Chapter 4 Further Reading

The Business Model of Engagement: Annotated Bibliography

The following resources deepen the analysis introduced in this chapter. They are organized by type — books, journalism, and academic papers — and annotated to explain what each contributes and how it relates to the chapter's core arguments.

Books

1. Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (Knopf, 2016)

Wu's history of the attention economy is the essential background reading for this chapter. Beginning with Benjamin Day's penny press in the 1830s and tracing through radio, television, and the internet, Wu demonstrates that the model of trading free content for advertising exposure — and the resulting incentive to capture and hold human attention — is not a digital invention but a structural feature of media economics that has recurred across every new medium. The concept of the "two-sided market" (consumers as the product sold to advertisers, rather than as the customer buying content) is developed with historical specificity that makes the attention economy feel less like an aberration and more like the latest iteration of a very old bargain. Wu's prose is accessible without sacrificing analytical depth.

2. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019)

Zuboff's monumental work is the definitive theoretical framework for understanding what this chapter calls the "data flywheel." Her concept of "surveillance capitalism" — the economic logic that claims human experience as raw material for behavioral data, which is then processed into predictions of human behavior, which are then sold in "behavioral futures markets" — is more precise than the colloquial "attention economy" framing and more analytically powerful. The book is long and dense; readers who find it demanding should read at minimum Chapters 1–3 (the behavioral data extraction logic) and Chapters 6–8 (on Google's transition from search engine to behavioral-data refinery). Essential for understanding why the business model is not merely financially extractive but epistemically extractive.

3. Foer, Franklin. World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (Penguin Press, 2017)

Foer, former editor of The New Republic, brings a journalist's eye to the structural argument about platform business models, focusing specifically on the implications for journalism and the information ecosystem. His account of how Facebook's pivot to News Feed distribution — and then its algorithmic curation of that distribution — systematically drained advertising revenue from news publishers is a vivid illustration of the downstream effects of the advertising model on the broader information economy. Less theoretically systematic than Zuboff but more immediately readable and rich with specific examples from publishing.

4. Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Henry Holt, 2018)

Lanier's manifesto is shorter and angrier than the other books listed here, but his argument about what he calls "BUMMER" (Behavior of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent) is a useful complement to the structural analysis in this chapter. Lanier, as a computer scientist and original participant in Silicon Valley's development, argues from the inside that the specific combination of algorithmic behavior modification and advertising monetization creates a system that is qualitatively different from — and more dangerous than — previous advertising models. His argument that the system is designed to produce addiction, not connection, is consistent with the evidence reviewed here, though he is less careful about the structural vs. intentional causation distinction this chapter draws.

5. Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (Yale University Press, 2017)

While Tufekci's primary subject is social movements, her analysis of platform dynamics — particularly her theory of "algorithmic affordances" and how they shape what kinds of communication and organization are possible — is essential background for understanding why platform business models have political as well as personal consequences. Her concept of "attention hacking" and the way movements become dependent on platforms whose affordances are controlled by third-party business logic is directly relevant to the political economy of engagement optimization.

Journalism and Long-Form Reporting

6. Horwitz, Jeff, and Deepa Seetharaman. "Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive." Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2020.

This report, based on internal Facebook presentations, was among the first pieces of major investigative journalism to document the gap between what Facebook's internal researchers knew about their platform's effects on political polarization and what the company's leadership chose to do about it. The key data: one internal presentation showed that, based on Facebook's own research, 64% of people who joined extremist groups on Facebook did so through the platform's own recommendation systems. The report is a direct precursor to the Facebook Papers disclosures and illustrates the "capability revelation" theme introduced in this chapter.

7. Silverman, Craig. "I Helped Popularize the Term 'Fake News' and Now I Cringe Every Time I Hear It." BuzzFeed News, December 31, 2017.

Silverman's reflection on his own role in the discourse about misinformation on platforms provides important context for the Facebook News Feed Arc introduced in this chapter. His account of how engagement optimization on Facebook systematically rewarded false news content — which was more emotionally provocative and therefore generated higher engagement than accurate news — is grounded in specific case studies from the 2016 election cycle and is accessible without being reductive.

