Cory Doctorow, author, explains “enshittification” and how Facebook takes advantage of users: “We’re locked to each other”
From fun to frustrating: Doctorow explains how Facebook’s focus on ads turns social networks against the very users they first attracted.
When most of us signed up for Facebook for the first time, probably in the mid-to-late 2000s, we likely couldn’t have imagined how the platform would change.
Long-time users have complained for years about rarely seeing friends’ updates and often wondering how the Facebook algorithm decides what to show them, and why it’s often of no interest.
A new word for a familiar problem
Author Cory Doctorow has coined the colorful term “enshittification” to describe how digital platforms decay over time, or “go bad,” as he explained on an appearance on “The Daily Show.”
According to Doctorow, there are three stages to enshittification, and he uses Facebook as the “canonical” example.
Stage 1: The golden age for users
In Stage 1, the platform offers excellent service to end users to ensure they stick around. For Facebook, that meant allowing users to interact easily with each other - writing on friends’ walls, sharing content, and more. Doctorow says Facebook effectively stole users from MySpace by convincing them they were being “spied on.”
“The last thing anyone should ever want is to be on social media owned by a billionaire that spies on you,” he ironizes.
Stage 2: Businesses take over
Stage 2 is when things begin to go downhill. Monetization starts to favor business customers at the expense of regular users. For Facebook, this meant prioritizing advertisers and sellers, introducing more ads and sponsored content, while organic reach faded.
“Facebook tells advertisers, ‘If you give us a remarkably small amount of money, we will target ads to them with exquisite fidelity,’” Doctorow explains. “‘We’re going to make sure when you give us a dollar to show an ad to a user, we’re going to stuff that ad in that user’s face.’”
“We told these suckers we were only going to show them things they asked to see - that’s a lie. Take stuff from your website, put it on my website, add a link to the bottom. We’ll cram it into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see it, they’ll click the link, free traffic.’”
That means businesses and users become “locked to each other,” with advertising looking for any opportunity to make money.
Stage 3: Everyone loses
Full enshittification hits in Stage 3, which has a negative effect on both businesses and users. “Ad-targeting fidelity goes way down, ad prices go way up, ad fraud explodes,” Doctorow says.
You’ve likely seen this happen to your favorite social networks or online platforms over the last few years. Now there’s a term for it: enshittification.
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