Executives in the social quantification sector, whether or not they planned to, are becoming social theorists, or at least trying to sound like them. “Thank you for believing in this community,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg in his full-page apology in British Sunday newspapers on March 25, 2018, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But behind the bland term community lay a lot of background theorizing. Certainly executives’ habit of speaking like social theorists did not start in the past decade. Just before the 2012 Facebook international public-share offering, Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook is “a fabric that can make any experience online social.” In 2010, he had already dubbed the 2007 invention of the social graph (Facebook’s way of mapping the network connections between users) “our way of explaining the phenomenon we thought was happening in the world.”

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 426