This weekender long read comes from the desk of Mockingbird’s social media guy, Bryan J., who reflects on the state of social media and the slew of recent articles responding to the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk.
If you haven’t seen a Mockingbird post on Facebook in a while, there’s a reason for that.
Each year, we set aside some money in the Mockingbird budget for marketing initiatives. At the advice of some social media professionals who love Mbird and want to see it grow, we would “boost” our posts and to allow those who have liked our page to actually see our articles (crazy, I know …). Social media might be free to users, but for everyone else it’s a pay to play operation. It was an effective tool — cheap, and easy to organize, a dream really for any organization looking to grow its audience.
Not so anymore. Back in August of this year, something in our Facebook posting routine caught the eye of Zuckerberg’s misinformation algorithm. To this day we don’t know what we posted or why we were flagged — the company didn’t reveal anything to us as a matter of policy (something about bad actors taking that information and using it to skirt the system). Caught up in the faceless algorithmic black box of the platform’s attempt to squash misinformation, Mockingbird was flagged as a bad actor, and we’ve had our permission to advertise and boost on Facebook permanently revoked. At the risk of playing the martyr card too heavily, the rhyme is too good to ignore: The Good News, according to the algorithm, is fake news. And with so many other voices paying to show you their content, the data shows our posts have gotten lost in the crowd.
Facebook isn’t what it used to be, and neither is the whole social networking landscape. Alongside Elon Musk’s very public and bumbling takeover of Twitter, growing concerns with Instagram and scams, and the collapse of the Metaverse, a shift seems to be afoot. Even just this week, Facebook took the time to tell me that they’re removing the “religion” section of the “about me” part of my profile, presumably while they send about 10% of their workforce severance checks. Whatever these new social networks are becoming, whatever we hope social media will be, there’s growing consensus that it’s time to say a parting word.
Social media as we know it is gone, and it’s never coming back.
1. The sense of dread and irreversible doom emanating from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have inspired a number of poetic and creative images. Elon Musk is fiddling while Rome burns. Twitter feels like the last Blockbuster, the end of an era defining business that touched everyone. Being on Twitter is like having one last cigarette in a smoker-friendly restaurant before the new bans kick in. It’s a mix of dark humor and schadenfreude, a recognition that we are losing something but also wondering whether we’re actually losing something of value.
In the Galaxy Brain newsletter from the Atlantic, Charlie Warzel describes it well. He likens our current social media landscape to a dying mall or a decaying suburban shopping center filled with payday lenders, vape shops, and a dirty dollar store. You can tell there was once something vibrant and good in these places, but the glory is gone, and they have fallen into disrepair and disuse.
Platform decay on Facebook continues apace; one year ago, in the first post of this newsletter, I compared a lot of what’s happening on Facebook to the vast wasteland of daytime TV. Twitter is full of non-Musk-related bad news, the most notable being that sports and entertainment content are waning in popularity on the platform while crypto and pornographic content are the platform’s fastest-growing categories. (Moral judgements aside, historically, it is usually a grim sign for platforms when they become disproportionately flooded by pornography and get-rich-quick material.) Similarly, places like Instagram feel a bit scuzzier lately. It’s anecdotal, but my feed and the feeds of people I talk to are so overrun with algorithmically recommended “related content” these days that you have to work a bit to find your friends in the morass.
A lot of what I’m describing is, admittedly, a vibe. But it’s a vibe of the “Welcome to Allegiant Air; yes, we’re going to charge you for a glass of water” variety. It’s not quite an “Everything Must Go” doorbusters situation, but it isn’t exactly trending in the right direction.
He goes on to say that our expectations of what social networking should be don’t match up with reality anymore. Specifically, what started off as a network to keep in touch with friends has ceased to serve that function.
The best argument that social media is dying is if you define social media as public feeds full of stuff that your friends post. Because that does appear to be going away, in part due to algorithmically curated feeds […]
Now, if your platform is in good health, with a vibrant, creative user base, and your recommendation algorithms do a good job of quickly assessing your users’ preferences, then it might work out for you. But if your user base is slowly atrophying due to the network decay I described above, or if your algorithms are pretty mediocre at understanding what your users like, your platform will start to feel a bit like a mall where all the stores have been replaced by weird cellphone-case kiosks.
