Facebook’s profit model conditions users into living social lives on its platforms.

Evidence

Facebook’s business model is premised entirely on its ability to capture data from its users and sell it to advertisers. Of the five corporations being discussed, Facebook is also the one that seeks to profit the most from conditioning users to conduct their social lives on its platforms, which have extended to include popular services like WhatsApp and Instagram. The company has come under fire for experimenting on users, targeting ads to them based on biased criteria, and shirking its responsibility to protect them from harmful or false content. Additionally, Free Basics, a program with fifty million users that promises to bring free internet access to populations in underdeveloped countries, has been accused of breaking net neutrality principles by allowing users to access only certain websites, above all, Facebook. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 190

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The conditioning-to-capture dynamic parallels my trees-as-infrastructure argument’s interest in how infrastructure shapes its users’ embedded routines, though on a colonial-extractive rather than ecological axis.
• XREF: connects to: Facebook weaponizes social proof by dressing commerce as friendship. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1455; Users freely did unpaid labor that increased Facebook’s own value — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1011; Facebook builds fabricated social realities that normalize surveillance as interaction. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 348 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Facebook weaponizes social proof by dressing commerce as friendship. #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1455
• Facebook’s growth practices aimed at annexing life to capital under connection’s ideology. #expands (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 95
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. #expands (0.82) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197
• Users freely did unpaid labor that increased Facebook’s own value #expands (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1011
• Facebook builds fabricated social realities that normalize surveillance as interaction. #expands (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 348
• Facebook cannot stop exploiting user emotions while revenue depends on prediction. #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 959
• Facebook cultivated the self-as-brand among ordinary individuals #expands (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1004
• Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers #corroborates (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 43