The stratification of the visibility of Google search results becomes evident if one searches for the term political news on Google: the main search results are news sites owned almost exclusively by big corporate media companies (see Table 13.1)
Facebook is the most popular social networking service in the world.⁴Some points of criticism of the service are that it has a complex and long-winded privacy policy, and it is nontransparent to users which data are collected about them and how the data are used. Facebook users are not involved in decisions. Facebook fan groups are dominated by popular culture, with politics being a sideline. Oppositionalpolitical figures are marginalized (see Table 13.2). Facebook is dominated by entertainment. Politics on Facebook is dominated by established actors. Alternative political viewsare marginalized, and especially critical politicsis not often found on Facebook. It is a more general feature of the capitalist culture industry that focuses more on entertainment because it promises larger audiences and profits.
Owned by Google, YouTube is the third most trafficked web platform in the world. There have been some well-known political uses of YouTube, such as the video of the death of Neda Soltani in the 2009 Iranian protests and the video of the death of Ian Tomlinson at the London anti-G20 protests. YouTube is also a known haven for videos by human rights activists that would be censored elsewhere. However, the question arises about how much visibility YouTube really provides to progressives, at least compared to the numbers of views of other material that is shared on YouTube. The list of the ten most viewed videos on You-Tube (shown in Table 13.3) exemplifies how the corporate exploiters ofsurplus value-generating labor control YouTube's political attention economy. At first sight, YouTube's video category “News & Politics," which is one of fifteen categories, seemsto be the bright political star on the YouTube firmament. A closer look, however, shows that the most viewed video in this category is one in which children sing the song "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands." It is an open question whether politics really does make many people very happy today. Entertainment is sought after on YouTube and Facebook, whereas more overtly political clips are far less visible
Class and Exploitation on the Internet
213