8. Mozur, Paul. "A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts Flooded With Hatred." New York Times, October 15, 2018.

This investigation of Facebook's role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar is the most extreme documented case of the connection between engagement-optimized algorithmic distribution and real-world harm. It is included here not as a typical example but as the end-point of the causal chain this chapter traces: the same mechanism that amplifies outrage for advertising purposes can, in an environment with weak civil society institutions and high political tensions, amplify incitement to violence. The mechanism is identical; the context changes the consequence.

9. Thompson, Ben. "Aggregation Theory." Stratechery, July 21, 2015. (Free archive)

Thompson's "Aggregation Theory" is the clearest concise explanation of why advertising-supported internet platforms tend toward monopoly and why the resulting monopolists have structural advantages that are difficult to overcome through competition alone. His framework — that platforms aggregate demand by reducing transaction costs for users, then use that aggregated demand to extract value from suppliers (including content creators and advertisers) — is essential context for understanding why the business model alternatives examined in this chapter face such significant structural headwinds.

Academic Papers

10. Kramer, A.D.I., Guillory, J.E., and Hancock, J.T. "Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788–8790, 2014.

The emotional contagion study discussed in detail in this chapter. Reading the original paper — which is brief, only three pages — is valuable both for the specific findings and for the understated, technical language in which they are presented, which creates a jarring contrast with the implications. The paper's description of News Feed manipulation as having "no deception involved" and "minimal risk" illustrates the divergence between academic research norms operationalized within a corporate context and the norms that would govern the same research at a university.

11. Bail, C., et al. "Exposure to Opposing Views on Social Media Can Increase Political Polarization." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(37), 9216–9221, 2018.

This experimental study, which exposed Twitter users to a bot that retweeted opposing political viewpoints, produced counterintuitive results: exposure to opposing views increased rather than decreased polarization, particularly among conservatives. The mechanism — that encountering outrage-producing content from the other side strengthens in-group identification rather than building understanding — has significant implications for evaluating platform interventions premised on exposure to diverse viewpoints.

12. Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., and Aral, S. "The Spread of True and False News Online." Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151, 2018.

This landmark paper, analyzing 126,000 news stories shared on Twitter from 2006 to 2017, found that false news spread faster, reached more people, and penetrated deeper into social networks than true news. The mechanism, as identified by the authors, was novelty and emotional arousal: false news was more novel than true news and generated more emotional reactions (fear, disgust, surprise). These are exactly the properties that engagement-optimizing algorithms are designed to reward. The paper provides the empirical backbone for the chapter's claim that engagement optimization systematically favors misinformation.

13. Andreou, A., et al. "Measuring the Facebook Advertising Ecosystem." Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium, 2019.

An empirical investigation of the Facebook advertising ecosystem, examining how the RTB auction functions in practice, what data is used for targeting, and what the actual distribution of CPM rates looks like across different audience segments and content categories. More technical than most sources listed here, but provides empirical grounding for the chapter's claims about how the programmatic advertising market actually operates.

14. Settle, J.E. Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Settle's book bridges the gap between the chapter's business model analysis and the political effects of engagement optimization. Based on survey and behavioral data from a large panel of Facebook users, she traces the mechanisms through which algorithmically curated feeds contribute to political polarization — not simply by showing people content that confirms their views, but by shaping the emotional quality of their political experience in ways that increase anxiety and hostility toward outgroups.

15. Deibert, Ronald. Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi Press, 2020)

Deibert, founder of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, examines the advertising-surveillance infrastructure of the internet from a political economy and governance perspective. His work is particularly valuable for the chapter's themes around regulatory alternatives: Deibert provides detailed analysis of what regulatory interventions have been attempted in different jurisdictions, what has worked, and what has been resisted, as well as a sobering assessment of how concentrated corporate power in the surveillance advertising market creates structural obstacles for democratic regulation. Essential reading for Part III of this book.

A note on primary sources: Many of the internal Facebook documents referenced in this chapter are available through The Facebook Papers collection, made available through a consortium of news organizations following Frances Haugen's disclosures in October 2021. The Wall Street Journal's "The Facebook Files" series (September–October 2021) provides the most comprehensive journalistic synthesis of these documents and is freely accessible online.