14. Antiagora*

Mark Zuckerberg famously called Facebook ‘the digital equivalent of a town square’, akin to the gathering place or agora of the ancient Greek city-states. Echoing the philosopher Jaron Lanier’s description of social media as privately owned digital meeting arenas made rich by unpaid or marginally paid labour, we propose that Facebook has become an antiagora: the supposed town square has morphed into the opposite of the idealised democratic meeting ground into a space of surveillance capitalism, information asymmetry, manipulation, and anti-democratic impulses. In recent years, Zuckerberg has signalled a metaphorical shift from a social network where users broadcast information to groups of people—a town hall—to a more private living room filled with smaller trusted groups. This new metaphor is also misleading. Using the Meta news ban in Canada, which blocked life-saving information from wildfire evacuees in this northern country in the summer of 2023, this chapter argues that it is time to reframe Facebook for what it is and what it does. We reject Facebook’s troubling metaphors—the town square as much as the living room—arguing that the figure of speech obscures the troubling communicative, material, and anti-democratic reality of the social media platform.