Management Perspectives

MYTH 1: Online, everybody is equal.

What came to be known as the Facebook Files—which Frances Haugen, a former product manager in Meta/Facebook’s civic integrity team, leaked in 2021—show that the company, among other things, had a program running called XCheck. The program provides a VIP list consisting of approximately 5.8 million profiles made up of celebrities, politicians, and other high-profile users, enjoying particular privileges as they do not have to live up to the Facebook community standards to the same degree as more regular users.

The VIP-profiles have a greater freedom in what they decide to write, even if what is authored is on a direct collision course with the community standards. Soccer player Neymar, former US President Donald J Trump and sons, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Mark Zuckerberg himself were among the profiles being accordingly entitled.

As Mark Zuckerberg has declared on a routine basis, we are all equal on Meta/ Facebook and its rules apply to all of us.
This brings to mind another book by George Orwell, besides 1984 – The Animal Farm; some are more equal than others…when it is good for business. On top of that, the way attention is distributed online, it stimulates difference rather than equality.

There is a narrative out there emphasising that since we all have profiles, we all have a voice. But it is not about having a voice, it is about whether your voice is being heard.

Attention online does not follow normal distribution but power laws; some are heard much more than others which exactly is the reason why there is something called an influencer. And a Matthew Effect kicks in here too: only a few stock a lot of attention, and typically accumulate even more, while all others are dotted up and down the tail end of this power law distribution.

To be sure, a majority of online traffic is in the hands of, and firmly controlled, by a handful or two large corporations, depending on how these conglomerates are tallied up and categorised: Meta/Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc, have and control most of the traffic.

MYTH 2: You are the customer of BigTech.

Paying and receiving attention drives the attention economy’s business model. Users, platforms, and various online service providers generate information which other users spend their attention on. Spending attention generates engagement and traffic, which in turn creates the user data that social platforms and tech companies collect, curate, analyse, and subsequently package and sell as finely masked and segmented ad packages to interested advertisers.

It is from this simple advertisement model that the tech industry has spun its fortunes. In essence, it rests on capitalising on our attention: Our online behaviour is translated into behavioural data, which in aggregated form, is sold to companies for the purpose of predicting the future behaviour of different segments and mapping the potential of influencing them.

As users we tend to think of ourselves as the consumer, but in reality we are the product itself. User profiling and predicting behaviour is not only interesting for a company with a product to sell, but also for institutions, organisations, or nation states seeking to influence the behaviour of its citizens, e.g., stopping the spread of COVID-19 in populations or consolidating autocratic ambitions, as say in China.

MYTH 3: We are not ‘ad-dicted’

The products that, say, influencers promote– from Nike sneakers to views on fiscal policy, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, are as recognisable, as they are vetted by the identity profile of the influencer in question. For the user, they appear as personalised messages and ads—more or less hidden—but in any event, personalised to ‘me’ as a user who has voluntarily decided to follow the influencer.

Every follower may accordingly gain personal ownership of the ads with which one is confronted in the public space given by the influencer’s profile, again provided by the social platform of choice. Claiming ownership to personalised ads is a way to make the users addicted. An addict becomes an actual addict by the time identified ownership of the addiction is realised.

All agents in the attention economic ecosystem, whether influencers, platforms, advertisers, media, or users, are addicted to and dictated by ads. Addicted to ads, as the base for the entire business model, makes action on the social platforms appear free, smooth, efficient, voluntary, beneficial, profitable, and personalised.

The actors are, at the same time, dictated by ads. If the ads do not work in the attention economy, the influencers are not going to promote them; the advertisers and sponsors do not care to pay; the media will not allocate air time and newspaper columns; and, the users are not going to spend their scarce time on what doesn’t work and nobody cares about.

Attention is something you buy your way into, in terms of social capital or hard cash, and the receiving end pays with attention (and data). So ads control and dictate what happens in the entire ecosystem. Thus, all involved parties are ad-dicted.

MYTH 4: It is all about user experience.

As long as we ideologically and legislatively accept the attention economy business model in liberal democracies, without any real constraints on how, how much, and in what way attention is allocated and data is harvested, it will be difficult to redeem any effective control.

The official argument for harvesting, segmenting, and selling massive amounts of data is that it enhances user experience (UX). As long as ‘enhanced user experience’ remains central, the illusion that data is harvested to benefit users will continue to be perpetuated. Add to this, that the purpose of data harvest is to refine the recommendation systems of algorithms in such a way that users increasingly get precisely what their interests dictate, from hula hoops and hamster wheels to political products.

In total, the business model of tech platforms is strengthened continually through a unilateral self-reinforcing feedback mechanism, all the way down to user level. Amplified data-harvest and segmentation improves user experience through algorithmic recommendation systems that boost data harvest, segmentation, and sales (or leasing), which, in turn, cements the necessity of surveillance while continuously reinforcing information power as the revenue of BigTech.

MYTH 5: BigTech wants regulation.

BigTech has, on more than one occasion, asked for regulation while continuously lobbying against proposed legislative packages from the EU and US. In 2022, the EU converged on both the Digital Markets Act, to level the playing fields among vendors on the information market ruled by attention economy, and the Digital Services Act. BigTech has lobbied massively against both these acts; to this day, BigTech fights against their implementation.