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my singing, and it took me a long time to realize that those people weren’t actually 
seeing me in the show. They were basing their opinions on a very small clip on the 
internet, and they made me really hate that moment in the show” (Mulvaney, cited 
in St Palmer, 2026). The very mechanism that enabled her participation was the 
same one that facilitated her harm, demonstrating that expanded representation 
and platform toxicity are not separate phenomena but products of the same  
algorithmic logic. 
The same dynamic operated around the Evita balcony scene. Zegler had already 
faced significant coordinated hate before Evita, with her co-star James Olivas  
describing it as people “choosing to be angry at her because she is a woman of 
color, and she is young, an easy target” (Olivas, cited in Kraljik, 2025). The balcony 
scene elicited genuine admiration from those who experienced it as a moment of 
accessibility, but also significant criticism from paying audience members who felt 
the show’s most iconic song had been diminished by its outdoor, free  
performance. As Fuchs argues, “not all voices have the same power and produced 
content and voices are frequently marginalised because visibility is a central  
resource in contemporary culture that powerful actors, such as media  
corporations, can buy” (Fuchs 2017: 74). For the institution, all engagement was 
promotional, but for the individuals caught in the middle, the experience was  
considerably more complicated. This is what the repositioned gate looks like in 
practice. 
Unpaid Digital Labour and the Ephemerality of Participation 
When audiences film the MegaSix finale, or share the Evita balcony clip, they are 
performing promotional work for free. The production benefits commercially while 
the audience member receives no material compensation. They are  
sharing a moment of joy with a community of people who feel the same way, many 
of whom may not be able to afford a ticket or make the journey to see the show in 
person. Terranova identifies precisely why this makes it so structurally effective 
as a commercial mechanism, arguing that “free labour is the moment where this 
knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that 
are pleasurably embraced and, at the same time, often shamelessly exploited” 
(Terranova 2000:37). The audience member does not experience their contribution 
as exploitation because it does not feel like exploitation. It feels natural, like fans 
simply doing what fans do. It is exactly because it feels that way that the institution 
can extract commercial value from it without ever having to ask. 
Terranova is careful to note that “free labour is not necessarily exploited labour” 
and that within online communities this labour is “willingly conceded in exchange 
for the pleasures of communication and exchange” (Terranova 2000: 48). Boffone 
himself acknowledges that “musical TikTokers want to promote certain shows 
even if they are aware that they are performing unpaid labour to do so” (Boffone 

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