Social media in the scam age
Summary
Lana Swartz argues that social media has entered a “scam age” in which scams are not aberrant criminal activity at the platform’s edges but a central organizing logic of its economies, infrastructures, and culture. Drawing on her prior work on cryptocurrency and fintech, and framed autobiographically through scam-saturated Florida (from Ponzi and the 1920s land boom to Miami as “crypto capital”), Swartz contends that the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate economic activity are dissolving as platform rules, anti-fraud systems, and hustle culture are jointly remade. The essay is agenda-setting: it calls on social media scholars to treat both scams and the discursive category of “scam” as key sites for understanding platform governance, economic citizenship, and the possible futures of online life.
Key Contributions
- Reframes scams as a central rather than peripheral object of social media research.
- Introduces the concept of network scams: massively multiplayer, role-blurring formations in which believer, shill, and victim are not cleanly separable.
- Connects anti-fraud infrastructures to questions of economic citizenship, surveillance, and algorithmic sorting.
- Offers Florida as a historical and metaphorical lens — a “digital swampland” — for theorizing scam-driven platform futures.
- Treats “scam” itself as a category that does boundary work, legitimating some forms of capitalism while delegitimating others.
Methods
A reflective, essayistic intervention in an anniversary special issue rather than an empirical study. Swartz synthesizes her prior research on cryptocurrency and financial technology, deploys autobiographical and historical framing through Florida’s fraud history, and engages secondary scholarship (including on racial capitalism) and cultural commentary to build a conceptual argument.
Findings
- The global scam industry was estimated at roughly $1.03 trillion in 2024; most Americans report having encountered an online scam, and over a third have lost money or personal information.
- Scams disproportionately target the vulnerable: children on Roblox, teens facing sextortion, immigrants via naturalization-services fraud, poor people via benefits scams.
- Each new communication technology has historically opened new scam vectors; AI tools and deepfakes now massively expand scam scale and efficiency.
- “Scammy” alternatives to failing institutions — MLMs, crypto, creator economies, hustle courses — are routed through and dependent on social media infrastructures.
- Anti-fraud measures justify expansive behavioral data collection that is also used for profiling, targeting, algorithmic sorting, and AI training.
Connections
This piece resonates strongly with Marwick2026-ss and Marwick2026-qd in its concern with how platform infrastructures shape harm, vulnerability, and governance, and with Boyd2026-op on the institutional erosion that scam economies exploit and accelerate. Less directly, Baym2026-tr offers a complementary register for thinking about how relational and economic logics of platforms have shifted over the anniversary horizon this special issue marks.
Podcast
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