The Meta ‘community’ is not your own

What do the CEOs of Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, Apple, Microsoft and Spotify have in common? They have all pledged to donate at least one million dollars to Donald Trump's campaign. A political donation is certainly strategic to a certain extent, but it also explicitly expresses support for a political line. Gone are the days of liberal-leaning Silicon Valley. The discontinuation of Meta's fact-checking also sparked an outcry. Less well known, but equally worrying, are the developments surrounding the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which has been accused of being too pro-Palestine in certain articles. This is why the US Heritage Foundation is now trying to find out the identity of anonymous authors and hold them accountable.

Originally, these platforms were launched with sensible or at least innocent aims, such as promoting dialogue between people or expressing creativity.

However, these services were often unprofitable or barely profitable. The ability to capitalise on data has changed the fundamental dynamic of the platforms. The users themselves have become the product: their data, their behaviour and their most intimate interactions are analysed and monetised in order to maximise profits. On the other hand, the image presented to the outside world continues to be characterised by terms such as connection, self-expression and even democracy.

However, I will now use the word ‘community’ as it is used on Instagram, a Meta platform, to illustrate that these words have anything but their original meaning.

Instagram fosters a safe and supportive community

When I search ‘Instagram community’, Instagram describes itself as a safe and supportive community that uses safety measures to combat online bullying. Well, since the cancellation of fact-checking, this is a thing of the past, obviously the SEO texts have not yet been adjusted.

When I look at the other search results, it says: ‘Instagram is a community that unites diverse ages, cultures and values. We want to create an open space for everyone.’ This description shows that the contradictions in the use and meaning of community are much more fundamental.

This becomes clear when we realise the actual meaning of the term: A community is a social unit that actually shares a socially significant characteristic. For example, culture, religion, customs, identity, values or norms. This similarity, which can also arise through geographical proximity, then leads to a sense of belonging. Communities are an important source of social relationships outside the family and are therefore essential for people.

It quickly becomes clear that the characteristics of different communities can sometimes be fundamentally incompatible, even if they are still well within a democratic consensus: Barbecue lovers and vegans, for example.

Instagram's community guidelines make it clear that it is just not possible to design a place for everyone equally.
When it comes to the question of what is permissible, the platform is guided by certain values. Female nudity, the famous nipple, is prohibited. However, this only applies to real women, as a work of art it is okay. Words such as ‘sex’ must be expressed using emojis. As a result, the sex-positive sex shop ‘untamed.love’ repeatedly violates the community guidelines, even though information about inclusive sex toys would actually be important for the community behind ‘untamed.love’. The puritanistic sexual morals are even more evident in the fact that Meta hid content about abortion pills last week.

What is completely uncontroversial, even important content for one community is sacrilege for another, an unthinkable audacity.

The problem is that by clearly defining such guidelines, one community is given the feeling of being normal, while others are marginalised.

This kind of prioritisation is not only found when it comes to sexual morality, but also in the concealment of other political content. It is now completely accepted that you need a loophole to talk about current wars. For a story to perform, you need at least a selfie, or even better, you create a make-up video and then talk about the political content.

On the other hand, no content moderation is also a kind of content moderation, as it consciously decides to allow content without restrictions and thus favours certain dynamics such as disinformation, hate speech or trolling. This passive attitude sets normative framework conditions by implicitly signalling that all content is equally acceptable, which strongly influences the culture of the platform and user interactions.

It is therefore not equally possible for all communities to express themselves on platforms.

This also becomes clear when I look at tutorials that are all about community building. All information is aimed at building a customer base. In my understanding of ‘build a community’, it's about doing something for a community. The added value for the community on Instagram is DIY tips or entertainment at best, but the actual profit flows from the viewers to the content creator, who earns money with the content. Community as a business model. Ultimately, the community helps the individual to capitalise on themselves. This is also very much at odds with the actual meaning of the word community.

Of course, private companies are allowed to have their own values, as they are not accountable to any democratic organisation. The problem is the huge divergence between the PR that a diverse community promises and the reality. Not only do platforms have judgemental algorithms, their market power is now so great that they have a demonstrable influence on public opinion, as the Swiss Federal Media Commission recently stated in a report.

In the last few days there has been another wave of departures from social media, yesterday the friend with whom I share my Spotify Family subscription asked me if we wanted to switch to TIDAL.

For me, the question remains how we can re-appropriate digital technologies so that we can build spaces that reflect the values of our respective communities.