Crises engendered by social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter have received significant academic attention in recent years, particularly with respect to their role in the spread of medical and scientific misinformation, polarization of political debate, and the erosion of democracy. These platforms have also been criticized for their negative effects on individual health and well-being, exacerbating problems such as social media addiction, attention span decline, as well as anxiety, depression, and loneliness.
Discourse on social network platforms at the academic level has primarily focused on the design of user-facing experiences. A paper appearing in the Journal of Social Computing on Dec 31 from a scholar specializing in technology ethics attempts to shift the discussion to their business model.
The author of the paper, University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business Lecturer Joanne Cheung, underscores how social media platforms are hybrid entities. Using physical space as an analogy, Cheung notes how social media platforms, like privately owned public spaces such as New York City’s Zuccotti Park, are privately owned businesses that offer public amenities. As such, a platform's ability to serve the public is mismatched with its purpose to generate private profit for shareholders. In cases when its public amenities conflict with its fiduciary duty to its shareholders, the latter wins out. This perspective is distinct from blaming individuals within platforms; instead, the mismatch between public and private interests is seen as structural outcome of the platform business model.
Specifically, the business of social media platforms operationally depends on the surveillance, extraction, and maximization of user attention. Acting as an intermediary, platforms capitalize on user attention to create, sell, and improve their advertising product. That is, the free amenities that enable users to connect and communicate is not the platforms’ primary product but rather a supply chain and sales strategy. In this way, social media platforms turn non-financial exchanges between users into financial ones, financializing everyday communication into a tradable asset, social relations into marketing channels, and people into commercial producers, consumers, and distributors.
“If social networks are to exist in service of democracy, then they need to proactively create the conditions for pluralism—to make it possible and desirable to reconcile differences rather than obscuring or exploiting them for profit,” wroteCheung.
In the piece, Cheung goes on to note the parallels between social media platforms and another, much older sector of the economy that has historically experienced similar misaligned incentives between its public service and private profit: commercial real estate development.
While real estate development plays a public service role in the creation of privately owned public spaces such as Zuccotti Park, they exist first and foremost to generate profit for investors. While the the latter at times enables the former, if the two come into conflict, private interests will prevail over the public.
Yet in the case of real estate, most societies have long since pulled back from a free-for-all and constrained what, where, and how commercial developers could develop.
As such, urban planning could potentially serve as a model for a professional role that serves the public interest. As designers of public space, urban planners must wrestle with large private interests while aiming to serve the public interest.
In order to receive the licensure to practice—and to ensure that the public interest prevails in these negotiations—urban planners in the United States for example must follow ethical principles set by the American Planning Association’s Institute of Certified Planners.
Most importantly, urban planning’s fiduciary duty to the public is both an ongoing practice of public service as well as self-improvement. In the context of longstanding problems like systemic racism, an urban planner’s ethical responsibility is not only to design and govern spaces in the public interest, but also to proactively reform its own practice in order to shift society towards equity and justice.
Cheung suggests that a similar professional role akin to that of an urban planner, with concomitant ethical principles, could be established for the digital realm.
Her paper notes these parallels in the hope that society can move from critiquing social media platforms to building alternatives that exist in the public interest by design.
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About Journal of Social Computing
Journal of Social Computing (JSC) is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal which aims to publish high-quality, original research that pushes the boundaries of thinking, findings, and designs at the dynamic interface of social interaction and computation. This will include research in （1） computational social science —the use of computation to learn from the explosion of social data becoming available today; (2) complex social systems or the analysis of how dynamic, evolving social collectives constitute emergent computers to solve their own problems; and (3) human computer interaction whereby machines and persons recursively combine to generate unique knowledge and collective intelligence, or the intersection of these areas. The editorial board welcomes research from fields ranging across the social sciences, computer and information sciences, physics and ecology, communications and linguistics, and, indeed, any field or approach that can challenge and advance our understanding of the interface and integration of computation and social life. We seek to take risks, avoid boredom and court failure on the path to transformative new paradigms, insights, and possibilities . The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms, methodologies and applications.
About Tsinghua University Press
Established in 1980, Tsinghua University Press (TUP) is a first-class comprehensive publisher in China. It publishes about 2,800 new titles in print and digital format annually, from STEM, social science & humanities to ELT, and has released 40 English and Chinese journals. TUP has a long history of close collaboration with many world-renowned publishers through copyright trade and co-publishing.
Journal of Social Computing
Public interest technologist argues social media must be governed akin to urban planning
31-Dec-2021