Analysis of Instagram adverts in the context of user experiences within the framework of surveillance capitalism

Abstract

The name of this phenomenon, which sees users as products and turns their spending time on social networks or websites without doing anything into financial income, is: Surveillance capitalism. Every step users take, everything they do to spend time, whether necessary or unnecessary, turns into data, and this data is monetised by selling it to companies or advertisers. The best performers of the function of monetising user data are global companies such as Meta, Microsoft and Google, whose applications, websites and social networking sites are used by many people in their daily lives. Every step users take, everything they do to spend time, whether necessary or unnecessary, turns into data, and this data is monetised by selling it to companies or advertisers. Global companies such as Meta, Microsoft and Google, whose applications, websites and social networking sites are used by many people in their daily lives, are the best at monetising user data. These companies, which are at the forefront of surveillance capitalism, sell the data they obtain from users to all companies that want to sell something on the internet. Surveillance capitalism deploys many technologies, but it cannot be equated with any technology. Its activities may involve platforms, but these activities are not the same as platforms. It engages machine intelligence, but cannot be reduced to machines. It produces and relies on algorithms, but it is not the same as algorithms. In the context of these definitions, the study aims to reveal the effort to understand the laws of surveillance capitalism, which affects the lives of individuals in many ways, through the experiences of individuals.

The findings indicate that surveillance capitalism influences user experiences through social media platforms such as Instagram as a post-panoptic tool, and also reveals more effective advertising strategies by monitoring and analysing consumer behaviour.