I’m not alone finding that social media isn’t actually about being social. The disconnect I find now, more than ever, is actually by design. Here’s Zeynep Tufekci writing for Wired:

These companies—which love to hold themselves up as monuments of free expression—have attained a scale unlike anything the world has ever seen; they’ve come to dominate media distribution, and they increasingly stand in for the public sphere itself. But at their core, their business is mundane: They’re ad brokers. To virtually anyone who wants to pay them, they sell the capacity to precisely target our eyeballs.

Zuckerberg wants you to believe that your voice matters. Tufekci continues:

They use massive surveillance of our behavior, online and off, to generate increasingly accurate, automated predictions of what advertisements we are most susceptible to and what content will keep us clicking, tapping, and scrolling down a bottomless feed.

Your attention, your information, their profits and power.

— h/t Brooks Review