Social Media and Surveillance Capitalism: Facebook, Political Polarization, Orwellian Dystopia, and American Democracy

Abstract

Social media platforms have played a significant role in recent elections in the U.S. and other democracies. While Facebook and Twitter (now renamed X) claimed that they are “on a journey to connect the world,” to serve the goals of reforms and to bring about more democracy, their platforms have been effectively used to spread lies, misinformation, and disinformation which led some analysts to argue that we now live in a post-truth world and that the Orwellian dystopia is upon us. This paper is an attempt to assess whether big tech companies have created an Orwellian state in the U.S. We argue that the idiom of the Orwellian dystopia has been misused by scholars, commentators, and politicians on the political left as well as the political right. Our analysis of social media, especially Facebook, shows that the social media companies are not intentionally trying to subvert American democracy. Instead, as a business, they are driven by a profit motive and the logic of “surveillance capitalism.” Keywords: Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, micro targeting, Orwellian dystopia, post truth