper calls this condition selective sustainability: some decolonial expressions remain more socially acceptable, economically viable, and politically survivable than others.
  • 5.1 Relational Labor under Postcolonial Tension: Relational labor in postcolonial contexts involves negotiating historically produced boundaries around cultural representation, historical narration, and criticism of nations.
  • 5.1 Relational Labor under Postcolonial Tension: Creators use Bengali language, religious greetings, subtitles, satire, and culturally recognizable address to build affinities across national and religious divisions.
  • 5.1 Relational Labor under Postcolonial Tension: Digital participation requires becoming recognizable within inherited categories while simultaneously contesting those categories and reclaiming narrative authority.
  • Platform governance converts geopolitical and institutional inequalities into signals organizing cultural production, including audience value and ownership claims.
  • Differential monetization can privilege diasporic viewers and reduce the economic support available for locally changing, rural, or agrarian cultural practices.
  • Inconsistent copyright enforcement and opaque moderation make platform outcomes difficult to anticipate, requiring creators to reconcile rules with lived realities.

6 LIMITATIONS, FUTURE WORK, AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The study identifies limitations involving unexamined algorithmic systems, limited gender diversity, group-interview dynamics, and participant education and generational experience. These boundaries motivate future work on algorithmic visibility and perspectives less represented in the sample.

  • Limitations and Future Work: The study does not examine recommendation algorithms or other algorithmic systems shaping decolonial discourse’s visibility, reach, and viability.
  • Limitations and Future Work: Only four female YouTubers were interviewed, limiting gender diversity in the participant sample.
  • Ethical Considerations: Two participants requested group interviews with channel co-patrons, creating possible risks of opinion suppression or conversational dominance.
  • Limitations and Future Work: All but one participant had at least a university degree, raising the possibility that findings reflect more highly educated people than the general population.
  • Limitations and Future Work: Participants had not themselves experienced British or Pakistani colonial rule, motivating future research with people who experienced colonial subjugation or colonially created crises.

7 CONCLUSION

Sustaining Bengali decolonial discourse on YouTube requires treating it as a situated, collective practice shaped by audience dynamics, platform governance, and state-linked regulation. The conclusion calls for contextually grounded approaches that account for the relational, political, and infrastructural conditions making participation possible or fragile.

  • Bengali decolonial discourse is a situated, collective practice rather than merely content creation.
  • Audience dynamics, platform governance, and state-linked regulation jointly shape the viability of online expression.
  • Supporting discourse in postcolonial ethnolinguistic contexts requires attention to relational, political, and infrastructural conditions.
  • Global platform design and governance should engage with users’ diverse, historically situated realities to pursue more equitable approaches.
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