Time for a Digital Labor Movement

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

13 January 14

ven though I have a journalism degree and worked for NPR affiliates for 5 years, I no longer read newspapers, watch TV, or listen to the radio. I get all of my news from Twitter by following people on the ground, credible journalists, and independent news outlets. I get a 140-character headline, a link to click on if I want to know more, and all of my news updates in real-time without any commercial interruption. I consider myself far more informed than I was in the days where I depended on conventional media for my information.

News content alone is nothing without distribution. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to see it or hear it, it is of little consequence. The same applies if someone writes a powerful, brilliant, hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism but doesn't have the social media savvy necessary to spread it around and get it seen by thousands of people on his own.

Just as the newspapermen and radio personalities were the creators and distributors of content in the 20th century, today's savviest social media users are the creators and distributors of the content making headlines and getting coverage from the conventional media. If those early content creators and distributors got paid for their work, why shouldn't we?

Today, Facebook is worth more than $100 billion, and is expected to make $12 billion in annual revenue by 2016 after creating a search engine of the content its 1 billion users have created for them over the years without pay. Facebook makes its money by tracking the content we post that gets more likes and shares than other content we post, and sells that data to advertisers to better track our online behavior so they can sell us stuff more effectively. Facebook and its advertising partners make billions. But the people who make Facebook's billions possible by posting viral content that gets lots of likes and shares get nothing in return for their work.

Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, makes $6 million a day. Facebook's 6,000 employees aren't capable of getting Zuckerberg $6 million a day, but the site's 1 billion users are. In posting content that lots of people like and share, advertisers get a better idea of the kind of content that is more appealing to users and buy that data from Facebook to make ads that target more people. In essence, Facebook users are like census takers: they gather data about their friends, family and coworkers, and then give that data to Facebook and its advertising partners. Both Facebook and its advertisers make lots of money off of the work we do for them. It's time we demand our fair share.

Facebook is not only making a killing off the content that page managers work hard to curate, but the site has even admitted that it's purposefully cracking down on pages' organic reach in a move to force them to pay for sponsored posts. Facebook's reasoning is that because there are so many pages competing to be posted in a user's news feed, it's only fair that the pages that pay for news feed space be given top priority. Now, Facebook is quickly becoming a pay-for-play site that forces out any page from news feeds unless they post viral content that gets shared widely. Regardless of whether a page pays for sponsored posts or posts viral content, Facebook and its advertising partners will still make money off their content.

Such a greedy move is akin to a constituent relations manager (CRM) software that manages an organization's email blasts, like Salsa or Nationbuilder, suddenly making those organizations pay a fee for emails they send to be put in their subscribers' inboxes. If those people subscribed to your email list or liked your page, they want to see your content, and you shouldn't be charged to communicate with them. As a company that made its billions off of its users' work, the users who consistently create viral content should be paid accordingly.

The website "Wages for Facebook" (W4FB) makes the case that page administrators and content creators who do a bulk of the work on Facebook are actively making people spend more time on Facebook as a result, and the viral content those people create is directly responsible for Facebook and its advertisers raking in profits off the data we collect for them. W4FB makes the larger point that the key to getting compensation for your work is to acknowledge that Facebook is, in fact, work, and that we are the employees. By first acknowledging that we have the right to have a wage, we can move the conversation toward bargaining for what a fair wage for work should be. And if we aren't compensated for our work, we could leave voluntarily, launching a Facebook Strike and refusing to post any content that makes Facebook and its advertisers rich, shutting down their whole profit operation.

Would it make sense to pay all 1 billion of Facebook's users for posting anything and everything? Of course not. But creators of viral content can and should be paid. If, for example, a page were to be compensated for creating a viral post that reached more than 200 percent of that page's likes, page admins could get, say, ten cents per share. This means for a viral post that gets 6,000 shares, the admins of that page who created that content could all share $600. In this way, Facebook and its advertisers would have a more egalitarian relationship with the people who mine their data for them. In a way, this could also be an important tool to fight Facebook addiction.

It's a very real problem for people to spend hours of their day to voluntarily give data to corporations seeking to profit from their personal lives. But if curating content for Facebook were seen as work that one could be paid for, that could mean two outcomes: either people would suddenly work very hard to make content that gets lots of likes and shares, or people not wanting to put in hours of work for free would voluntarily leave the site. And instead of a box on a screen telling someone how many friends they have, they could quit working for Facebook and rediscover their real friendships.

It's important that Facebook's hardest-working content creators are paid justly, not just so those people can have a wage for the work they do, but also in the best interest of Facebook, since they know their advertisers are counting on people to create that content. We aren't just consumers of information, we're the creators of that information that's being sold back to us. We deserve our cut.

Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

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