Who Makes Money From Social Media?

Free Our Feeds

Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.

Custodians of the Internet

A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...

👊💰 We need a revolution in social media business models

Deepti Doshi on the business incentives underlying social media

Reclaiming Social Spaces: Are Open Source Platforms a Path for More Human Connection?

What if social media platforms were built to serve their communities, not billionaires? Join us with the founders of Blacksky as we explore the potential of open source social media.

Let's fund the open social web

A pro-social approach to building better platforms

The politics of ‘platforms’

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.

Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.

Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web

Here’s one way to understand the symbiotic relationship between publications and platforms in the digital age. Publications depend on advertising dollars to keep producing content, so they need to hold readers’ attention. Big platforms like Facebook and Twitter already have plenty of attention, but they need vast quantities of content to fill up their newsfeeds. It seems natural, then, that publications have started relying on platforms to drive readership.

🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable

How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar

The Case for a Public Social Media Platform - JSTOR Daily

Artist and writer Joshua Citarella explores why corporate platforms corrode democracy—and what a postal-service-style digital commons could do differently.

Improving social media for democratic discourse

Social media have expanded opportunities for communication and political participation, but today's dominant platforms are optimized primarily for engagement and advertising revenue, contributing...

Why Influencers Suddenly Love Facebook. (No Joke.) “It’s My Biggest Source of Income”

A quiet overhaul of the 21-year-old platform’s monetization formula is winning over a new class of content makers.

It's obvious why we hate social media

We need better internet platforms. We're already building them.