user-created content
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.
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. 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.
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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 they 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.
By the end of the first decade of the 21st 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.
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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 2025, Twitch claimed 6.93 million monthly broadcasters and 35 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 bring in many millions of dollars 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 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. 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.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.