What’s wrong with relying on targeted advertising? Targeting the business model of social media platforms

Abstract

Social media platforms play a central role in the structure of political discourse today. It is imperative to theorise about why and how we should regulate these institutions to manage some of the problems they raise for political discourse, namely misinformation and disinformation, hate speech, and polarising content. In this paper, I scrutinise their business models to form a basis of justification and strategy to regulate social media platforms. I argue that, in virtue of their business models, platforms are morally complicit with Show more