A war between worlds: Facebook reacting to the Time Well Spent movement in a platform capitalism era

Abstract

This master thesis aims to investigate Facebook’s reaction to the Time Well Spent (TWS)initiative, started by Tristan Harris.1 Harris has criticized how companies like Facebook haveattention capturing affordances, causing users to spend lots of time on Facebook. The researchinvestigates the question: ‘In what ways does Facebook construct time well spent in a way it fitswith its current revenue model?’ The corpus consists of one text by Facebook CEO MarkZuckerberg on how Facebook aims to address time well spent, and an interface analysis on theproposed interface solutions. Scrinek has coined the term platform capitalism to demonstratehow platforms’ business models are dependant on the amount of time users spent within theinterface.2This conflicts with the TWS critique, since Harris is criticizing the attention capturingaffordances within platforms like Facebook. Therefore, the confrontation between Facebookreacting to the TWS initiative and their proposed interface solutions will be studied. This will bedone to illustrate in what ways Facebook uses discourse to rephrase time well spent and proposesinterface solutions which still serve their business model and therefore still contain attentioncapturing affordances. Ultimately, this thesis will provide insight in the ways platforms stillmaintain their utopian view on how platforms make culture more participatory, user-centeredand collaborative.3