Facebook builds fabricated social realities that normalize surveillance as interaction.

Evidence

Consider the teen drama Skam, a social media series that started on Norwegian public TV and is now a very successful Facebook franchise airing in the United States, France, Germany, and Italy (and watched all over the world by millions of teenagers). Skam did not invent the use of personal surveillance as a mode of social interaction, but it definitely promotes and rewards it by encouraging viewers to stalk or “play detective” with fictional characters on Facebook and Instagram as a way to drive the narrative forward (Instagram, currently a very popular platform with young people, is owned by Facebook). The fact that Facebook can create realistic profiles for fictional characters, complete with histories and timelines that can be modified by the corporation to augment credibility, illustrates Facebook’s ability to manipulate reality for profit. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 348

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the attention/surveillance school’s claims about platform-engineered environments; the fabrication of fictional profiles is a concrete case of platform power over perceived reality. — connects to: Living publicly online normalizes constant scrutiny of one’s actions — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 382; Surveillance of social text drives people toward perfunctory, impersonal communication — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 844; Facebook’s systematic denial was timed to habituate users before scrutiny could bite. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 498 (+7 more)
• CANDY: The Skam framing phenomenon—fictional characters with real-time posts and live events—is a genuinely surprising, shareable tidbit about Facebook.

Broader Connections

• Surveillance of social text drives people toward perfunctory, impersonal communication #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 844