The Rise of Platform Empires: Sociality as Mass Deception

The Cambridge Analytica ‘scandal’ revealed the collection of mass amounts of data not only from willing Facebook participants, but also from their non-consenting Facebook friends. In this paper, I argue that mass, secret data collection from willing and unwilling users (and non-users) is not a scandal, rather it is an industry standard driving the working business model for social media and digital platforms. The Cambridge Analytica case provides deep insight into this business model and into Facebook’s role in the rise of platform empires shaping social interaction, global economics, and not only surveillance capitalism but also data colonialism (Zuboff 2019; Couldry & Meijas 2019). While GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, TenCent) make up these platform empires, Facebook has led the way in presenting social connection as its primary aim, rather than the increasingly sophisticated collection of personal data in exchange for highly profitable targeted advertising. This mass deception is hugely significant because: it has historic precedents in the culture industries (e.g. Adorno & Horkheimer 1944; Smythe 1981); it presents digital sociality as an experience of connection and visibility while also transforming sociality into a process for invisibly producing data; and it obscures the protection of privacy-as-a-right through a complex language of copyrights and data ownership. It is this kind of deceptive sociality which promotes the rise of platform empires (and platform imperialism), eroding social privacy and transforming ordinary people into data subjects.