Platforms, Algorithms, and Discursive Power: A Comparative Audit of Top-Tier Influencer Ecosystems in China and the United States

Abstract

Cross-national comparisons of digital influence usually reduce to follower counts. A figure such as MrBeast's 468 million YouTube subscribers set against Li Ziqi's 30 million is read as an eight-to-one ratio of cultural reach and reported as such on both sides of the Pacific. This paper argues that such numbers are compressed arguments rather than neutral facts, and often incoherent ones, because the pools they draw on, the acts they aggregate, and the legal regimes that produce them are not the same across the two systems. A raw integer stripped from its platform, its measurement protocol, and its regulatory context cannot do the comparative work it is asked to do. Drawing on a multi-platform audit of 105 top-tier accounts, 52 in the United States and 53 in China, across twelve platforms, with 628 channel-level records, the paper shows that the two ecosystems are structurally hard to place on a single scale along three axes: platform architecture, platform stack, and content regime. The empirical core is a three-axis influence index that scores each creator on political, economic, and cultural influence against a region-specific virtual ceiling, so that no real creator reaches the maximum. The paper proposes algorithmic sovereignty as a comparative frame that treats infrastructure, discursive governance, and data jurisdiction as first-order variables, and it reframes the familiar free-versus-censored binary as two sovereignty constructions with distinct trade-offs. It closes by revising the theory of the public sphere: that sphere is no longer singular but algorithmically partitioned into mutually opaque layers, with the cultural register, rather than the political one, providing what bridging still occurs.