Social Media and its sinister undergirdings

 With most businesses, the user of the product or service is the source of the revenue. 

But there is another kind of business—the so-called attention-economy business, typically an ad-based business—where the user of the product or service is not directly the source of the revenue.

 Instead, the user’s attention is the product, and this product in turn is sold to advertisers or other buyers (Williams, 2018). 

Businesses that operate on an ad-based attention-economy business model, of course, have long been around, including newspapers, radio, and network television (Wu, 2016). However, the most valuable and influential form of attention-economy businesses are social media companies, such as Facebook (including Instagram), Snap Inc., and Twitter (PwC, 2018).

A significant amount of attention has been devoted to the untoward ways social media has been used, including, for example, to bully (Campbell, 2005); to radicalize individuals sympathetic to terrorist causes (Huey, 2015); to exert undue influence on geopolitical events, such as the 2016 US elections (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017); to generate mass outrage to pressure an employer into firing an employee (Bhargava, 2020; Ronson, 2015); and to polarize social groups (Sunstein, 2017). These are important issues, but they all involve using social media to pursue wrongful ends