Going Public on Social Media

Abstract

This brief essay questions the disconnect between the financial goals of social media properties and the concerns of privacy advocates and other new media critics. It is argued that critics of social media often fail to recognize the financial imperative of social media companies, one that requires users to divulge and publicize ever more granular aspects of their daily lives, thoughts, and feelings.

In January 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience that if he were to do it all over again, user information on his popular social networking platform “ . . . would by default be public.” ¹ Zuckerberg is not alone in this thinking. Many other executives in the new media industries have not hidden their distain for privacy settings or other such limits placed on social media’s project of radical transparency and data mining. Indeed, going back to 1999, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy famously declared that “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” ² More recently, Google’s legal team claimed that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” ³

Users have also embraced social media platform’s numerous opportunities to disclose, self-promote, and publicize. Conversely, I have yet to hear the claim that individuals search out and engage with social media in the hopes of keeping their thoughts secret and private. Yet, social media critics, educators, and government officials continue to embrace the privacy framework when discussing the failings and dangers of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other platforms. This is not to suggest that privacy concerns should not be integrated into—and respected by—social media corporations. I am merely pointing out that a critique of social media might also engage with the stated design and intent of such properties, that is to publicize thoughts, feelings, and relationships for economic gain. Constant revisions to legally complex and lengthy terms of service merely reflect the oft-stated goals of social media, the generation and collection of ever more granular data points.

And just as users have been encouraged to “go public” with their feelings, frustrations, and “likes,” sharing their friend networks to app developers and other third-party companies, social media companies too (most recently Twitter), have also gone public on stock exchanges. Not surprisingly, multiple changes to Facebook terms of service, and their corresponding efforts to increase the scope and size of user dataveillance, thus immediately preceded the firm’s search for financial investors and stock listing.

What’s more, the double imperative of “going public” on social media platforms and stock exchanges is not restricted to platform users, Facebook also tracks information detailed on non-users, creating so-called “shadow” profiles. This is a crucial point often missed by privacy advocates—social media companies are not restricting their operations to commodifying users or otherwise transgressing their respective property rights (or labor, as some neo-Marxists have argued), or even their user base as a whole. Rather, Facebook and other social media properties are seeking to capitalize upon data that point to social relationships, while also discounting others. One thus can’t help but wonder how long privacy advocates can continue to shine the light on the individual, when social media platforms always and already profile clusters of users on or off platform, with or without ever consenting to a terms of service.

So why then the push to frame the dangers of the social media world, as again in the first instance at least, a concern over individual privacy? Would it not make more sense, given the stated goals of social media CEOs, the intended goals of social media platforms, and the process of public stock listing, to develop critical theories of publicity, as financialized on social media platforms and beyond? Such a project might begin by focusing on the terms of publicity, the rules, expectations, and laws that govern the process by which we share our lives online, and in so doing recognize and address the data economy that calls forth such personal information as a matter of economic design, as an obvious and well-publicized business plan.