The Platform Capitalism Exploitation Framework: A Theory-Driven Synthesis of Youth Problematic Social Media Use

The Platform Capitalism Exploitation Framework (PCEF) offers a theory-driven scaffold for understanding youth problematic social media use, situating clinically significant patterns within platform political economy rather than individual psychopathology. Integrating platform capitalism, attention economy, and technofeudalism scholarship, the PCEF specifies three dimensions: temporal exploitation (colonization of user time), data exploitation (behavioral data extraction), and content exploitation (appropriation of user content). It proposes “triple commodification” as a recursive dynamic in which youth simultaneously occupy product, producer, and consumer positions. To assess its plausibility, the author conducted a targeted synthesis: a structured qualitative assembly of 35 eligible records, comprising 28 primary studies and 7 prior syntheses. No effect sizes are pooled; quantitative reference points are taken from published meta-analyses as their own authors report them. Those estimates diverge threefold, from r = .11 for general use and depressive symptoms to r = .34 for problematic Facebook use and distress, and the ordering tracks how exposure was defined rather than how outcomes were measured. Mapping the primary studies onto framework dimensions shows data exploitation unmeasured in every one, and no study characterizing platform architecture. Six falsifiability hypotheses specify what would corroborate or reject the framework.