We all Volunteer at Facebook

How social media presents a new political economy and profits from each of us, every day.

The thing that most notably sets social media apart from any other service is that it is free. Free for users, yet wildly profitable. How can it be that a company, like Facebook, can employ 45,000 people, make $70 billion in yearly revenue and pay out its executives more than $100 million, without charging a single user?

The answer is less appealing than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would have you think. Whenever asked this fairly straightforward question, Zuckerberg will present Facebook as a passive, neutral platform that just serves to connect people and answer that they profit because they run ads. This is true, as anyone who uses Facebook would know, and this company alone soaks up 20% of global digital advertising to make up most of their revenue.

However, while Facebook and most other social media services will present themselves simply as benign homes for digital communities, the reality is that they profit from the information, attention and labour of users, and continue to imbed themselves into more and more facets of society. From work and social life, to news, politics and entertainment, social media is almost impossible to escape, and anything but benign.

Facebook is Far from Free

One of the reasons Facebook has such a significant share of the world’s digital advertising revenue is because the platform targets specific content at certain users. It does this by gathering information on users, right from the moment they sign up to the service. Age, gender, location, country of origin and personal mobile phone numbers are among the first details that are asked in order to make a profile. 

From there on, every action of the user is logged to form a complete profile of interests, behaviour, work situation, social connections, income and even sexuality! This information is processed by an algorithm, which determines what specific content gets prioritised and directed to the individual users attention. The way users respond to this content is also logged, which over time improves the algorithm. In this way, Facebook has outsourced its own ongoing development to the online work of users, and not paid employees.

Facebook then provides this information in its suite of advertising services, letting companies precisely target advertising campaigns at users, based on their profiles, using its ever-improving algorithm. So much user knowledge is made available by Facebook that its services are a staple of any digital marketing campaign, a circumstance that profits the company hugely.

Facebook depends on the attention and online activity of its users to train its algorithm, which keeps it profitable and competitive.

In many cases, the continuing operation of the platform depends on the labour of users. Every optional survey, quality rating, update to install and user agreement to read takes time and effort and through this the platform hands off a great deal of it’s troubleshooting to the public. This strange reliance on users to both refine the platforms and populate its data banks is common practice in all digital media, especially Facebook, and puts users in a sort of hybrid position between a consumer and a worker. Albeit ones that volunteer their time and labour and harvest their own valuable information, without pay.

In any other circumstance, the enormous profiteering and outsourcing of labour to the public that Facebook does would be widely understood as exploitation. What’s more, not only is the public left in the dark about how user data can be accessed and used, Facebook itself has admitted to mishandling data and even psychologically experimenting on the public.

Your Time is Money

The primary purpose of social media platforms like Facebook is to keep users engaged for the longest amount of time possible. The more attention and activity Facebook encourages, the more their data banks fill, and advertising rates increase. While this might seem an obvious and harmless objective, how Facebook does this is very troubling.

In 2014, Facebook publicly admitted that it had used its algorithm to control the experience of more than half a million users, in order to test how it could manipulate user’s moods. The algorithm would restrict the amount of ‘emotionally positive’ posts coming from the users network, and allow ‘emotionally negative’ posts to dominate the users experience. The experiment was reported to have reduced the amount of positive sentiment in the subsequent posts and interactions of users, and caused an increase in the “transmission of anger” among networks of users.

This experiment was widely condemned as completely unethical, as users had no way of knowing they were being experimented on, and posed serious questions as to the power and influence of a platform that has 2.7 billion users around the globe. It also shows a blatant disregard for the wellbeing of its users as well as real-world communities and institutions.

Facebook itself admitted that this experiment was done in order to figure out how to keep users more engaged, and in that way it was not an altogether unusual occurrence. User attention and activity generates profits for Facebook and because of this, the algorithm, by design, will direct content towards users that encourages them to stay online, whether harmful or not.

Facebook sold Cambridge Analytica access to the information of 86 million profiles, which was illegally used, resulting in global legal action.

Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images

Facebook Does Not Protect User Data

The social media giant’s abuses go beyond psychological manipulation, as they have also demonstrated a disregard for user privacy. In the wake of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal Facebook received multiple fines from governments around the world, and now faces what could be a $500b suit from the Australian government. 

Through third party apps, Facebook sold to Cambridge Analytica, an English data mining company, the information of 86 million users, which used that data in contravention of national privacy regulations around the world. Despite being warned in 2016 by its own employees of the illegal harvesting and use of data by the English company, Facebook did not adequately respond, and attempted for several years to hide the incident.

The New Political Economy of Social Media

The business model of social media companies like Facebook presents an entirely new mode of production within society. The popularity of free-to-use, profitable social media platforms and their pervasion of our lives also creates a relationship of production that is unlike any other. 

The information of users has been made into a commodity by this system, and the attention and time it takes to provide it is a labour force. The absolute reliance on the public that this economy flourishes from should make it accountable to the public who uses it. Instead, it is common-practice for social media giants like Facebook to operate in the shadows with nearly complete unaccountability.

We all volunteer for the operation and profit of these corporations, and in return they misuse, abuse and endanger the public. This business model has demonstrated itself as deeply exploitative and dangerous, and without drastic action to regulate, dissolve or nationalise these companies, their power will continue to grow, along with the abuse.