The Costs of Commodifying Human Connection: A Case Study on Surveillance Capitalist Social Media Platforms and Trumpist Political Extremism

Abstract

As a global means of communication and information access, social media platforms are increasingly becoming integral to daily life. Subsequently, platforms are becoming more characteristic of modern threats, such as political extremism, calling into question what responsibilities social media companies should have. Currently these companies operate with little to no oversight, and have largely placed responsibility for their platforms onto the users themselves. However, their economic model of mining personal data for profit, called surveillance capitalism, has been criticized for manipulating and exploiting users in ways that negatively shape online engagement and environments for profit. The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between surveillance capitalism and political extremism. This was done through a case study examining the roles of the four core influential features of digital technologies, as identified by an EU report, in Trumpist-political extremism. These features were reviewed for how they function for the surveillance capitalist model, followed by an analysis of aggravating and/or enabling roles the for-profit features had in the extremism. Findings reveal the extremism was exacerbated by the features in a way that created financial value for social media companies, indicating an active relationship between surveillance capitalism and political extremism.