Terms of Service Quotes

“Who hasn’t stopped an activity mid-stride so that a friend can send out some update about it? Who hasn’t done it himself?”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” according to one popular digital-age axiom. It’s a bit glib, but there’s truth in it. The”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Pay is meager: a few cents per image or a dollar per hour, sometimes with opportunities to make a couple more bucks.* It’s brutal work, numbing, boring, and rife with imagery of gore, bestiality, abuse, and violent pornography. As one moderator, or content reviewer as they’re also called, told the journalist Adrian Chen: “Think like that there is a sewer channel and all of the mess/dirt/waste/shit of the world flow towards you and you have to clean it.” The job of these unseen laborers is to deal with all of the horrible stuff people upload to social networks and prevent it from ever being seen. They are the ones who make sure that Facebook is a clean and well-lighted place.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Pay is meager: a few cents per image or a dollar per hour, sometimes with opportunities to make a couple more bucks.* It’s brutal work, numbing, boring, and rife with imagery of gore, bestiality, abuse,”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“The result is churnalism—cheap, disposable content repurposed from press releases, news reports, viral media, social networks, and elsewhere, all of it practically out-of-date and irrelevant as soon as someone clicks Publish. With”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Both Google search results and Facebook’s News Feed algorithm are based on showing us what they think we want. The”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“The new American dream is to go viral,” to achieve celebrity by having your image explode across the digital firmament.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Multitasking is largely a myth; we can’t do multiple things at once, and when we try, we tend to do a poorer job at both. Frequent interruptions—such as your phone starting to vibrate while you’re reading this paragraph—make it harder to return to the task at hand. In”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” The”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Usually the sharing economy is just a way for companies to outsource labor and risk to individual consumers, who take on part of the traditional responsibilities of a company while getting a fraction of the services.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“The paradigm of social media is one that Silicon Valley would like to extend to society at large: a technocracy of benevolent, but total, surveillance. In this kind of society, profits flow to platform owners, not those writing tweets and sharing YouTube videos.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection