How Facebook Is Commodifying Community

YOU COULD SAY it’s been the best of times and the worst of times for Facebook Inc. This summer the social media platform’s number of monthly users reached 2 billion. That’s more than one-fourth of the world population, and Facebook has achieved that global reach while still off limits for more than a billion Chinese. More than half of Facebook users log in every day; in the U.S., one out of every five internet page views takes place on Facebook. The company is currently valued at $435 billion.

This success has come despite what should have been a truly dreadful year for the company’s image. Rapes, murders, and suicides have been live-streamed on Facebook. And at least some of those atrocities may have been provoked by the unparalleled opportunity Facebook offers to sociopaths and exhibitionists. In addition, in the past year Facebook was guilty of helping disseminate false information that helped elect Donald Trump. The social network has also been widely named as a major contributor to our increasingly toxic political culture, in which citizens never have to face facts that might contradict their prejudices. A 2016 study from the University of Pittsburgh even found an association between social media use, including Facebook, and depression among young adults.

As the age of Trump has dawned, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been devoting a lot of time to polishing his company’s image. He’s been on a “listening tour” of heartland states aimed at learning more about the lives of his American customers. This is probably a good idea for a 33-year-old who went straight from Phillips Exeter to Harvard to Silicon Valley. But it has also fueled speculation that, when he’s old enough, Zuckerberg might want to be the United States’ next billionaire president.

Whatever his long-term intentions, one immediate result of Zuckerberg’s public soul-searching has been a new corporate mission statement unveiled in June. For years Facebook proclaimed that it was all about “making the world more open and connected.” This was a value-free statement that assumed openness and connection were unquestionable goods in and of themselves and implied there was something fundamentally wrong with concerns about privacy or autonomy. This Facebook mission reached its logical conclusion in April when we got “connected” to Steve Stephens, the Clevelander who shot a randomly chosen elderly man in the head and “shared” the video with the world.

Facebook’s new mission is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” The new buzz words, “community” and “closeness,” imply that “connection” is no longer to be for its own sake but for the goal of creating online zones of cooperation and dialogue. Zuckerberg announced the new slogan at a Chicago conference of Facebook group administrators. These are the unpaid organizers who create genuinely meaningful support groups for such previously isolated people as single fathers or sufferers of rare diseases. They were granted the privilege of paying their own way to Chicago to commune with each other, and with Zuckerberg himself.

Of course, “building community” sounds like a positive direction for Facebook, if in fact there must be a Facebook in the world. But let’s remember that “building community” will not cost the corporation anything. The company’s software engineers are designing programs to make it easier for users to find “meaningful groups” and for group administrators to manage their functioning. But those staff person-hours will be more than paid for by the ad revenues that all those new group pages (and page views) will generate.

Let’s also remember that, no matter how many times Zuckerberg intones his emotive, idealistic-sounding buzz words, we’re still talking about an incredibly profitable business whose only product is the zillions of uncompensated hours that 2 billion people spend staring at screens and posting free content.