Social media corporations, advertising and management gurus and uncritical social media scholars that celebrate capitalist platforms associate with social media that it enables everyone to get and share information, to communicate, engage, produce and distribute content, connect with others. [...]

The problem of this approach is the simplistic understanding of participation as content-creation and sharing that ignores the political connotation of participation as participatory democracy, a system, in which all people own and control and together manage the systems that affect their lives (Fuchs 2014c, chapter 3). The engaging/connecting/sharing-ideology is an ideology because it only views social media positively and is inherently technological-deterministic. It assumes that social media technologies as such have positive effects and disregards the power structures and asymmetries into which it is embedded.

[...] Social media ideology is a form of one-dimensional thought both in the East and the West: It is silent about exploitation and disadvantages that users may have from capitalism’s and the capitalist state’s control of the Internet. Eastern and Western social media capitalists not just share the engaging/connecting/­ sharing-ideology, but also the same capital accumulation model that is based on targeted advertising and the exploitation of users’ digital labour (Fuchs 2015, chapter 7).