ABSTRACT
This contribution analyses the role of social media in capitalism’s new long depression. As foundation, it summarises a Marxist political economy explanation of the profitability crisis having to do with the development of the organic composition of capital and the rate of surplus-value.
Social media such as Facebook and Google’s YouTube need to be understood in the context of capitalist accumulation, financialisation and crisis. Their targeted advertising capital accumulation model plays an important role in this context. Social media ideologies have played a role in transformations in light of the crisis. Such ideologies include the claim that there are Facebook and Twitter protests/revolutions. Social media is also a sphere, where ideologies that stand in the context of the crisis are publicly communicated and contested. Social media are in complex ways embedded into the contradictions of capitalist society, economy, politics and ideology.
