Media Matters: Taking Stock of Social Media as Facebook Faces the Music

MySpace Tom has got to be having a hearty laugh right now. It’s probably one of many he has enjoyed in recent years watching the repeated stumbles of Facebook, which culminated in the company’s recent underwhelming quarterly report and subsequent stock crash. When the now ubiquitous social media goliath toppled Tom’s once mighty virtual friendship facilitator, it was widely chalked up to the upstart platform’s user-first ethos. 2016’s Cambridge Analytica scandal sparked a crisis of confidence among loyal users and intrepid investors alike, unmasking Facebook’s true business like a Scooby Doo villain. The company was revealed not as a unifier of humanity, altruistically bringing friends, families, and nations together one emoji at a time, but a bottomline-driven proprietor of data collection and sales. Under the Facebook business model, the company’s 2.2 billion users are not the customers, they are the product.

What Social Is Selling

The writing was on the (Facebook) wall all along. With the average digital denizen logging untold hundreds of hours each year friending, tagging, tweeting, pinging, snapping, swiping, and selfie-ing at a cost of little more than privacy and productivity, every one of our favorite social media time-sucks would have been out of business before Justin Bieber’s first arrest if their business was social engagement. 

However, in facilitating our digital flights of fancy, these 21st Century social hubs are able to collect all manner of personal information. Not just the basics either. Age, gender, and location are child’s play. The Tofu-of-the-Month club you joined during your sophomore year vegan experiment has that. Your social media hangouts have the good stuff: brands you follow, causes your support, content you click (and how long you engage with it), where you go, who you go with, and who you lie to about it. Perhaps most importantly, they know exactly who your friends are. There was a saying back when such idioms were actually, well, said, as opposed to memed: “Show me who your friends are, and I’ll show you who you are.” Well, friendo, Facebook knows exactly who you are, and that information is invaluable to marketers.

Facebook and other online platforms are the modern marketer’s ice cream dream. Such sites tantalize with not only massive reach, but also pinpoint hyper-targeting, thanks to ever-expanding reservoirs of user data. Increasingly sophisticated analytics capabilities are the cherry atop the sundae, allowing marketers to put their products in front of the users most likely to purchase them.

If you’re a maker of beard and mustache trimmers, female users are probably of little value to you. For that matter, neither is the junior Wall Street type who is most likely clean shaven. Nor is the Bushwick hipster who plays in a Nirvana cover band, dabbles in carpentry, and hasn’t seen a razor since the hottest app on the market was buffalo wings. You want the Williamsburg hipster who plays in a Wilco cover band, but also works at a software company, and owns a full set of non-plastic dishes. Facebook can put you directly in front of him and thousands more like him for a simple per-click cost. That's what they're selling: the perfect match between product and customer.

Going Viral: How the Cambridge Analytica Hacked the System (Or Not)

The line between marketing and manipulation is razor thin. So it was probably inevitable that the same pinpoint analytics leveraged to inundate you with sponsored content about running shoes just as you start your marathon training would eventually be used to hack your very worldview. That’s exactly what Cambridge Analytica did in the run up to the 2016 presidential election when it began using Facebook data to target prospective voters with meticulously tailored propaganda.

To be clear, the Russian-linked political consultancy did not misuse Facebook data. The data was used in precisely the way that Facebook markets it: for audience segmentation. It’s how Cambridge collected the data that has placed them at the center of a political and legal firestorm. Facebook has long facilitated third-party sign on, in which users can simply leverage their Facebook password to log in to Uber, Spotify, and myriad other apps that have become integral to the digital lifestyle. The catch? By “connecting” these third party apps to your Facebook page, you are also granting them access to all of your Facebook data, and in some cases, even that of your unsuspecting friends. It’s right there in the dense block of fine print that you skipped over in your haste to stream the new Cardi B single.

Cambridge Analytica created an app called “thisisyourdigitallife,” which ostensibly allowed users to take a 5 question personality test. The seemingly innocuous quiz’s questions, when paired with the pandora’s box of user data to which it opened the door and parsed with advanced analytics, provided Cambridge Analytica with nearly five thousand data points with which to craft and target content. Using the company’s insights, the Trump campaign and its allies were easily able to bombard likely Trump voters with pro-Trump ads and sponsored content. In the world of data-driven marketing, however, that's amateur hour. 

Perhaps more potent was the level of precision with which the campaign, in tandem with Cambridge, was able to manipulate users who would sooner hire Papa John as a diversity consultant than vote for Trump. Disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters were bombarded with content designed to sow disillusionment with Hillary Clinton and the entire electoral process, so as to reduce their participation or drive them to third party candidates. Conspiracy minded users were woven into a web of digital intrigue, in which Clinton was the Grand Poobah of a human trafficking cartel run out of the basement of a pizza parlor that doesn’t actually have a basement. Voters of color, angered by the spate of racially charged incidents dominating the news, were steered towards militant social media groups. The rapid ascendancy of such “organizations,” often created by Trump-aligned operatives, was then used to frighten nervous white voters into concert with the candidate’s “law and order” hyperbole.