Still, Warzel doesn’t think social media is gone forever — it’s mainly evolving away from a model of peer-to-peer connection to an audience-broadcasting model. Facebook and Twitter are out; Youtube and TikTok are in. Hence why we’ve switched from referring to these tech giants as “social networks,” a la the 2010 film, and started calling the whole enterprise “social media.” A network implies reciprocation, while media is about passive consumption.
2. Journalist Marie Le Conte agrees. She argues that current thirty-somethings were the first generation to grow up with the internet, and they in particular have a front row seat to the changes everyone is experiencing but nobody likes. In her essay, she describes an instance of sexual assault inspired by the internet that is heartbreaking and illuminating to the ways that pornography has changed the real world. But her observation that Instagram made the internet the realm for beautiful people is especially insightful, especially when paired with Warzel’s audience-broadcast thesis:
Her most refined hypothesis about when the internet became the real world is “when the beautiful people arrived.” “There are studies that show that attractive people have a more pleasant life. That is in the data. I am not inventing anything,” she assures. In the pre-Instagram internet, they did not exist. “The rise of Instagram marked that change: ‘Oh God, we’re doing it again, we’ve reinvented that beautiful people are popular.’ They are men and women, and they are really beautiful and boring, and it was like the internet became the typical American high school movie.”
3. It’s such a weird time that we can describe social media as both “a dying mall” and “a place only for pretty people,” and both are equally true. Over at Vice, Edward Ongweso disagrees with the assessment that social media is merely transforming or transitioning, and writes bluntly that “Social Media is Dead.”
Take the core thrust of the social network ad copy that many still recite as gospel: by harnessing the power of the internet, global communications networks, and other digital technologies, we can create spaces where communities can form and thrive. Places where we can learn about the world and connect to it, keep track of our friends or make new ones, form new identities or plug into existing ones, organize, discover, flourish, yadda yadda.
This was a stupendously naïve picture of the world, and it was recognized as such even when it was initially pitched, but it has only been altered slightly since then. Today, we recognize that the technologies responsible for social media do not always harmoniously synergize with one another to create wonderful communities. It’s relatively easy for these networks to incite a genocide, spark a mental health crisis, radicalize people, black out entire countries, and surveil specific populations.
Much of this has been a long time coming: For years, our social media feeds have largely not been unadulterated streams of posts from friends and people we’ve chosen to follow. Instead, the content we are most likely to see is, famously, selected by inscrutable algorithms, which themselves can be bypassed by advertisers who pay to boost or promote their posts. The result can hardly be called anything “social” — the goal here is mind-numbingly droll absurdities calibrated to increase and sustain engagement, not the construction of communities that can collaborate or communicate in ways that aren’t mediated by a startup or a market.
I enjoyed social media because I could stay connected with family and friends, but as their posting continues to drop on all platforms and the algorithms take over, the empty space has been filled with ads, memes, and thinly veiled pleas to increase my engagement. It’s kind of like getting a Christmas Card and hoping it’s from a friend, but actually, it’s from your dentist: there’s a connection there, sure, but we all know this attempt at connection is basically a marketing exercise.
4. Ongweso continues by articulating how capitalism and the profit motive are fundamentally at odds with the project of facilitating human connection. I don’t think he’s wrong. The drive for revenue undercuts any utility these formerly fun sites may have. Capitalism, however, only tells one part of the whole story. Ian Bogost writes in the Atlantic that “The Age of Social Media is Ending,” and lays some of the blame on our own optimism and naivety.
If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.
Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation (although the risk of instrumentalizing one another was present from the outset). The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain. Someday, eventually, perhaps its web will unwind. But not soon, and not easily.
