The Death Of Social Media
Social media has gone from building communities to breaking communities.
Social media has evolved significantly since the time of the bulletin board systems that kicked it off, long before it had a name. Originally, it was about social networking, building and maintaining communities, exchanging ideas and sharing interests, and was a social good. The monetisation of social media, however, has reached its logical conclusion, and very little of the original values that made social media an empowering force remain today. The owners of social media giants Facebook and X, in particular, have abandoned all pretence and are using our desire as a society to link and connect and work together against us to guide a corporate-state ideology and protect their own assets and interests.
Facebook, shortly after it was created, offered a wonderful, simple way to find your friends by their names rather than by their phone numbers. When I joined in January of 2007, I typed in the names of people I knew from high school, university, politics, and the high tech community in which I worked over the years. Many popped up, often with no linked friends yet and no idea how to begin.
The nascent social media service made keeping track of your contacts became far easier, reconnecting with long lost friends more possible than ever. It was a live, self-updating personal Rolodex, where you could contact them straight through their contact card. Other social media networks had risen and some had already fallen, but none had captured the ease of use, simplicity, and critical mass of this highly intuitive new system.
Orkut was created just two weeks before Facebook with a similar idea, but its clumsy interface and high level of spam accounts killed it, shut down by its owner, Google, after about ten years. MySpace was started only weeks before Orkut and, while it continues to live, it peaked in 2009, never having reached critical mass. LinkedIn was started a few months before all of those as a networking site for professionals, and while some people have found great use for it, in 15 years on the site I have yet to find it a source of anything but useless automated notifications. This is hardly an exhaustive list of the heyday of social network creation.
What the successful networks did was create a way to maintain and expand your contacts without too much fluff, provide an easy way to stay in touch, share personal news and updates, and exchange information on topics and events of interest. It allowed the development of new friends and networks and created communities that did not previously exist.
Slowly but surely, each of the networks looked for a way to make profit.
Linear logs of all of your friends’ updates slowly devolved. Companies realised that a post that made a user angry or shocked would get them to stay on the site longer than a routine life update from their high school classmates. More time on the site meant more ad revenue. More emotional reaction meant more engagement with the ads. More engagement meant more data about what the users reacted to. More data meant ads could be targeted to the individual reactions of the users and could be priced higher.
Slowly, subtly, those unjudged, unfiltered updates from your friends gave way to algorithmic suggestions of content based on not only on what you react to, but based on what the people you engage with react to, providing content you never asked for from sites you never heard of. But it was endlessly interesting, and doomscrolling was born.
The real-world communities that had used social networks to stay together started falling apart, replaced with communities invented and promoted by the highest bidder with the help of artificial intelligence.
Today, only a small fraction of the entries facebook offers me on its newsfeed are from the over 2,500 people I have connected with since joining the platform, most of whose content never appears. The vast majority are suggested or sponsored content and videos that facebook knows will generate a reaction from me, that its algorithm determines I am likely to find interesting, whether positively or negatively, along with an endless series of suggestions for far-right groups, personalities, and "information” sources. A negative reaction is, after all, still a reaction.
A small sampling of updates from my connections will be offered to see if I react to them, to determine whether they should be shared with anyone else at all. If I don’t click “like” within a few seconds of seeing those posts, it is possible nobody else will ever see them, as facebook’s artificial intelligence will determine that that post was not interesting. If the first few people offered the content don’t like it, nobody else will be given the chance.
In such an environment, anything that appears to be news can spread like wildfire. Sensational headlines and tear-jerking pictures, increasingly created by generative artificial intelligence specifically to be liked and so generate revenue, not to share information, spread the fastest. Far-right propaganda with made-up or embellished stories of national leaders or international events or policies spread the fastest. Fact-checking becomes essential.
The dominance of social media means people are increasingly going to facebook or X for news, no longer going to news websites themselves. Eyeballs and the associated ad revenue for media organisations have tanked as a result. Genuine news websites have to hide behind paywalls to generate any source of revenue. Illegitimate news websites are funded by outside interests with an agenda and can remain free. The media environment biases ever-more to fake news. Fact-checking becomes even more essential.
In Canada, the government realised the problem and tried to bring in a law to force social media companies to share their revenue with the media organisations that were losing money by the news being shared on the platform. In 2023, the government of Canada picked a fight with facebook, and facebook simply shut down access to legitimate news in the country. It is now virtually impossible to share news in the country on the platform. Genuine news in Canada has all but disappeared for the average person, handing the entire information environment over to alt-right sites that even facebook’s algorithms know is not news and therefore does not need to be censored.
The spiralling information environment has made getting legitimate news and information out to the general public, who have become completely reliant on an algorithm based on reactions and not facts for their news, virtually impossible.
Meanwhile Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and used it as a campaign platform to get Donald Trump returned to the presidency, with Musk as a critical kingmaker with now virtually limitless power.
On November 6, 2024, in the United States, it reached its inevitable conclusion when a malicious aspiring dictator regained the presidency, backed by extremists and foreign actors with motivations that are not in the best interests of the country, supported by a social media communication environment that ensured their message was the main one available to the vast numbers of people who rely on the platforms for news. Two months later on January 6, 2025, it took down the Prime Minister of Canada, whose survival in this information environment, partly of his own making, was no longer tenable.
With the far right firmly control in the United States and well on its way in Canada, the other players in big tech and social media spent much of December and January at Mar-a-Lago worshipping at the feet of Musk and Trump, and doing what they are told, culminating in Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk, all having front row seats at Trump’s inauguration, sitting in front, even, of the rest of his new cabinet:
Facebook, under its parent company Meta, has abandoned all pretence of fact checking or any progressive policies whatsoever, with its leadership openly embracing Trump and the far right.
No longer interested in building or maintaining genuine communities, the oligarchy has adapted social media’s profit-making algorithms to guide us into the totalitarian era in which we are now entering, the better to protect their profits and the power that comes with them.
They are using social media’s monopoly on community to destroy the real-world communities that built it, to turn social media as a whole into a weapon of subjugation of a people who are far too fascinated with cat videos, fake news, and funny memes to realise their democracy is being taken out right from under them, one like at a time.
Get out and support real Canadian journalism! Pay for subscriptions to independent publications like Canada's National Observer and The Tyee, to mainstream news sources like the Toronto Star, La Presse and others. Avoid any that is owned by Postmedia. Speak up for the CBC. Use it or lose it. Learn about media literacy. Share what you learn. Build real life community. I have been allergic to social media since it began and I feel totally vindicated now.
Great article. I gave up on Facebook many years ago because my account was hacked and my
contacts bombarded with requests, usuallyfor money, to help the false me. We are too involved with the USA because of the internet and are adopting a US perspectives. I do not agree with the idea that the CBC or NFB are helping to stop the bigotry directed at English Quebecers. We are tax paying citizens who are trrated by The Feds as well as Provincial organizations as Domestic Foreigners who are tolerated out of the generosity of the various Quebec Governments.