Once the seeds were planted, Facebook’s own algorithms provided the water enabling the propaganda to sprout and spread like poison ivy. Unsuspecting users were quickly besieged with ever larger swaths of similar content. Without even realizing it, millions of users were soon sucked into alternate universes of targeted content designed to influence their behavior. What’s more, thanks to social media’s ubiquitous “Share” features, they were recruiting others. While a piece of sponsored content is likely viewed with inherent skepticism, an article shared by a favorite uncle, sorority sister, or television’s Scott Baio comes with built in credibility. As a result of the aggressive hyper-targeting, the 2016 election became not just a battle of competing ideologies, but of competing realities.

Unfriending Facebook

Last month, for the first time in thirteen quarters, Facebook underperformed projections for revenue and active users. Stock prices plummeted by 22% and have yet to rebound. Moreover, Facebook’s cultural hold on our digital dalliances may be loosening; the status of our engagement with the platform sliding from “in a relationship” to “it’s complicated.”

Millennials, Gen Xers, and late-adopting Baby Boomers (ironically now among the once youth-driven platform’s most loyal users) may be locked into the Facebook ecosystem for the long hall. But Centennials aka Generation Z, made up primarily of ‘tweens, teens, and young adults up to age 22, doesn’t seem to be drinking the Kool-Aid. At least not by the gallon. While Centennials actually spends even more time on social media than their Millennial counterparts, their objectives are different.

A 2017 GlobalWebIndex study found that Centennials' primary purpose for social media was entertainment rather than social networking or news. YouTube is far and away the most used platform among Gen Z, and they are more likely to be found adding GIFs to their Instagram stories, or dog faces to their Snapchat selfies than sharing political screeds on Facebook. Instagram is owned by Facebook, as are Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, two of the most popular messaging technologies among young users. However, while engagement with such apps does expose users’ data, they are far less effective for targeted messaging than Facebook proper, which seems to be slowly aging into your grandma’s social media platform.

Moreover, Centennials place a greater emphasis on the values of the brands they engage with. While Facebook’s callous commodification of its users and Zuckerberg’s detached indifference may not have phased jaded Boomers or cynical Xers, there are early signs that it did not play well among Centennials. Perhaps more significantly, Gen Z shows a strong aversion to sites that make them feel negative. A recent Origin study found that more than 40% of American 18-24 year olds report that sites such as Facebook make them feel anxious, sad, or depressed. Probably not coincidentally, 64% of participants claimed they were currently taking a break from social media, with a third considering abandoning it completely. If the social space ceases to serve as a hub for those first entering their spending years, such platforms will hold significantly less value to advertisers, and thus to investors.

The Future

It is entirely possible that we are witnessing the twilight of Facebook as cultural phenomenon. Let’s face it, Zuckerberg’s baby lost it’s “cool” factor the moment early-adopting kids found themselves friended by their parents, their teachers, and the police. So opportunistic investors looking to buy deflated stock on the cheap and cash in on a quick bounce back may want to prospect elsewhere.

Still, the ubiquity of the Facebook ecosystem across three generations suggests that it is likely now “too big to fail.” Even if it no longer carries cool currency among younger users, it's baked into their existence, like oxygen or water. They may shake their heads at the antiquated social media practices of their Farmville-playing parents and older siblings. But when those same Centennials ship off to college, they will want to stay in contact with their hopelessly out-of-touch relatives, and Facebook may well remain the path of least resistance.

More importantly, the stumbles of the last couple of years could be the best thing to happen to legacy social media platforms in the long run. In May Facebook announced that it was severely tightening its review process to which third party apps must submit in order to access user data. After the stock crash, the company followed up with a declaration that it had cut off access for hundreds of thousands of apps that had failed to undergo review. In addition, the company has also made adjustments to its privacy options, putting more control in the hands of users. UpdatedTerms of Service more clearly spell out what data is being collected and how it is being used. In its grandest mea culpa to date, Facebook announced the deletion of 583 million fake accounts.

The acknowledgement that more than a quarter of of its monthly users were bots, trolls, and spammers almost certainly played a part in Facebook’s disappointing second quarter performance. Yet, such measures are the first steps towards a model of greater user control and transparency. Digital natives not old enough to recall a world before social media have looser conceptions of privacy. They are willing, and even eager to share their lives online. What they have little tolerance for is being manipulated, exploited, and commodified - particularly for what they deem ethically questionable ends.

Tighter safeguards and greater transparency may ultimately lead to a less lucrative business model, at least with regards to advertising revenue. It may also create a more stable, and ultimately sustainable one, less prone to the explosive highs and crushing lows that have marked the nascent years of the social media industry. Think of it as the social space maturing out of its tumultuous adolescence - dynamic, wondrous, and maddeningly unpredictable - into adulthood. Now that Facebook and its peers have survived the hormonally charged years, look for the next phase to be far more consistent, methodical, a little boring even. As long as the social space can maintain its penchant for innovation alongside a newfound stability, the marketplace will ultimately reward it with a Like.

Media Matters is an exploration of the news of the day, and what it can teach us about communications, contemporary culture, and life in the digital age.

About the Author

Jeffrey Harvey is a Washington, DC based writer and content strategist with experience in broadcasting, strategic communications, public relations, marketing and media analysis. He has written prolifically on subjects including technology, healthcare and arts and entertainment. His original one act play, Coffee won a staged reading at the Kennedy Center in the Source Theater Festival.