Social Media Shouldn’t Be Free
If we want to be treated like customers instead of the product, we need to pay up
The old cliche “You get what you pay for” doesn’t always apply, but it usually does. The things we value typically come at a price because things worth having require effort to produce, use, and maintain. This is as true for physical products like laptops and refrigerators as it is for services like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
The current debate surrounding the deplatforming of Infowars demonstrates how wrong we’ve been to accept the services our social media platforms provide free of charge. In hindsight, we should have known that the ability to communicate and develop online relationships with people on the other side of the globe was going to come at a cost — even if that cost turned out to be more hidden than the usual direct hit to our wallets.
We are finally beginning to realize that we, the users of these platforms, were the product all along. The companies that developed the online services we use have to make money somehow. Collecting massive amounts of data that can be shared with advertisers and political campaigns is a pretty good business. (Unfortunately, it’s also amoral.)
When what is being mined is information about a platform’s users, it doesn’t matter if those…
