FACEBOOK
MAY be turning 20 on February 4th, but it is just as much of a magnet
for controversy and cash today as when it was a brash,
break-everything teenager. On January 31st Mark Zuckerberg, the
social network’s founder, was harangued by American senators over
the spread of harmful material.
The next day, as we published this,
he was poised to announce another set of glittering results for Meta,
Facebook’s parent company, which is now valued at $1trn. Yet even
as social media reliably draw vast amounts of attention from addicts
and critics alike, they are undergoing a profound but little-noticed
transformation. The weird magic of online social networks was to
combine personal interactions with mass communication. Now this
amalgam is splitting in two again. Status updates from
friends have given way to videos from strangers that resembles a
hyperactive tV. Public posting is increasingly migrating to closed
groups, rather like email. What Mr Zuckerberg calls the digital “town
square” is being rebuilt — and posing problems.This matters,
because social media are how people experience the internet. Facebook
itself counts more than 3bn users. Social apps take up nearly half of
mobile screen time, which in turn consumes more than a quarter of
waking hours. They gobble up 40% more time than they did in 2020, as
the world has gone online. As well as being fun, social media are the
crucible of online debate and a catapult for political campaigns. In
a year when half the world heads to the polls, politicians from
Donald Trump to Narendra Modi will be busy online.The striking
feature of the new social media is that they are no longer very
social. Inspired by TikTok, apps like Facebook increasingly serve a
diet of clips selected by artificial intelligence according to a
user’s viewing behaviour, not their social connections. Meanwhile,
people are posting less. The share of Americans who say they enjoy
documenting their life online has fallen from 40% to 28% since 2020.
Debate is moving to closed platforms, such as WhatsApp and
Telegram.The lights have gone out in the town square. Social media
have always been opaque, since every feed is different. But TikTok, a
Chinese-owned video phenomenon, is a black box to researchers.
Twitter, rebranded as X, has published some of its code but tightened
access to data about which tweets are seen. Private messaging groups
are often fully encrypted.Some of the consequences of this are
welcome. Political campaigners say they have to tone down their
messages to win over private groups. A provocative post that attracts
“likes” in the X bear pit may alienate the school parents’
WhatsApp group.
Posts on messaging apps are ordered chronologically,
not by an engagement-maximising algorithm, reducing the incentive to
sensationalise. In particular, closed groups may be better for the
mental health of teenagers, who struggled when their private lives
were dissected in public.In the hyperactive half of social media,
behaviour-based algorithms will bring you posts from beyond your
community. Social networks can still act as “echo chambers” of
self-reinforcing material. But a feed that takes content from
anywhere at least has the potential to spread the best ideas
farthest. Yet this new world of social-media brings its own problems.
Messaging apps are largely unmoderated. For small groups, that is
good: platforms should no more police direct messages than phone
companies should monitor calls. In dictatorships encrypted chats save
lives. But Telegram’s groups of 200,000 are more like unregulated
broadcasts than conversations. Politicians in India have used
WhatsApp to spread lies that would surely have been removed from an
open network like Facebook.As people move to closed groups, the open
networks left behind are less useful because of the decline in public
posting. During the covid-19 pandemic, scientists and doctors
contributed to an online debate which contained real insight as well
as misinformation. Open-source intelligence flowed when Russia
invaded Ukraine. Today those conversations are disappearing or moving
to closed channels, slowing the spread of ideas. The people still
weighing in on the public networks, meanwhile, are disproportionately
male and likely to describe themselves as very left- or right-wing:
bores, in plain English. What’s more, the open-network algorithms
driven by users’ behaviour seem primed to spread the spiciest
videos.
For something to go viral on a social network, people had to
choose to share it. Now they endorse it simply by watching, as the
algorithm rewards content that attracts the most engagement.
Deliberate curation has been replaced by a system that taps straight
into the id. Provocateurs like Mr Trump or Nayib Bukele, the
favourite in this week’s election in El Salvador, stand to benefit,
as do misinformation merchants. Platforms say they are better at
weeding out fakes. Taylor Swift, the latest highprofile victim of a
deepfake, might disagree. More urgent even than the rise of fake news
is a lack of the real sort. Mr Zuckerberg once said he wanted
Facebook to be like a personalised newspaper. But since the network’s
pivot to entertainment, news makes up only 3% of what people see on
it. Across social media only 19% of adults share news stories weekly,
down from 26% in 2018. Publications like BuzzFeed News, which relied
on social distribution, have perished. That is their lookout (and
ours). But it is everyone’s problem when nearly half of young
people say that, just as the platforms decide news is no longer
interesting, social media are their main source of news.
WhatsApp
and WhatsDown
Some
people argue that social networks’ defects can be fixed by better
governance, clever coding or a different business model. Such things
can help. But the problems raised by the new generation of apps
suggest that social media’s flaws are also the result of the
trade-offs built into human communication. When platforms swing back
towards private groups, they inevitably have less oversight. When
people escape their echo chambers, they may well face more extreme
content. When users embrace harmless entertainment, they see less
news. As social networks wither, platform operators and users should
devote less time to the old battles and more to grappling with the
new. ■