Lisa Schirch Social Media Impacts on Social & Political Goods 9 necessarily incompatible with contributing to social and political goods, there are inherent tensions. 8. Advertisements on Social Media. Like newspapers, TV, and other media, social media platforms like Twitter, Google’s YouTube, and Facebook operate based on ads. Six million advertisers place ads on social media platforms. These ads generate profit and pay for the thousands of staff running corporations like Facebook. (Crawford 2018) 9. Attention for Sale. What is being sold by social media corporations is the attention of social media users. In exchange for using social media platforms, users agree to have their information shared with advertisers, including corporations who want to sell products, and those with specific social and political goals that want to sell ideas. 10. Harvesting Personal Data and Psychometric Profiling. Social media platforms “harvest” personal information by collecting data on what users post, where they are, who they know, and how they might be influenced. Psychometric profiling provides advertisers and political strategists with information based on users’ online activity, interests, gender, sexual preference, geographical location, religion, and any other information gleaned from our social media posts so that advertisers can tailor their ads to these “custom audiences.” (Tactical Tech 2018) 11. Advertisers Prefer Placing Ads on Social Media. For a fraction of the cost of placing an advertisement on television, newspapers or magazines, advertisers using social media platforms can target specific ads to specific groups of people. Facebook calls this its “Custom Audiences” program. Google places advertisements based on user’s searches. Google’s search engines and algorithms prioritize and sort links to pages on the internet that are relevant according to a viewer’s geographic location, language, traffic, and other factors. 12. Cultivating Addictive Habits to Collect More Data. Social media platforms like Google and Facebook collect information on billions of people, more than a third of the human race. The more time people spend on these platforms, the more data these corporations can collect. More data allows the corporations to sell more ads, in turn generate greater shareholder profits. Some researchers argue that the profit model of social media platforms relies on “hijacking attention” away from other activities. “Facebook attracts us, hooks us, encourages us to declare our affiliations, divides us, and tracks every single interaction along the way.” (Vaidhyanathan 2018, 51) In response to this critique of “addiction by design,” a few social media corporations began introducing new settings and options for users to monitor their usage in August 2018. (Hern 2018) 13. Public Loyalty and Profit. Public loyalty is important to social media platforms’ business model. Tarleton Gillespie describes the challenge that social media companies face in their torn loyalties to “customer-users” and profitdriven investors in his book Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content