Comparing social media to cigarettes in terms of public health is helpful, because like any addiction, the core motivators at play are a mix of nature and nurture. It takes two to tango. We were free to uninstall the apps from our phones, just like an alcoholic can choose whatever they want to drink. The problem is that the alcoholic chooses alcohol all the time, and we likewise enjoy too much the rush of pleasure hormones that come from those little red notification dots and an endless scrolling supply of new distractions.
5. So what is one to do? Kyle Chayka outlines some of the options in his New Yorker round up, “The Case for Quitting Elon Musk’s Twitter … and for Staying.” Is it moral to stay on the social network and support an egomaniac’s abuse of his employees? Is asking that question a function of virtue-signaling or a serious ethical reflection? Is it possible that Elon could turn the platform around after he gets his bearings straight? Why not just quit and recover some of our expended mental health?
6. This gives me the opportunity to praise the only social network I trust, the solution to the problem of social networking we are all longing for. Yes — the guy who runs social media for Mockingbird has a favorite, under the radar, indie social media platform.
Can I introduce you to The Grandpad, the perfect social network?
In 2019, a family member bought my grandparents an octogenarian friendly tablet called The Grandpad. Designed for senior citizens, the Grandpad reduces the functionality of the tablet so that only the most basic apps are allowed. There is no Facebook, Twitter, or Gmail. There is no Spotify, Instagram, or Google Chrome. There are no ads. Instead, there is a basic weather and news app, a music store, a Grandpad specific email address, a camera for phone calls and video chats, and a timeline with posts from family members.
It’s the perfect social network. The only people on it are my family. Unless you marry into the family, you can’t join, friend, or follow me. I get photos of my cousins living in another state, sharing the joys of a first day of school. My aunt posts photos of Halloween costumes of her grandchildren, my sister posts videos of my nephews playing together at the park. We couldn’t attend a recent family wedding because of our expected baby’s due date (doctor’s orders!), but we got to see all the pictures on the day-of. When my daughter was born back in August, she met her great grandparents on The Grandpad’s video chat feature. They said she looked like her mother.
No trolling, no fake news, no clickbait. Just a quiet little social network for my family. It’s fantastic, way better than anything Musk or Zuckerberg could offer.
The catch is, of course, you have to pay for it, both the tablet itself and a monthly fee. And friends, I have to tell you, the Grandpad is not cheap.
7. There’s wisdom in the old saying “you get what you pay for.” And since we don’t have to pay cash for Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, or even for Youtube or TikTok, there’s always going to be one of those Faustian bargains hidden away in those unreadable terms and conditions. Advertisements, trolls, cookies, data collection, clickbait, addicting algorithms, fake news, rage posts: it’s definitely possible to have a social network without these things we collectively loathe, and have the people who are closest to you in constant contact. It just can’t happen for free. As the New Yorker joked last week, “We at Instagram Want You to Know That if You Don’t Use Reels We Will Hurt You and Your Family“:
Every morning, our founder wakes up to around 17,423 tweets, D.M.s, e-mails, comments, tags, and mentions, all with the same message — that people miss the days when Instagram was an app where they could see photos of their friends, their family, and Beyoncé serving in an outfit that almost no other human being could pull off.
Listen — we get it. You want your photos in chronological order, you want your followers to actually be able to see the stuff you post, you want to stalk your ex at 3 a.m. to make sure that they’re still unhappy. But here’s the deal. That’s not going to happen, O.K.?
You know what’s gonna happen instead? You’re gonna use Reels. Why? Because [expletive] you. This app is not about you. And it’s cute that you ever thought it was. This app is about money. And we’re trying to make more of it, you dunce. Do I have to spell it out for you? M-O-N-E-Y.
Connection comes at a cost, even in the digital age. Want to stay connected to college friends? Tell us what you ordered last week on Amazon. Want access to moment by moment updates from the war in Ukraine? Sure, but also, endure a host of Russian disinformation and troll bots. This is why Mastodon is often cited as the ultimate Twitter alternative. It’s a cross between the minute-by-minute timeline of Twitter and the funding stream of Wikipedia. No ads, chronological timeline, decentralized ownership, clear content moderation — it will never make money, but it will provide the service at the cost of its many generous benefactors and regular fundraisers. A mass exodus to Mastodon hasn’t taken place yet, but its existence provides an existential threat to the big social media companies none the less. If someone else is willing to eat the cost of connecting, it undermines quite a few business models.
