User generated content or user generated audiences? Debunking the empowerment myth through analysis of user registration and commodification on social media

Social media are looking for ways to monetise their network on the long term. These companies have two assets in common, their loyal user base and vast amounts of information about these users (which includes User Generated Content or UGC). These assets are used for targeted advertising purposes. Social media are commoditising personal information and this is visible in the social media design. The design limits users' chances to be informed and thus design influences users' agency on social media with regard to this on-going commodification. This is an indication of disempowerment, as opposed to the much celebrated nature of empowerment and autonomy via these media.
We confront the literature that celebrates user empowerment and user generated content with a critical, politic economical view on labour. This confrontation shows how UGC and PII (Personal Identifiable Information) are being leveraged for surplus value through immaterial labour. Immaterial labour (IL) was first conceptualised by Italian Marxist Autonomists (Hardt & Negri, 2001; Lazzarato, 1996) and adapted to social media by Coté and Pybus (2007). IL is used to conceptualise the commodification of subjectivities to market goods and services. This process can be with or without users' consent. Because both UGC and PII are relevant to privacy, we have added the privacy framework of conceptual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2004). Since we will be analysing distinct features of social media we have integrated the perceived and real affordances approach (Norman, 1999). This combination is needed to analyse how the commodification of UGC and PII on social media have shaped the registration process and advertising services, which shape user empowerment and disempowerment on social media.
In this paper we analyse two central aspects, the registration process and advertising services on social media. We analyse to what degree users were given an informed choice in adapting these new forms of targeted advertising. For this research we examine four social media platforms; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and StumbleUpon. They are dominant social media players, providing the clearest examples of new forms of advertising in three distinct ways. The findings are based on a combination of in-depth web content analysis and expert interviews during 2010. The outcome is based on surveillance and privacy research in the four-year interdisciplinary project 'EMSOC - User Empowerment in a Social Media Culture' (www.emsoc.be) in Flanders (Belgium).
The research shows that users are asked to opt-in once, during the registration process. Informed consent is however hard to achieve because the terms of service or privacy statements are hard to find and read. Advertising on social media exists in different forms: targeted advertising, targeted advertising coupled to social context or UGC, and advertising integrated in the main services (for example in Facebook's News Feed). As these new services are rolled out, they are either impossible to opt-out or they are hard to opt-out because users are unaware of them. The paper illustrates the limits of user empowerment on social media and how there is even user disempowerment in the case of targeted advertising and the related privacy issues on social media. This paper also proposes a method to measure users' agency with regard to their privacy on social media.

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