The goal of maximizing profits for shareholders by any means available incentivizes discord as the primary source of profits.

Few would deny that social discord is rising. The proposed causes range from wealth/income inequality to the rise of polarizing political ideologies and the Trump presidency.

A few commentators are starting to question the role of social media in this dynamic, and specifically, the advertising-based revenue model of social media. This advert-based revenue model is based on two principles:

1. If an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.

In other words, if you’re not paying for the service or content, then your personal information (harvested by Google, Facebook, et al.), your time online (i.e. your “engagement”) and the content you create and post for free (videos of your cute cat, expressions of outrage, etc.) are the products being sold to advertisers at a premium.

2. The more discord content sows, the more advert revenue it generates. In traditional media, audiences were measured by visitor impressions on websites, the number of web searches made for keywords, the number of viewers of a TV program, the number of listeners to a radio station, and so on.

But Facebook has changed the advert-revenue model in several key ways.Facebook now seeks “engagement” rather than impressions, and it sells so-called “dark ads”, adverts that are targeted by the advertiser to very specific audiences, so that only the people in that audience see the paid content/advert.

Only three entities know who’s seeing the paid content/advert: Facebook, the advertiser and those targeted to receive the paid content/advert.

On the face of it, this seems fairly benign. A company selling Medicare plans might target Facebook users who are about to turn 65, for example, with paid content about Medicare plans or an advert for their services.

But these changes are not benign, as longtime correspondent GFB explains in his commentary on this article, How Facebook Rewards Polarizing Political Ads (via GFB):