The Social Media Age

Zoetanya Sujon

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526481962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

Exploring power and participation in a connected world. Social media are all around us. For many, they are the first things to look at upon waking and the last thing to do before sleeping. Integrated seamlessly into our private and public lives, they entertain, inform, connect (and sometimes disconnect) us. They're more than just social though. In addition to our experiences as everyday users, understanding social media also means asking questions about our society, our culture and our economy. What we find is dense connections between platform infrastructures and our experience of the social, shaped by power, shifting patterns of participation, and a widening ideology of connection. This book introduces and examines the full scope of social media. From the social to the technological, from the everyday to platform industries, from the personal to the political.It brings together the key concepts, theories and research necessary for making sense of the meanings and consequences of social media, both hopefully and critically. Dr Zoetanya Sujon is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for Communications and Media at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

Part I What Are Social Media and Where Do They Come From?

1 The Social Media Landscape

Chapter Overview

• Introduction 4
• Data and Surveillance 5
  • Cambridge Analytica 6
  • China’s social credit systems 8
• Community and Connection 11
  • Pokémon Go 12
  • Memes 16
• Conclusion 19
• Further Reading and Key Resources 20

Chapter Objectives

• Introduce game-changing cases making up the social media landscape
• Identify key themes relevant to social media
  • Data and surveillance: Cambridge Analytica and China’s social credit systems
  • Community and connection: Pokémon Go and memes
• Critically assess individual cases and their relationship to the broader social landscape

Introduction

Social media are not just about connection, but also about the circulation of information and communication, sometimes at lightning speeds. Fake news and disinformation are rampant, leading some to refer to the state of pandemic misinformation as an infodemic (see Donovan and Wardle 2020; Gruzd and Mai 2020). The rise of deepfakes, images and videos using AI technology to swap faces or even create people who don’t exist at all threatens public trust and the public good. Social media invite new kinds of interaction, impacting on friendship and family groups, as well as reconfiguring public engagement through influencers, memes, viral media, algorithms and bots. Each of these also morphs and changes, from influencers to micro or even nano-influencers, and from memes to meme factories and troll armies (e.g. Abidin 2020). In addition, the normalization of social media metrics, how many likes, views, shares, follows we get, shapes how people perceive and negotiate belonging (see Rogers 2018b). All of these innovations make up a dynamic and shifting social media landscape, making it difficult to work out what is going on and how to make sense of it.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a focused look at these changes, and introduce game-changing cases which have impacted on how we think about and understand social media. To pick the most relevant cases, I have chosen examples that are cross-platform and widely recognized, and that raise questions about the purpose and meaning of social media. This whole book addresses current and emerging issues across the social media landscape, cases that indirectly and directly illustrate social media power and capture tensions between individual agency and infrastructures, as well as weaving together both commercialism and community. Subsequent chapters address specific platforms as well as cross-cutting themes, particularly in Part III on everyday life, with chapters on selfies (Chapter 7), privacy and dataveillance (Chapter 8), social screens (Chapter 9), and love, intimacy and disconnection (Chapter 10). Yet this chapter focuses on cases that are too big to fit into one chapter, and are relevant, in some way, for all of the other chapters in this book. In addition, it is useful to introduce cases which are not already wrapped in a particular conceptual framing, and can be applied to different theoretical reflections as it suits the reader.

The first two cases focus on data and surveillance, including the Cambridge Analytica events and what we understand as China’s social credit systems. The second theme looks at social media in terms of community and connection, and introduces Pokémon Go, Google’s augmented reality game that shook popular culture in 2016, as well as memes. Pokémon Go may seem to be an unusual case for a book on social media, but it does highlight the ways in which we are social on location-based platforms, and helps drive our thinking around what are and are not social media (see Chapter 2). Finally, this chapter introduces memes, which are not platform specific but constitute a significant part of digital culture and social media content. These are all complex cases, so at the end of this chapter you will find further readings on all of these cases to help direct you to where you can learn more.

