Is social media dead?

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1:59Kyle Chayka:And it is mixed by an engineer in Australia, Travis. Hey there, by the way, Travis, if you're listening. Hi, we love your work. Hey, Travis. So today on the show, we're actually going to be hearing from someone you don't normally hear from. One of our producers in New York is Zandra Ellen. So Zandra, please take it away. Hey there, Zandra. Hi. Hi, Global Story listeners. This is Zandra. I'm one of the producers of the show. I pitched this idea because I spend a huge amount of time on the Internet. I was raised on the Internet. I not to age virtue signal a little bit, but I am I am bravely I am bravely the youngest person on earth at at 28.

2:37On earth or in the teams? I know I'm the youngest person on earth, Tristan, as we know. Yes, you are. Yes, yes, you are. So let's be so clear about that. And yeah, and I grew up on the Internet. Most of the social interactions that I can remember having in my life, in my teen years, in my childhood transpired on the Internet. And I think that one of the things that I've sort of noticed is that social media is really transforming. And I wanted to show you an image that I think encapsulates what I'm talking about when I say social media has changed. I'm going to slack it to you right now, and then I just want you guys to describe what you see.

3:20Kyle Chayka:Oh. Oh. Oh. What is this? I think it's a man who's supposed to look like Jesus. It's a man who looks a bit like... Who also looks like his dog. He's been AI'd, right? Has to be AI'd. It's a guy in the middle of a street, pretty crowded street, with long shoulder length, brown wavy hair, wearing some sort of white loose-fitting tunic it looks like, who clearly looks like he is supposed to be Jesus. He's holding his dog and his face looks like his dog, So he's half Jesus, half dog. Yeah. Very creepy. And the caption says, why don't pictures like this ever trend? OK, so it kind of hurts my eyes to look at it a bit.

4:03It's a really stressful thing to look at. And another thing that I just want to observe about the photo is it has 282 ,000 likes and 5 ,000 comments. So people like this. So people, so evidently people like this. And the other thing that I just wanted to note about this image is this is from an account that I do not follow. I don't even know how one would find this account. It looks like it was posted by somebody called Emilio Piano dash one. Yeah. You know, I'm on Facebook to look at my friends from childhood's engagement posts. I'm not here to look at Emilio Piano dash one. Who may or may not be a real person.

4:46I mean, it seems. Oh, yeah. Exactly. And when I saw this, I was like, something really strange is happening. I sort of couldn't stop thinking about it because I feel as though our interactions with social media have become so much less social, so much more kind of uncanny in this way, like the golden retriever Jesus. And I think that a lot of people sort of are noticing that something has changed. But it's a little bit ineffable. You can't quite put your finger on what exactly is happening. And then recently, I saw this article, and I felt like finally someone had a theory about what was going on.

5:33And it was in The New Yorker. It was written by a New Yorker staff writer named Kyle Chayka. So I got in touch with him, and I asked him to come on the show. And that's all I've got for you. So you guys take it away.

5:46Kyle Chayka:All right. For the BBC, I'm Tristan Redman in London. And I'm Asma Khaled in Washington, D.C. And today on The Global Story, is social media dead or is it just becoming something else?

6:05so kyle what is your brief history of social media according to kyle what were your first experiences with social media and where did it take you it's a long story i mean i think like many millennials my life is kind of inseparable from the internet and social media has been and how I discovered things, and how I defined myself. And I suppose MySpace was really the first social network that I got on, and that came toward the end of high school. MySpace had that feature where you selected your top eight friends, and so you had to think about your actual relationships and communicate them in a literal way on the internet.

6:53And I think from MySpace, it was a quick jump to Facebook when I got a college email address. So at that point, you couldn't get on Facebook until you had an actual college email address. I remember those days.

7:07Kyle Chayka:Yeah. Students were that first demographic of mainstream social media. Funnily enough, the first place I ever encountered my now wife was on pre-college Facebook. No way. In 2005, I think, that we exchanged messages in some accepted students group. And I think that was why social media was enjoyable at that point, because you kind of knew who you were talking to and you were connecting with a set group of people. And it was much tighter and closer than 100 million random people on the internet as it is right now. What's your best memory of the early days of social media? The point that I always go back to, I think, was the early 2010s.

7:54And in particular, Tumblr, which was this microblogging website, which was a kind of parallel to Twitter, but it was more multimedia. It had more images and videos and GIFs and things like that. I was collecting photos of art. I was passing around anime screenshots. I was, you know, looking at curated selections of medieval manuscript illuminations. Tumblr just felt like this utopia of niche internet curation. It was the zine of its time. And I mean, really, before dating profiles, I think, and before Instagram became the portfolio of your life, Tumblr was this representation of who you were and what you liked.

