Problems of centralized Social Media Platform

Excessive growth of commercial activities used as a marketing tool

Social media platforms have become a medium for commercial advertisements, a place for communication, exchange of opinions and sharing information. Consequently, there has been a rise in consumer’s dissatisfaction as well as damages incurred from the use of social media. According to the Korea Consumer Agency, out of 500 consumers, 63.8% have answered “experienced dissatisfaction” from the use of social media platforms and 82.4% of such dissatisfaction was caused by “excess amount of commercial posts”.

Further, as seen on the chart above, a case in which a platform provider returning massive profits generated through marketing back to its users is extremely rare. A monopoly on profits by platform providers is also a prevalent problem with the social media market. Due to an increase in advertisement exposure frequency, platform provider’s profit increases. However, ironically, the user’s usage environment is becoming increasingly worse.

Indiscriminate Leakage of Personal Information and User Activity History

With Facebook’s user information leakage incident which lead to the EU to bring GDPR into effect, social media’s personal information leakage is done opposed to a user-user agreement and beyond agreed limits. Platform providers monopolize user’s personal information and make profits through advertisements and selling user data. In that process, transparency is inhibited, questioning the platform provider’s ethical and legal responsibility. This is a problem caused when centralized services undertakes excessive business activities and allows individual’s private information to be shared with companies, regardless of our actual wishes or preferences.