Corporate social media is a vastly more effective, bidirectional successor to legacy corporate media and thus is used to the same ends, i.e. manufacturing consent for broad goals of the bourgeois state. But it can also shape behavior. Facebook published a study years back that they know which candidate individuals are likely to vote for, and they demonstrated that delivery of apolitical voting reminders at election time has a statistically significant outcome on whether the test group ends up voting, and so it follows Facebook has an ability to influence election outcomes.
Beyond narrative management and behavioral control, corporate social media also has well documented ties to the u.s. intelligence apparatus.
Shoshana Zuboff makes an interesting case in her book that surveillance capitalism is a new business model in which the behavioral data of populations is harvested and sold by social media companies as a new raw material and ultimately used to predict and shape consumer behavior. There’s not a fundamental difference between use of such information for marketing or for political manipulation.
Capitalist social media should be destroyed and I believe most people are fools for using it. I do believe that a form of social media has value and would/should exist in a just society that is accountable to regular working people.
Corporate social media is a vastly more effective, bidirectional successor to legacy corporate media and thus is used to the same ends, i.e. manufacturing consent for broad goals of the bourgeois state. But it can also shape behavior. Facebook published a study years back that they know which candidate individuals are likely to vote for, and they demonstrated that delivery of apolitical voting reminders at election time has a statistically significant outcome on whether the test group ends up voting, and so it follows Facebook has an ability to influence election outcomes.
Beyond narrative management and behavioral control, corporate social media also has well documented ties to the u.s. intelligence apparatus.
Shoshana Zuboff makes an interesting case in her book that surveillance capitalism is a new business model in which the behavioral data of populations is harvested and sold by social media companies as a new raw material and ultimately used to predict and shape consumer behavior. There’s not a fundamental difference between use of such information for marketing or for political manipulation.
Capitalist social media should be destroyed and I believe most people are fools for using it. I do believe that a form of social media has value and would/should exist in a just society that is accountable to regular working people.