Professor John Naughton has contributed a chapter to the new book, Anti-Social Media: the Impact on Journalism and Society. The chapter, entitled Mark Zuckerberg's dilemma – what to do with the monster he has created, is also available to read online at Open Democracy.
The book, edited by John Mair, Tor Clark and Neil Fowler, recognises the beneficial effects of social media whilst also looking at at ways to minimise the bad, covering topics such as online trolling, the future of newspapers, political campaigns and journalism.
Professor Naughton, who is a former Vice-President of Wolfson College, has published widely on journalism and social media. In this chapter, he takes a look at the degree to which Mark Zuckerberg has corporate control over a competition-free platform and how the very nature of Facebook's business model leaves it vulnerable to exploitation by bad actors, political and otherwise. He describes this model – which is also followed by Google – as surveillance capitalism, where the tech companies mine data willingly given by their users and monetise it via advertising.The consequences of this model have implications for journalism (and its evil stepchild 'fake news'), democracy and even individual well-being.
Professor Naughton will be giving a Science Society talk on Friday 7 December in the Gatsby Room. You can join him for drinks and nibbles starting at 17.45 and the talk, Learning from Luther: 95 theses about technology, will begin at 18.00.
You can also follow his weekly column for the Observer, the Networker, and find him on twitter @jjn1.
