Why I Call It "Commercial Media"

If you have interacted with me you might have seen me use the term "Commercial Media" instead of "Social Media" for platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and co and use the term "Social Media" for the Fediverse.

This isn't about semantic nitpicking or an attempt to be different and difficult. It's about language and how we perceive reality. For over a decade we have allowed a handful of conglomerates to dictate the terms of our digital interactions. It's a category error to call platforms like Facebook, Instagram or TikTok "Social Media" as it mistakes the user's activity for the platforms purpose.

It should be time to look past the "pretty" interfaces and take the infrastructure into view.

People defend these platforms usually with a single boiled down argument: "I use it to talk to my friends, find my community and share my art. That is social!"

That's right. We Humans are inherently social and cooperative beings. If you would trap fifty people in a cooperative mall for hours you would see that those people have formed a community. They will eventually sit down, share stories and laugh because someone told a joke. But this wouldn't turn the mall into a public park or a community center as the mall was still build and engineered from the ground up to show advertisements, hold lots of foot traffic and extract money from your or anybodies presence.

This logic also applies on the internet. The users intent is social, to form connections, help each other and express ourselves. The platforms infrastructure on the other hand is commercial, to maximize the daily active users, extract behavioural data and monetize it.

When we call it "Social Media" we center the conversation on our behaviour, calling it "Commercial Media" does it finally center the business model of the platforms.

Words have power. Platforms labeled as "Social" carry the connotation of public utility and we trade it like a public town square. But a true public town square doesn't require you to sign of data-harvesting agreement just to walk across the pavement and it doesn't employ hundreds to thousands of data scientists to engineer psychological traps to keep you staring.

By framing these spaces as social do we internalize their systemic failures. When algorithms feed us outrage to boost engagement and activity, we blame "human nature" or "toxic internet culture". When we find ourselves doomscrolling at 2:00 AM, we blame an own "lack of discipline". But it isn't a failure of our willpower it's the success of highly optimized commercial products.

You aren't failing to socialize but successfully being monetized. The algorithms do exactly what they were coded to do.

Rebranding this in our speech does matter because it strips away the illusion of the unearned goodwill of these corporations and forces us to view a timeline on these platforms not as a stream of human consciousness but as ad-delivering mechanisms that tolerate human interaction to keep lights on.

Once you see the commercial nature of these platforms that illusion shatters and you realise that those commercial platforms can't be reformed because they function exactly as intended.

But the solution isn't to stop being online socially. It's time to move social lives to spaces especially designed for human beings and not shareholders. That's why the Open Social Web, self-hosting, federated protocols and decentralised spaces matter as they aren't just technical alternatives but ideological refusals to let our relationships be treated as resources for surveillance capitalism.

Next time you talk about the Commercial Web, call it what it is. Words matter and on Commercial Media are you the product.

If you want to hear more from me you can find me in the Fediverse at @gelbphoenix@social.gelbphoenix.de (Mastodon) or @gelbphoenix@gram.social (Pixelfed). For more posts like this subscribe to my newsletter or support me by becoming a member or donating.