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Reference

Annabell, T., Fieseler, C., Goanta, C., & Wildhaber, I. (Eds.). (2025). The Hashtag Hustle. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035332816

‌Book Review Essays

Mukhopadhyay, M. (2026). The hashtag hustle: law and policy perspectives on working in the influencer economy: edited by Taylor Annabell, Christian Fieseler, Catalina Goanta, and Isabelle Wildhaber, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK, 2025, 220 pp., £100.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-035-33280-9. Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/14729342.2025.2599025

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https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayukhpsm/

Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and this is our Weekend Book Review 📚✨

Today I am diving into a book that lives right where your screen time turns into someone else’s full time job. The title is as punchy as the world it studies: “The Hashtag Hustle: Law and Policy Perspectives on Working in the Influencer Economy” 🔥

This is not just another book about influencers looking pretty on camera. It is about influencers as workers 💼
It is about labour you rarely see, contracts you never read, and algorithms that can make or break a career overnight. It takes us behind the ring lights and into the messy intersection of law, money, culture and that restless thing we call the creator economy 🎥📱

What I love about this volume is how seriously it treats influencer labour. It digs into:

• invisible effort and “visibility labour” 👀

• composite careers and platform precarity 🎯

• disclosure rules in Germany, consumer laws in the UK and France, governance and censorship in China 🌍

• datafication of children, “sharenting”, and the shadow of generative AI over privacy 🤖🧒

And holding all of this together are four editors whose backgrounds almost feel like a dream team for a book like this.

We have Taylor Annabell, a researcher at the Faculty of Law, Economics and Governance at Utrecht University, who thinks at the crossroads of doctrine and digital practice. We have Christian Fieseler, professor at the Department of Communication and Culture at the Norwegian Business School, bringing in the communication and platform governance lens. Then Catalina Goanta, associate professor at Utrecht University, connects law, platforms and consumer protection in a way that feels razor sharp and very current. And finally Isabelle Wildhaber, professor of Private and Business Law at the University of St. Gallen, adds deep expertise in work and employment research ⚖️📊

Together they stitch law, media studies, marketing, management and communication into one thick tapestry of the influencer economy. Reading them, you feel the tension between hustle and exploitation, between entrepreneurial freedom and legal abandonment. It is academic, yes, but it is also uncomfortably real for anyone who has ever posted content and wondered who really holds the power: the creator or the platform 💡📲

In this episode, I am going to walk you through how The Hashtag Hustle shows that our laws are still crawling while digital capitalism is sprinting, and what that gap means for every creator trying to turn attention into income.

🙏 A huge thanks to the editors Taylor Annabell, Christian Fieseler, Catalina Goanta and Isabelle Wildhaber, and to Edward