Paul Geyer publishes political theory research on social media subscription models

The research has been published in the journal tripleC: communication, capitalism & critique.

Paul Geyer is a postgraduate researcher of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Studies whose research focuses on ideology and social media.

His latest research publication, ‘An Uncritiqued Frontier of Social Media: The Social Media Subscription Model’, foregrounds the need to critique subscription services like Twitter Blue, Snapchat+, Youtube Premium and Meta Veirified.

The article focuses on three key points:

First, subscription services have remained uncritiqued because of the blind spot created by the emphasis on data collection.

Second, the Social Media Subscription Model (SMSM) now asserts social media as part of a mixed model (Fuchs 2020, 134) instead of only being considered as an advertising model.

Third, applying the classical Marxian twist of capitalism as self-negating, the SMSM is also a structural response to a contradiction of ‘peak data’, meaning how does social media sustain itself if it commodifies all data? Stressing the necessity of viewing the SMSM and social media as part of a Mixed Model.

The article is published open-access and is available to read on the tripleC website here.