From Facebook’s psychological experiments on unwitting users in 2014 to the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 or the Facebook files in 2021, controversies involving the company have been numerous. Despite an increased demand for transparency, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta (formerly known as Facebook), has never been too inclined to commit to any specific actions.
This can be explained by the fact that social media operate in the attention economy. Their algorithms – the ranking and recommendation systems they use to filter and propose content – also aim at maximizing the time that users spend on their platform. The goal is to expose them to ads for longer periods of time, and also collect more personal data that can subsequently be monetized. To do so, social media companies design their algorithms to trigger behavioral modifications – they raise up our desires and encourage us to immediately satisfy them, and so deprive us of the ability to truly choose.
