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Six: The Musical illustrates this institutional dimension particularly clearly. The  
production has maintained its cultural relevance by consistently casting  
performers with significant social media followings, effectively outsourcing its 
marketing to its own cast. This is not simply a casting strategy. It is a content  
strategy. Performers are expected not just to perform on stage but also to be  
continuously online, generating algorithmic engagement that keeps the  
production visible in a landscape where yesterday’s show is always at risk of being 
replaced by today’s trend. What this obscures is that the performers at its centre 
are not content. They are human beings. By casting for platform visibility and  
relying on cast members to generate ongoing digital engagement, institutions have 
effectively turned performers into promotional products, available for public  
consumption and judgment around the clock. The parasocial relationships  
enabled by social media intensify this dynamic. Fans develop a sense of intimacy 
that can quickly tip into entitlement, feeling qualified to critique, compare, and 
judge in ways they would not if the performer existed only on stage. The distance 
that once protected both parties has collapsed entirely. 
The normalisation of online hate directed at performers is a structural  
consequence of a platform environment that amplifies all engagement equally, 
and that none of its participants, not institutions, not performers, not audiences, 
fully control. The industry that chose to make platform visibility a casting criterion 
does bear responsibility for the conditions it created. When coordinated hate  
descended on Six following Mulvaney’s casting announcement, the producers 
condemned it publicly, limited access to their social media accounts, and  
released a statement explicitly protecting their cast (Hall 2026). That response 
does not erase the structural problem, but it complicates any simple narrative of 
institutional exploitation. 
Equally, the performers who built public platforms did so by choice and  
benefited from those choices before bearing their costs. Lowther’s platform gave 
her a career. Mulvaney’s visibility led to her Broadway debut. Audiences who post 
criticism are exercising the same free will that performers used when they chose 
to build a public platform. Everyone is operating within a system whose rules were 
set by the platforms themselves, rules that reward engagement above all else. 
Negative comments hit harder than positive ones, even when the positive ones are 
vastly more numerous. That is not a human failing. It is a platform design feature, 
one that the industry, the performers, and the audiences within it are still  
learning to navigate. The gate has been repositioned. But who controls it now is a 
more complicated question than it first appears. Not every performer can sustain 
the labour of permanent platform visibility. Not every performer should have to. 
 
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