In an age increasingly defined by social media and platforms, it is impossible to capture every relevant and thought-provoking case. This chapter does not aim to be comprehensive; instead it looks to provide a strategic introduction to key issues on and off of social media. These cases illustrate the contradictory and often uneven social landscape, marked by rapid change, fierce debate and serious negative and/or positive implications.

Data and Surveillance

The 2010s have been marked by unprecedented surveillance, the scale of which was revealed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden. Granted permanent residency in Russia in October 2020, Snowden was responsible for leaking 200,000-plus documents to Guardian journalists, proving US, UK and Australian government surveillance of citizens around the world. These documents revealed several government programs, such as PRISM, which directly incorporated big tech companies in the mass surveillance of citizens, including Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, YouTube, Skype, Microsoft, Yahoo and many other telecommunications companies (Greenwald 2013, 2014). Other international mass surveillance programs included XKeyScore and Tempora. The NSA selects about 22.4 terabytes of data for review every minute, which is about 5,724 two-hour HD movies (MacAskill and Dance 2013). The NSA established a global precedent for government agencies and how they monitor and surveil citizens through social media.

At near to the same time, the ‘Apple-Foxconn alliance’, what Jack Qui calls ‘Appconn’, had become famous for mistreating its staff so badly that a wave of Chinese Apple staff committed suicide in 2010, highlighting a global IT business model based on severe worker exploitation (e.g. via resource extraction for smart phones as well as IT manufacture) (Qui 2017: 6–8). Indeed, Qui argues that Appconn best represents a ‘new hegemon’, and it is not just Apple or Foxconn, or China’s low wages, that contribute to re-creating digital slavery, but the exploitative nature of the global platform economy (2017; cf. Zuboff 2015, 2019; China Labour Watch 2018).

These are important points. In our current landscape, datafication comes with mass surveillance, gross exploitation and the tremendous power of big tech, all of which set the background for two of the most important social media cases of the late 2010s: Cambridge Analytica and China’s social credit systems.

Cambridge Analytica (CA)

Cambridge Analytica, henceforth referred to as CA, is a strategic communications firm, self- described as ‘a data driven political consulting and commercial marketing firm’. CA is part of SCL (formerly Strategic Communications Laboratory, then called the ‘SCL Group’), and came to public attention for using personal data, primarily demographic information as well as ‘likes’, from 87 million Facebook accounts in 2015. These data were collected, with consent, from approximately 300,000 Amazon Turk workers and Qualtrics panels in 2015 through an app that claimed to test people’s personalities. This app was designed by Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge professor working with Facebook. Kogan’s app collected additional data from each user’s Facebook friends (approximately 267 friends each) without consent (Venturini and Rogers 2019: 533). The app collected demographic data and likes in order to make personality predictions about users which were then used for both the Leave.EU and Trump political campaigns in 2016, amongst many other uses (Cadwalladr 2018; Kogan 2018; UK Parliament 2019).

Widely reported in the media as another major ‘social media scandal’ (e.g. Chang 2018; Confessore 2018; Wong 2019b), the Cambridge Analytica events revealed Facebook’s business model is about collecting user data and profiting from those data, rather than about connecting people. Based on Facebook’s apparent data harvesting, the UK Parliament conducted an 18-month investigation into CA and social media. Based on this, their final report, Disinformation and Fake News, found that Facebook offered ‘friend permissions’ to app developers, allowing those developers to access personal information from users’ Facebook ‘friends’. This also involved whitelisting or priority access to these kinds of ‘friend’ data, only for the highest paying developers from 2015. Finally, developers were granted full access to ‘lookalike audiences’, i.e. audiences mirroring certain demographics or interests shared with the developers’ target audience (UK Parliament 2019, based on court case documents for Six4Three vs Facebook on anti-competition and privacy violations).