8. Whenever we talk about social network connection, what we’re really talking about is love. Love of family, love of friend, love of neighbor. We’re also, however, talking about lesser and baser loves too: love of brands, politics, ideologies, or even the narcissistic love of self. Whatever the future of digital connection brings, be it the Metaverse or Mastodon, what we are all trying to work through is the price of love. How many ads must I sit through to feel connected to and loved by my friends? How much clickbait must I sift through to connect with my favorite writer or journalist? How much of my serenity must I sacrifice as I wade through the political drama of my neighborhood-free-stuff-group in search of a second-hand dresser for my kid? How much am I willing to donate to keep this connection alive?
This, I think, is the ultimate diagnosis of our social media sins. We wanted love and connection, but we tried to have it without paying for it. Instead of paying with our dollars, we paid with our mental health, our privacy, and our social fabric, which the marketplace was willing to accept instead.
Related to this, we also tried to make connection painless and easy. Why bother with Christmas Cards when a new family profile picture gets the idea across? Why make a phone call when you could just write “happy birthday” on someone’s timeline? Why attend a graduation when it’s going to be livestreamed? Not only has the quality of our connection diminished on social media because we don’t want to pay for it, but the connections themselves are suffering too. When connection is easy and doesn’t ask for a sacrifice, it means less to the recipient. A happy birthday note on Facebook is nice. A card in the mail with a personalized message hand written in it, however, is a symbol that someone loved us enough invest time, money, and thought into our connection.
Keeping a connection is an act of love. The great question is how to pay for that connection when love can’t be bought or sold: it can only be given at an expense and received. Even Jesus Christ himself had to pay for the sins of the world. What’s the old saying? “Grace is free, but it ain’t cheap?” Some relationships are worth paying to preserve, whether that payment is in sweat, money, pride, time, or blood. God only knows what the heavens gave up to be in relationship with us. That connection also comes with a cost, more than the $15 billion Zuckerberg invested in the Metaverse and the $44 billion that Elon paid for Twitter. Might someone else buy it for us? As Bob Dylan once growled, “I pay with blood, but not my own.”
As expensive as The Grandpad is, I don’t know if I have the standing to say whether it’s worth it. Someone else in my family is footing the bill; I was simply invited to join. Somebody wanted to connect with me, a gift I received with joy. But also, someone else is bearing the cost to stay connected with me, and that gift I receive as love.
This is the part where I’m supposed to invite you to connect with Mockingbird through our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – irony acknowledged – but if you enjoy those platforms and you enjoy Mockingbird’s work, you absolutely should. About 25% or 30% of our traffic comes from those sources, and we’re happy to, ahem, connect with people there. But also, if you’re really interested in being connected with us apart from algorithmic interference, or if you’re getting ready to jump off social media for good, there are other ways to connect with us too. Join our email list or subscribe to the magazine. Subscribe to all of our fun podcasts too. Download the Mockingbird app for IOS. Join us next year in New York or Orlando or Tyler. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even have room for you in our future Mastodon instance.
Non-Social Media Strays:
- You can find Mbird contributor Joey Goodall over at his new gig with Faith+Lead, who launched their new website this week. I particularly enjoyed this “Recipe for a Crappy Dinner Party,” and am tempted to host one myself.
- Yoland Pierce at Christian Century: “Who will love the ugly things in life? Who will love the people considered to be ugly? And can our feelings of disgust and distaste for the ugly keep us from fully walking in the will of God?”
- “I’m often astonished by how quickly we let rules become an end in themselves, when what they should be is a means.” Emma Wilkins on when being a rule follower is easier than having good intentions.
- More from the Nick Cave fountain: “A good faith conversation understands fundamentally that we are all flawed and prone to the occasional lamentable idea.”
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