The Engine of Modern Social Media Advertising?

John Fraim

Thanks Richard. I watched the clip ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9GWRuNBjHk ) and of course fascinating. Part of a developing story where the bottom keeps falling out from under you as new facts break about this huge event. Perhaps the most significant tech event in history. At least the most coincidental between a whistleblower who has thousands of documents from FaceBook during her employment as a Product Manager. She reveals her identity and appears on the nation’s largest and most prestigious television news show. Really, a hyper type of Walter Cronkite of the modern era of media. A newsmagazine of the most important current news events in the nation. No one trusts anyone today, yet CBS’s 60 Minutes has probably the most trust of any media in America today. Liberals and conservatives and radicals and socialists and communists and illegal aliens alike. 

And of course, tomorrow, she takes her story and documents to Congress tomorrow. They are sure to get a different story than the stories they’ve gotten from Zuckerberg about FB. Or for that matter, other CEOs of leading tech companies. Here is an important employee from a company Congress is already considering holding hearings on for several reasons. There is certainly reason to think that much of social media operates with a similar philosophy as FaceBook. 

One of the major statements of the whistleblower is that anger causes greater social engagement social media sites of the Internet. In effect, FB makes more profit from creating anger and division among its users than creating peace. There is much less social engagement on the Internet when one is relatively at peace with themselves as people today. They go to social media on the Internet like FB when they are angry. But they are angry because anger has been created online so much in their lives. The whistleblower interviewed on 60 Minutes is very explicit. It is more profitable to create anger and division in culture and on the FB platform (a continuous loop of course) 

* * *

When you think about it (and there is a lot to think about) advertising dollars in the era of Internet social media are not based on marketing the product as marketing engagement of time on a social media platforms like FB, Instagram or What’s App. Anger brings people to social media and anger makes them engage in social media and spend more time on their platforms, within their captured universe of social communication. Not just social communication on FaceBook but almost all social communication today since FaceBook is so networked through society like some poison vine, wrapped around so much in our electronic world today. 

Anger might really be said to lay at the heart not of just FaceBook today but of the entire advertising and consumer culture of America. Perhaps the grandest change in America is happening a little behind the old curtain, off stage a little, out of sight. It is the change from a producer to a consumer society. Of course, the same change is happening to the citizens of the nation. Producers in the country are dying as Ayn Rand used for a theme in her Atlas Shrugged. I tried to read it a long time ago, but it was too long for me, and I stopped reading it. Over the years, though, I’ve come back to it. I read certain sections of the book. Not in any type of order. I have just pulled the book off my library shelf now and then over the years. 

In terms of a drone’s eye view of the past, one might suggest that the real engine of capitalism was the advertising of products. But this has changed to an advertising of not products as much as the social platforms the products “hangout” on, appearing at all sorts of times during one’s engagement with the social media. All the time, the social media learning more and more about those on the platform. Learning how their data and communication with site visitors creates the world’s greatest advertising media form. 

* * *

This is a a stunning turn relating to a change in the advertising industry today by the greatest advertising power in the world: FaceBook. Yet it is one of the factors that has really been behind much of the huge profit and growth of FaceBook. They have created more time on their site via created the emotion and engagement of anger and division between people rather than harmony and peace. 

The story continues to develop as my FaceBook page continues to be down. What the heck was the reason they shut FB down for this time? I doubt it somehow went down by itself in the longest outage in the history of social media. And right after perhaps the greatest whistleblower in history has come forward about them with thousands of internal documents. 

Yet official statements from FB today give a rather bizarre reason for the company going dark. There is no connection between the 60 Minutes interview and the entire FB system going dark all over the world? It sounds almost as crazy as a worldwide pandemic starting in a Chinese market by accident. 

It’s one of those times when more questions and observations continue to form. Some of them. It represents the greatest moment for whistleblowers ever. Will it cause a flood of other whistleblowers? Who come forward about corruption in front of Congress? But a place like Congress and DC is already so corrupt. Will there be anything done? 

* * *

In a strange way, one of the greatest perpetuators of the government narrative over the years has been CBS. Yet here, it takes the story of a whistleblower forward who might challenge or threaten the government narrative. It offers an interesting thesis that is counter to the one I now hold that the government is in bed with the media.  CBS is certainly leading media and especially, the famous, historic 60 Minutes watched by a great cross-section of the nation. It is interesting that this whistleblower has not gone forward on some communications media like Project Veritas and that CBS is promoting her story. A strange relationship if media is in bed with the government as one would not want to put out a story against the greatest social media in the world causing the emotion of anger and division rather than peace and harmony.

Again, it doesn’t take much to assume that this new social media “advertising engine” is being used by the other great Internet companies and platforms in the world. Both those who manufacture products for the Internet and those that create platforms for these products. Is it much more complicated than this today? The relationship between creating anger and division in culture for profit purposes. Emotions of anger and division create more online time for an individual than those of peace and harmony.

Is social media (like FaceBook) the grand driving force of modern culture? And, if so, a unified America is less profitable than a disjointed, disgruntled America. It was in the modern social media capitalist’s interest to create a need for restlessness, consumption, anger, division in culture mainly through their experiences on the platform of designers of social media

* * *

There has been little interest in creating harmony and peace and contentment in social media. All these emotions cause platform users to engage less with the platform. Stay off social media and the Internet! The great social media company FaceBook of course cannot have this type of collective emotional state in its billions of users around the world. Peace and harmony within their user base will run them out of business as individuals will not need to exist in their digital world of fake news. And oh, reality. Then, and only then.

Might humanity be able to successfully move on to important things.

Like living in the real, natural world rather than the artificial world of culture, always pulling farther and farther away from nature.

God always in nature and not culture. Not surprising we pull so far away from nature in modern times. All the world sucked into the grand black hole of modern Internet technology of social media engagement data. All defined by this data. And one’s data the criterion for defining one’s surrounding digital world. 

Is it possible to break from social media with a movement towards offline time spent in the natural world without any media in it. No interruptions or disturbances. No iPhones buzzing. No emails on the computer. Nothing. No technology at all. A modern form of Buddhism it seems to me. Foregoing technology. The greatest thing one could give up in our modern world. A true modern Buddhist in this sense.

Perhaps the events of the whistleblower coming forward (her materials in the WSJ in the past month, one of the causes for FB stock falling about 7%) will mark a modern turning point in culture and society and individual psyches. A serious examination of the true effects of social media. Aided by the grand media source of CBS News and their 60 Minutes team. Presenting powerful evidence to Congress. It is still difficult for me to make out who is on what side right in all the running around right now. Her appearance before Congress begins in a few hours. In many ways, it is the appearance of many more in front of Congress.

John

________________________________________