The parliamentary report found that, contrary to Facebook’s claims, these kinds of data- selling practices were not only commonplace, but also integral to Facebook’s business model:

We consider that data transfer for value is Facebook’s business model and that Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that ‘we’ve never sold anyone’s data’ is simply untrue. (UK Parliament 2019: 134)

Although directly related to Facebook, the UK Parliament’s findings apply to many social media platforms and the ‘complex web’ of actors involved not only in the Cambridge Analytica events, but also in datafication processes across the web, social and mobile ecosystems. Dr Emma Briant (2018), a propaganda researcher and expert on SCL Group, argues that this case is about much more than one company, and about much more than privacy invasions or data harvesting:

It’s a story about how a network of companies was developed which enabled wide deployment of propaganda tools – based on propaganda techniques that were researched and designed for use as weapons in war zones – on citizens in democratic elections. (Emphasis added)

Bearing these two points about CA’s broader implications in mind, the most essential points of this case begin with a very brief background.

In terms of politics, CA was founded in deeply political circumstances. For example, Steve Bannon, well known for his far right and extremist politics, was the former Vice President of Cambridge Analytica (2014–2016) as well as the chief executive and chief White House strategist for Donald Trump (2016–2017), and founding member and former executive chairman of Breitbart News (‘the platform of the alt-right’, 2012–2018) (Cadwalladr 2018, 2019; Osborne 2018). Christopher Wylie, one of the key whistleblowers in the Cambridge Analytica revelations, reported directly to Steve Bannon during his employment at CA – and he claims that he built Bannon’s ‘psychological warfare machine’ (Cadwalladr 2018).

Briant (2018) has also documented the extremist tactics used by CA and its multiple affiliates in political campaigns, such as ‘racist and violent video content designed to drive fear and intimidate voters in fragile states’ as well as in the US and UK. Cambridge Analytica was not unique in building these kinds of campaigns. It was one company in a complex web of companies and actors, where it is clear that harvested data – from Facebook, from Republican databases, and many other sources – were used by CA (and others) in both Donald Trump’s election campaign and Leave.EU campaigns (UK Parliament 2019: 140–47).

While some claim that the quality of Facebook data was too low to be meaningfully analysed (e.g. Venturini and Rogers 2019), Kogan himself notes that not much data are needed to make personality and voting predictions:

[Former colleagues had] already developed a model to make predictions from likes, and I had experience using the Facebook login app from my previous. This idea of predicting personality from page likes became the foundation of the project that I did with SCL. (Kogan 2018)

In addition, the quality of information has little to do with the fact that these kinds of data are collected, without consent, sold, and used to manipulate political votes and sentiment.

Notably, the public and political attention focused on Cambridge Analytica has many important implications. The first of these is that Facebook has been under investigation by both the US and UK parliaments, and has been fined £500,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK (ICO 2018) and $5 billion USD by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US (FTC 2019). While this may seem a hefty fine, when the exchange rate is accounted for and the two fines are combined, they account for 0.03% of Facebook’s 2019 total revenue (Facebook fourth-quarter 2019 report).

The ICO has also found that current UK electoral law is not fit for a digital age and has called for radical reform of ‘electoral communications laws and rules on overseas involvement in UK elections’ (UK Parliament 2019). The ICO has also called for the creation of a powerful new independent regulator to oversee a new ‘Compulsory Code of Ethics for tech companies’ (UK Parliament 2019). These proposals have been further explored in the Online Harms white paper, which ‘sets out the government’s plans for a world-leading package of measures to keep UK users safe online’ (UK Government 2019). In what seems like a final development, CA and SCL filed for insolvency and shut in early 2018.

Thus, while it seems the CA revelations have sparked serious changes to Facebook’s practices and the regulation of tech, data and political practice, many questions remain about the effectiveness of such proposals. For starters, both CA and the SCL Group have a parent company, Emerdata, which continues to conduct business and is run by the same players as CA and the SCL Group. Indeed, the UK Parliament’s final report on ‘Fake News and Disinformation’ states:

Senior individuals involved in SCL and Cambridge Analytica appear to have moved onto new corporate vehicles … We recommended that the National Crime Agency, if it is not already, should investigate the connections between the company SCL Elections Ltd and Eme...