ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 focuses on how the infrastructural design and exploitation of user data by social media platforms render conspiracism profitable. It looks at platform affordances that enable the rapid sharing of less than credible content as well as the amplification effect of algorithmic curation and how the latter supports “divisiveness.” Surveillance capitalism, understood as an economic model based on the extraction and monetisation of user data, means that all engagement, including engagement around Covid-19 conspiracy theories on social media sites, is valuable to the host platforms. The chapter adapts this formulation to posit “disinformation capitalism” as the content-agnostic monetisation techniques that help platforms retain user attention and accumulate their data. The chapter finishes by considering what kinds of infrastructural-level challenges would be needed to interrupt disinformation capitalism and what we might miss about the pleasures and rewards of online conspiracism, and digital sociality more generally, if they are seen as merely symptoms of surveillance capitalism.
