Social Media Monetization and Demonetization: Risks, Challenges, and Potential Solutions

When a user swipes left, swipes right, browses, likes, and shares a piece of a post or video on a social media platform, the monetization system of the platform notes these actions and processes the user’s social media usage behavior. Noncommercial content, which seems to have no relation to social media monetization, could be preferred by the user. However, the user’s preference has been collected and utilized by the system to depict the user persona and detect user preferences. This information can be “monetized” at an appropriate moment by pushing a social media advertisement or a social media post containing a shopping link. This describes the basic workings of social media monetization which is quite different from our view of conventional business. Social media monetization is a novel economic schema that hybridizes commercial elements (e.g., advertisements, shopping information) and social elements (e.g., friends, community) in the service of optimal economic benefits. In the era of big data, artificial intelligence, headless e-commerce, and other frontier computing and commerce technologies, the monetization process is becoming more algorithmic, automatic, and cost-effective. The advertisement auction process in a social media platform can be automatically conducted in a way advertisers’ desire. The product(s) contained in a social media post can be precisely recommended to target users with a specific persona. It is expected that, in the future, the automation and precision of social media monetization will be further elevated and elaborated. Given this, we cannot help asking where we should locate humans in the algorithm-based economic system and what we should do when the system goes wrong?