[...] Internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter provide access to means of communication without selling access or content as commodity, yet they do not stand outside the commodity form, but rather commodify users' data. In return for the commodification of data, Facebook and Twitter provide a means of communication to their users. These means could be considered as being in-kind goods provided as return for the users granting the companies the possibility to access and commodify personal data. [...] users on Facebook and Twitter do not receive a universal medium of exchange, but rather one specific means of communication. By giving users access to their platforms, Facebook and Twitter do not provide general means of survival, but instead access to a particular means of communication whose use serves their own profit interests. This is not to say that I argue for payments to users of corporate Internet platforms that are advertising-financed. I rather argue for the creation of non-commercial non-profit alternatives that altogether escape, sublate and struggle against the commodity form.

[...] for being able to drink the Coke one has to pay money so that Coca-Cola realizes monetary profit. The consumption does not directly create value for the company. On Facebook and Twitter, the consumption process of the service entails all online communication and usage online. All of this time is not only reproduction time (i.e. time for the reproduction of labour-power), but at the same time labour time that produces data commodities that are offered by Facebook and Twitter for sale to advertising clients. In the consumption process, the users do not just reproduce their labour-power but produce commodities. So on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, all consumption time is commodity production time.

[...] Whereas wage labour is coerced by the threat of physical violence (the threat is death because of the lack of being able to purchase and consume goods), audience labour is coerced by ideological violence (the threat is to have fewer social contacts because of missing information from the media and missing communication capacities that are needed for sustaining social relations). Audiences are under the ideological control of capitalists who possess control over the means of communication. If for example people stop using Facebook and social networking sites, they may miss certain social contact opportunities. They can refuse to become a Facebook worker, just like an employee can refuse to work for a wage, but they may as a consequence suffer social disadvantages in society. Commercial media coerce individuals to use them. The more monopoly power they possess, the easier it gets to exert this coercion over media consumers and users.

[...] Smythe does not celebrate audiences as always rebelling and does not argue for social-democratic reformism that tolerates exploitation and misery. His analysis rather implies the need for the overthrow of capitalism in order to humanize society and the overthrow of the capitalist media system in order to humanize the media.

• Cocercion [...]
• Alienation: Companies, not the users, own the platforms and the created profit.
• Appropriation: Users spend time on corporate Internet platforms that are funded by targeted advertising capital accumulation models. The time spent on corporate platforms is the value created by their unpaid digital labour. [...]

Sut Jhally (1987, 78) argues that "reorganising the watching audience in terms of demographics" is a form of relative surplus value production. One can interpret targeted Internet advertising as a form of relative surplus value production: At one point in time, the advertisers not only show one advertisement to the audience as in non-targeted advertising, but they show different advertisements to different user groups depending on the monitoring, assessment and comparison of the users' interests and online behaviour. [...] The efficacy of advertising is increased [...] The more targeted advertisements there are, the more likely it is that users recognize ads and click on them.

[...] These ads contain more surplus value than the non-targeted ads (i.e. more unpaid labour time of the advertising company's paid employees and of users, who generate user-generated content and transaction data).

Social media users are double objects of commodification: they are commodities themselves and through this commodification their consciousness becomes, while online, permanently exposed to commodity logic in the form of advertisements. Most online time is advertising time. [...] advertisements do not necessarily represent consumers' real needs and desires because the ads are based on calculated assumptions, whereas needs are much more complex and spontaneous. The ads mainly reflect marketing decisions and economic power relations. They do not simply provide information about products as offers to buy, but present information about products of powerful companies.

[...] claims about the Internet in the 1990s also constituted a "Californian ideology" (Barbrook and Cameron 2001) that stresses individualism, personal responsibility, competition, private property and consumerism, lacks consciousness of inequality and exploitation and is in line with the basic ideas of neo-liberalism (Fisher 2010). [...]

There are indications that profits have been increasing as a result of the relative decrease of wages and the increase of low-paid precarious employment. [...] the capitalist relations of production have in the latter decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century been shaped by an increase of socio-economic inequality that benefits capital at the expense of labour. Neo-liberalism has been a political class struggle project aimed at the "reconstruction of the power of economic elites" and "a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal" (Harvey 2007, 19). The relations of production are shaped by a deep class conflict between the interests of labour.

[...] Its public listing as a stock market company has made Facebook definitely more prone to crisis and therefore more inclined to extend and intensify the exploitation of users. The capitalist Internet has faced a financial bubble before. Capitalism has slid into a big crisis since the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008. The social media economy's financialization may result in the next big bubble. The only alternative to exit the Internet crisis and exploitation economy is to exit from digital labour, to overcome alienation, to substitute the logic of capital with the logic of the commons and to transform digital labour into digital work.