The Environmental Costs of Surveillance Capitalism: A Case Study of Social Media Platforms

Abstract

The business model of surveillance capitalism, premised on the extraction of behavioral data and its predictive potential for profit, relies on extensive material infrastructure. Such profit is typically driven by practices such as telemetry, user tracking, data analytics, secondary data uses, increased user engagement, and AI model training, as well as large-scale data storage systems that retain personal information for sale or reuse. This paper is motivated by the question: how much of the rising carbon impact of ICT can be attributed to this material infrastructure? Such an inquiry provides a foundation for quantifying the environmental costs of surveillance capitalism by proposing a conceptual framework and research direction that link processes of surveillance with their underlying material realities. To demonstrate the applicability of this framework, we examine the proportion of network traffic caused by surveillance capitalism processes through a comparative case study of a corporate social media platform, X/formerly Twitter, and a decentralized, non-commercial alternative, Mastodon. Our findings highlight the existence of corporate overhead: excess resource consumption driven by corporate social media practices, which is used as an initial proxy for the activities of surveillance capitalism. Our findings further demonstrate how the corporate overhead of X can be used to establish a lower bound in CO2e emissions attributable to for-profit activities that do not contribute to the user experience.