What’s wrong with relying on targeted advertising? Targeting the business model of social media platforms

Bibliographic Data

ID12610214
AuthorsHwa Young Kim (0000-0001-5557-8852, Philosophy, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, corresponding author)
Year2024
Pages1-21
Publication date2024-01-29
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1369-8230 • E-ISSN: 1743-8772
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13698230.2024.2309047
OpenAlexW4391317222
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited20

Social media platforms play a central role in the structure of political discourse today. It is imperative to theorise about why and how we should regulate these institutions to manage some of the problems they raise for political discourse, namely misinformation and disinformation, hate speech, and polarising content. In this paper, I scrutinise their business models to form a basis of justification and strategy to regulate social media platforms. I argue that, in virtue of their business models, platforms are morally complicit with malicious actors in quickly and widely spreading their disinformation, hate speech, and provocative claims. I do this by rejecting the claim that platforms are merely intermediaries that reflect their users popular preferences and therefore cannot be complicitous with malicious actors as they have no intentional participation. With this basis of justifying regulation, I propose a progressive tax on platforms advertising revenue based on the number of users they have and show how this is preferable to banning the business model. This can remove the main incentive social media platforms have to be complicit with malicious actors without further consolidating the 'winner take all' nature of the social media market

Advertising · Business · Business model · Economics · Internet privacy · Law and economics · Political science · Public relations · Social media · Computer Science · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Social Media and Politics · Marketing

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