What is Data?
In some ways, the data of social media are obvious: your posts, comments, likes, friends, followers. With just 300 likes alone, a social media platform can build a precise personality profile of you that knows you better than your spouse.1
Just the tip of the iceberg #
Apps like Instagram also track your behavior, like the amount of time you spend looking at a post, what you stop to look at, what you read. Any other permissions that you grant, like your phone’s location, are readily incorporated into this torrent of data. If 300 likes are enough for Instagram to know you better than your family, then imagine what is possible with all of this other information. All of your engagement with corporate social media ultimately serves to build a digital profile of you with shocking predictive power: sexual orientation, susceptibility to addiction, political viewpoints, so on and so forth.
How is this data used? #
This digital clone of you is designed to sell advertisements. Companies pay for access to your digital profile so that they can try to sell you something in a highly targeted way. The better your digital profile, the more targeted they can be, so social media platforms are always competing to have the best model of you.
A goldmine for billionaires… #
If this digital model of your personality was only used to sell advertisements, it would be bad enough. In reality, this information is often used in other ways. For example, billionaires can (and do) buy access to your data to manipulate politics on national scales. Both Brexit2 and the 2016 US election3 used the psychological profiles taken from their hundreds of millions followers’ social media profiles to sway the outcomes of those elections.
Seen in this context, the purchase of Twitter-X by Elon Musk is not just or even primarily about personal ownership of a bully pulpit. It’s about access to over a decade’s worth of data from hundreds of millions of people: a data goldmine. The recent $33 billion sale of X to Musk’s AI company makes this abundantly clear. xAI has no interest in administrating a social media platform for “tweeting.” All they want is to churn an enormous dataset into ever-more predictive representations of users with the ultimate goal of mass manipulation.
Who do you trust? #
The centralization of this data into a handful of social media and tech companies makes it easier for the government to access our information. Do you trust that billionaires such as Musk and Zuckerberg will defend your data privacy? DOGE has already allegedly undertaken massive data extraction and consolidation from the federal government,4 and we have no understanding (yet) how it is being used.
What can be done? #
Alternative, better forms of social media exist.
Platforms are out there whose operation is not motivated by the pursuit of profit but instead by the genuine desire of people to connect and share over the internet. These platforms don’t have advertisements. They do not record every action you ever take to sculpt a digital model of your personality for selling you things. Many of these platforms are not even centralized, meaning that there is no single database of all users. These platforms don’t generate billions of dollars in revenue. They don’t advertise, so they primarily grow through word of mouth, like this.
Ditch corporate social media and its profit-driven user surveillance, and join the alternatives below!
Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. Youyou et al. (2015), The Internet Knows You Better Than Your Spouse Does. Scientific American ↩︎
Revealed: how US billionaire helped to back Brexit. The Guardian ↩︎
What Did Cambridge Analytica Really Do for Trump’s Campaign? WIRED ↩︎
A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data. NPR, DOGE Is Building a Master Database to Surveil and Track Immigrants. WIRED ↩︎