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.