23 March

This is the social media business model (not a joke, this is actually it). 1. Offer people a way to network socially. This is like social heroin for people, irresistible. 2. Transform that network into an economy of likes, a hierarchy of what’s most popular. 3. Harvest the data from that hierarchy of likes and sell it to advertisers. 4. Allow advertisers to pitch their ads precisely, according to the likes. 5. Weave together the social hierarchies with the products, with ‘influencers’. Like a giant networked Tupperware party. 6. Offer the platforms to publishers of content, who can then precisely target their information according to the same ‘like’ data. 7. At this stage users, advertisers and publishers are then locked together, mutually feeding each other. 8. Then gradually remove the original benefits offered to users, advertisers and publishers, and redirect them to the platforms and their shareholders. 9. So for example, users see less and less of their original social network, and ever-more targeted advertising and publications. You may have noticed this in your feed, how it increasingly begins to look like the classifieds and opinion pages in old newspapers. 10. Advertisers in the meantime have their rates increased massively, while the platform fails to prevent fraud and scams, meaning increasingly the ads don’t even target the intended users. 11. Publishers are forced to publish their entire work on the platform, with no links to anything external, so that the platform becomes the sole place they can publish. The platforms then control and monetise access.