Facebook’un Eleştirel Ekonomi Politiği: Sosyal Medyada Dijital Emek Sömürüsü

Abstract

Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the world's largest social media company. The revenue model of social media companies is based on targeted advertising. In this type of advertising, the likes left by the us er on social media and all kinds of data are sold to marketing companies as commodities. Users are expected to devote all their time and attention to the platform. The more users and time spent on the platform, the more user attention and data can be harvested, which is the prerequisite for social media companies to accumulate capital. Privacy policies have secured the collection of data. To avoid giving up on the gains provided by social media, users often ignore or never read what is written in the privacy policy so as not to waste time. Thus, they consent to their data being sold to marketing companies. Users produce and consume social media content themselves. They spend considerable time and labour doing that. However, users never get paid for that. Also, their data is sold to marketing companies as commodities. That is called digital labour exploitation. Social media platforms are free in theory, yet the exploitation of the users is the price to be paid in practice. This study aims to explain the exploitation of digital labour, characterized by unpaid user labour and data in social media. In the theoretical part of the study, the exploitation of digital labour was examined based on Facebook's capital accumulation model. A field study was conducted to identify the approach and awareness of social media users in Turkey on digital labour exploitation. It concluded that users were not highly aware of digital labour exploitation. It was determined that many users prefer to keep using these social media despite the exploitation in these platforms.