[...] Financialisation is a response to contradictions of capitalism that result in capitalists’ attempts to achieve spatial (global outsourcing) and temporal (financialisation) fixes to problems associated with overaccumulation, overproduction, underconsumption, falling profit rates, profit squeezes, and class struggles (Harvey 2003, 89; Harvey 2005, 115). The ideological hype of the emergence of a ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ that communicated the existence of a radially new Internet was primarily aimed at restoring confidence of venture capital to invest in the Internet economy. The rise of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and related tar- geted advertising-based platforms created a new round of financialisation of the Internet economy with its own objective contradiction: in a situation of global capitalist crisis corporate social media attract advertising investments because companies think targeted advertising is more secure and efficient than conventional advertising (Fuchs 2014c). Financial investors share these hopes and believe in social media’s growing profits and dividends, which spurs their investments of financial capital in social media corporations. The clickthrough-rate (the share of ads that users click on in the total number of pre- sented ads) is however on average just 0.1 per cent (Fuchs 2014c), which means that on average only one out of 1,000 targeted ads yields actual profits. And even in these cases it is uncertain if users will buy commodities on the pages the targeted ads direct them to. [...]

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).