When the Advertisers Come to Rule Our Feeds…
Are Social Media Companies Creating Feeds of Mindless Advertisements?
It seems that Facebook proper has utilized the problems and backlash stemming from the election interference of 2016 to its advantage; while using the instances that took place which were ultimately their fault in the first place, they’ve single-handedly exercised the power they hold over their platform to also shadow-ban pages, or so have some groups and individuals alleged. As the debates about deplatforming and demonetization heat up, real questions are being raised about what these platforms mean to us and what they’re for; I think, for a very long time, that many of us have held the false belief that these platforms like Facebook and Instagram were designed with our best interests at least partially at heart…but the veil of illusion is starting to life and we’re seeing these platforms for what they really are: money-making machines.
While the battle has been increasingly tense in the arena of politics, even in the areas of commerce, we’re beginning to see deplatforming that’s seemingly senseless and carried out on a whim. Having run several pages which have to do with business and not politics, I can say first-hand that shadow-banning is a very real thing. Shadow-banning happens and suddenly, overnight, a page that might have received 2,000–3,000 views-per-post will suddenly dip down into the low tens or dozens of views-per-post. This happens when Facebook deems such a page unworthy of distribution, even if the page has dedicated fans and a business to run. All of this screams that Facebook and it’s child-companies are really just creating the perfect streams of advertisements ever-so-slowly, user preferences be damned. And, in this battle for your screen time, Instagram, a company whom Facebook is a parent of, is no exception.
With Instagram putting pages ahead of the users which share through the app, as has been discussed on OneZero, I fear that these platforms are increasingly becoming nothing more than a long stream of advertisements, no longer needing the contributions of individual members. They’ve crossed the proverbial Rubicon and are now treading into the territory of being an advertisement feed, rather than bona fide social media networks. Users have less of a chance of attracting a following than businesses do, meaning that Instagram has created a bit of a self-imposed conflict of interest between the users it needs and the advertisers which are the lifeblood of its profits.
This strategy was quite genius, for all of its faults, I’m not even going to lie; get everyone hooked on Instagram as a place to show off their photos and feel like a star, even if for a moment, then hand it off to corporations to just advertise, advertise, advertise, making sales in the process…Instagram is eventually going to turn into nothing more than a feed of advertisements, something resembling more of an Etsy than social media. It’s already working its way there. The bots are out of control. Personal profiles don’t get near the algorithmic reach that companies do; it’s basically a marketer’s dream at the expense of the individual and quality content.
All of the concentration of the effort of the Facebook brand and it’s child-companies seem to be focused on building profits and revenue at the expense of the user experience, a recipe for disaster we’ve seen play out before.
…but did we expect anything less from Facebook? I don’t think I ever did. I think a lot of us are still waiting for Facebook to go the way of its forerunner, a company whose friendly figurehead, Tom, was much more likable than Mark Zuckerberg. Pinterest is still an amazing alternative to Instagram, thankfully. Too many brands ended up on Instagram which had no business being there in the first place, every small-time mom-and-pop business being run out of God-knows-where flooded the feeds. How many thousands of feeds do I need offering me the same exact CBD oil? It’s all pretty bad, anymore, and the strict, rigid, content-police have just made the platform unusable, as many women have been targeted for simply showing a little bit of skin, not even full-blown nudity.
The female body is now considered pornographic, even when it’s simply existing outside of any sort of pornographic act. As time goes on, these platforms will have to juggle the difficult situations they find themselves in, between keeping it a place where advertisers feel secure and where individuals can express themselves authentically. Social media has and has always had, an implicit sexism problem, one that stems from the male gaze and the perceptive belief that the female body is something to be sexualized.
Who’d have thought that Twitter is likely to win the social media game in the long run? I, for one, do think they will win it, especially if they implement the changes that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been discussing, changes that will seemingly make the aggregate discourse much more human and real…just give it time, my bets are with Twitter. You can’t continually put profits over users in such a flagrantly abusive fashion and expect people to love you out of sheer brand loyalty forever. Facebook and its subsidiary platforms may likely go the way of MySpace, a collapse which seemingly happened overnight, not unlike that of the Berlin Wall or the former Soviet Union. Time will tell who emerges as the social media platform which makes the most sense and causes the least amount of damage.
Google, with Google+, put profits over people straight out of the gate, and Google+ recent failure has shown that the model simply doesn’t work; sure, Twitter has only been profitable one time, but no social media giant can survive a mass-exodus like MySpace had (anyone visit MySpace recently? Yeah, I thought so). Time will tell, indeed, what’s in store for the world of social media, but one thing is for certain, the futures of these companies are anything but certain.
Do we really want to stare at feeds that are just mindless advertisements with very little, if any human content? Is that what really drives users to platforms? Please tell me I’m not alone, here, in saying that I want a much more authentic experience than these companies are trending toward!
I, for one, hope to see a more user-friendly, user-based social media world in the future, but considering the financial obligations that these companies are mostly bound by, that dream is likely to remain just that — a dream.
