Facebook makes “$9 billion of ad revenue in the 2nd quarter this year alone”, according to Chris Hayes’ segment of “Has Facebook Grown So Massive it Can’t be Controlled?”. It is safe to say that this for-profit business is influences a ton by its ad buyers. Although this is a major part of what makes Facebook the way it is, there are many consequences that follow. When profit runs the content, news and other important information is tampered with. Sources try to get more creative and lose focus of the story, and for Facebook, this is true. A place where people used to come together to reconnect and chat has become full of ads and politics. Facebook has become so big that it should no longer be considered a ‘platform’ because the content is …show more content…
I heard some technological determinist statements and some social constructionist statements. The difference between these two concepts are that technological determinism believes that technology determines a direct outcome while constructional or social shaping believes we, as a society, and social context, shape outcomes of technology. (Croteau and Hoynes). For example, in the video, Siva Vaidhyanathan says that Facebook impacts voters turnout because it creates an urge to vote. He is saying, technology directly creates the outcome of higher voting rates. Social construction, the concept that society intercepts the outcome of technology, can be compared to saying “guns don’t kill, people kill”. The gun is not directly causing this outcome, society is using the tool in this way. Applied to media, Kara Swisher uses this type of statement when she says social media is becoming weaponized. She states that technology is not out of control but Zuckerberg and company grasp the idea and have control over it, but they have just been sloppy. Swisher says that we control what the media does and it can become bad just because we are not ahead of it and not thinking in advance, but we do control the algorithms and have power to control its