The New Social Media: Contracts, Consumers, and Chaos

Abstract

This is a Response to Niva Elkin-Korel, Giovanni De Gregorio, and Maayan Perel’s Article relating to contract networks on social media. Starting with their innovative proposals relating to rethinking how contractual parties interact on social media and expanding the framework of their relations for the purpose of content moderation, this Essay criticizes some of the implications of the proposed paradigm. The Response first recontextualizes social media from the perspective of social commerce and content monetization by proposing the concept of “the New Social Media.” It subsequently discusses the role of content monetization in processes of social media content moderation. The main thesis I pursue in this Response is that content monetization has led to the creation of contractual networks, the shape and participants of which are only known by platforms themselves. In the context of an opaque ecosystem where it is difficult to speculate who exactly participates in these contractual networks, the concept, while reflecting a sophisticated systematization of contractual relationships on social media, has some serious limitations.