If it’s the case that the average person in Great Britain will spend more cumulative hours on social media over the course of their lifetime than in the pub, we have to fiercely resist efforts to depoliticise online spaces. A worst-case scenario for our movement, which faces the inherent difficulties of any challenge to the status quo, is social media platforms becoming increasingly sanitised and imbalanced even further towards entertainment over information-sharing.



Capitalism has already had an impressive influence on how social media works. For example, major platforms now rarely display posts in simple chronological order. Facebook led the way on this in September 2011, just five months before the company was floated on the stock market with a record $104 billion valuation.



Twitter, from February 2016, altered its timeline to include old tweets and tweets liked by other users. Instagram adopted an algorithm-based timeline in June 2016. Each change has provoked a backlash from users, but is never reversed: this is because these decisions are driven by profit, rather than an effort to improve user experience.



The complex algorithms underpinning what you see on your Facebook or Twitter timeline are designed to maximise the amount of time and energy you sink into the platform, bolstering the respective company’s advertising revenue. This is even the function of seemingly innocent features such as Facebook’s iconic ‘Like’ button, which delivers dopamine boosts to the receiving user, part of the basis for a growing problem of social media addiction among predominantly young people. Facebook has a clear profit incentive to keep users hooked on its services.



The profit motive is also what is driving these companies to develop technology like “sentiment analysis”, whereby users’ data is used to judge their mood and alter their experience on the platform accordingly. In a leaked report presented by Facebook to one of Australia’s top banks, the social media giant boasted that it could detect when its young users feel insecure, stressed or anxious, though later insisted it was not (yet) allowing advertisers to target users on that basis. (Facebook has already had to apologise for running secret psychological tests on its users).



It’s possible to hold a more optimistic outlook on the state of the Internet by focusing on the vibrancy and growth of the free-and-open-source software (FOSS) movement and collaborative projects like Wikipedia.



Software like the Linux kernel, which now powers Android smartphones, has been collectively built and maintained by over 12,000 programmers working either on their own initiative or for one of over 200 companies and organisations who support the project. Wikipedia, a non-profit project relying on voluntary contributions and donations, has built up a library of over 40 million articles in 299 different languages since it launched in 2001.



This is certainly an illustration of the Internet’s potential, and a useful counterpoint to those who would argue that profit and greed are the sole drivers of human progress and innovation. Unfortunately, neither the FOSS movement nor Wikipedia pose a serious threat to their opposite: the Internet-for-profit. Like cooperatives under capitalism, they are doomed to exist on the fringes of a system in which they are inherently disadvantaged and unable to compete effectively without compromising on their original ideals.



Having steadily eroding Internet Explorer’s virtual monopoly over the course of several years, Firefox, the free-and-open-source browser project developed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, was quickly deposed as the world’s second-most popular web browser by Google Chrome following a short, aggressive marketing campaign by Google. Although Chrome’s source code is drawn from the free-and-open-source Chromium project, the function of Chrome’s growth has been to reinforce Google’s hegemony over key web services – locking users into Google Search, encouraging them to create Google accounts and make purchases from the Chrome Web Store.



It’s not even the case that all in the FOSS movement would want to challenge the concentration of online power among private companies In spite of having what would seem to be a collectivist and socialistic ethos, the movement is politically broad, even including right-wing libertarians comfortable with the coexistence of profit-seeking monopolies alongside collaborative projects. (Richard Stallman, widely seen as the father of the movement, himself says: “The Free Software movement [is] concerned with one specific issue: freedom and community for software users. Libertarians are welcome in the Free Software movement, if they support its goals.”)



This ideological gap puts the onus on socialists to develop and articulate a coherent alternative vision of the internet, in which the ideal of ‘free exchange of information’ can be fully realised without being made secondary to the ability of private monopolies to generate profit, and in which we neither delegate more power to private business nor return to a deregulated “Wild West” model in which we simply accept that women, ethnic minorities and queer people will be driven off popular online platforms through targeted harassment and abuse without recourse.



The alternative is socialised and democratic web infrastructure, and millions of net neutrality supporters are there to be won to the case. Socialists should engage net neutrality advocates with the simple message: Mark Zuckerberg is as much the enemy as hate figure Ajit Pai of the FCC (below).