Engineering and manipulating emotions and sociality on social media can easily result in one-dimensional social media. The Princeton researchers and Facebook were criticised for not obtaining the users’ informed consent for the online experiment they participated in. Facebook apologised to its users<sup>3</sup>. The Electronic Privacy Information Centre demanded that Facebook makes its News feed algorithm public because the secrecy of algorithms enables and supports possible manipulation.
8.3 Current Key Areas of Research
This section focuses on two key areas of current critical research about social media: digital labour and digital alienation.
8.3.1 Digital Labour
The notion of digital labour emerged in the context of the 2009 conference The Internet as Playground and Factory organised by Trebor Scholz at The New School in New York (see http://digitallabor.org). Later, also a collected volume of some of the presented contributions was published (Scholz 2013). The basic idea is that user activity on commercial digital media is unpaid labour that creates value and a digital commodity. Therefore social media companies such as Facebook and Google exploit users. My own contribution to the digital labour literature has been the combination of the digital labour concept with critical and Marxist theory (see Fuchs 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015).
If one wants to understand a particular aspect of capitalism, then one needs to look at how commodity production is organised. Marx has provided a framework for such an analysis (see Fuchs 2010):
$$
\mathsf { M } - \mathsf { C } \left( \mathsf { c } , \mathsf { v } \right) . . \mathsf { P } _ { . . } \mathsf { C } ^ { \prime } - \mathsf { M } ^ { \prime }
$$
202
Themes
3 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-apologises-psychological-experiments-onusers
4 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/04/privacy-watchdog-files-complaint-over-facebookemotion-experiment