8:43Okay, Carl, was there a moment for you when you felt like social media changed? Oh, man. I mean, in 2015, 2016, I think, in the United States, when Twitter became the hub of election discourse, it kind of shattered the illusion that the internet was a space you could go to just, like, have fun and express yourself and find cool friends and discuss the latest cultural happenings. Oh, I did think of another moment that I can describe. Yeah, tell us. Which is earlier. And I think it happened in 2011. I was working at an art blog in Brooklyn. And so my boss hatched this plan to go to a series of performance art installations at a gallery and live tweet the whole thing.

9:36So we were kind of sitting in the corner, tweeting about the performances that were going on in this, you know, decrepit warehouse in Bushwick. and I was tweeting about, you know, one performance or other. I don't think I liked it very much. And so my tweets were a little bit critical. And so after the performance was over, the artists themselves came up to me and confronted me about my slightly negative tweets about their work. And I think at that moment I realized, oh, what you post online can come back to you very quickly. Yeah, yeah. Well, shortly after that experience of yours in 2011, Facebook in 2012 ends up buying Instagram, which I remember at the time seemed like a huge deal.

10:24Looking back on it, I think it was probably pipsqueak money compared to what we see now in the tech business. But it feels like that was the beginning of a kind of consolidation of social media companies by big corporations. Can you talk us through how that process panned out in the 2010s? The 2010s kind of started out as this profusion of different platforms and websites. You had blogs, you had Tumblr, you had Twitter, you had Instagram. And it wasn't really clear what would be successful. It was this kind of different options for different people. And I think when Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012, that was a signal that actually the future of social media was more in corporate consolidation than it was in this profusion of independent websites.

11:13A little later than that, in 2013, Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo. And that was the kind of death knell for my internet utopia on there. Later on, Facebook acquired WhatsApp. And Mark Zuckerberg's own strategy that he explicitly stated was that he was trying to buy startups in order to neutralize their competition. So by acquiring Instagram, he would ensure that Instagram would not threaten Facebook. By acquiring WhatsApp, he would ensure that messaging would not threaten Facebook and Instagram as a different way of communicating online.

11:51Kyle Chayka:I am curious, as we see this consolidation, does it change what the owners of social media want to do with these platforms? Yeah, I mean, I think the marketing message of social media was that by connecting everyone on Earth, we're going to bring in a new era of total equality and democracy, and the people who deserve attention will get attention, and no more gatekeepers will stand in the way, everyone's voices will be heard. And that was the case, like that message continued through a bunch of the 2010s, I think, up until 2015, 2016, when social media feeds became more algorithmic. So more driven by recommendations, more automated, and less driven by the choices of the users.

12:39And that process has only continued until now. The algorithmic recommendation makes it easier to grow audiences faster. It makes social media more broadcast and less one-to-one. It makes it more centralized rather than decentralized. And so influencers or creators now, these singular voices, they become centers of gravity in that algorithmic landscape.

13:04Kyle Chayka:So if we fast forward a couple of years later, the pandemic essentially takes over all of our lives in 2020. and one of our producers, Andrew, was saying that it felt like during that time period, a lot of life moved onto social media because there was really no social life. Full disclosure, I had a small kid and was pregnant with another. So I felt like I was actually weirdly engaged in real life during that time period. But I know that for so many people, there was no social interaction. And so all of that was happening online. How big of a moment was the pandemic for transforming how people use these platforms?

13:43I think it was huge. I mean, I think a bit of common wisdom was that the pandemic accelerated internet habits by five or six years. Before the pandemic, there were many, many people who were extremely online, myself included, who just spent tons of time on social media, who consumed digital native content more than cable news, say, or newspapers or more traditional forms of content. But in the pandemic, hundreds of millions of more people embraced that extremely online lifestyle and started diving deeper into internet niches and finding their favorite influencers and figuring out what they like on YouTube and diving into that huge pool of the internet and getting lost there a little bit in a way it made social platforms even more vital because that's how we connected with each other but it also turned social media into more of a broadcast mainstream media kind of thing because suddenly that's where everyone's attention was and as the attention went there then you saw everyone else chasing it like now the polarity has kind of flipped i think where you have all these cable news figures going onto YouTube.

14:59You have podcasters who are more famous than traditional celebrities. So it's really a kind of process of professionalization almost of social media that you're describing. Is it in that atmosphere that Elon Musk decides to buy Twitter in 2022? Yeah, I think Elon Musk bought Twitter in 22 because he saw it as a political tool, for one thing. Like, it was very clear that Twitter was a place where politics happened. Twitter also kind of got left behind in that professionalization of social media. Like, it wasn't sharing revenue with creators like YouTube. It wasn't really embracing multimedia in the same way that Instagram or TikTok was.

15:46And so I think he saw a kind of distressed asset that wasn't as optimized as it could be. But then he also... He changed the mechanisms of that communication toward his own ends. He prioritized the topics that he wanted to prioritize. He made himself the loudest voice on the platform. So I think he bought it in order to tune the variables in his own favor. What do you mean by tune the variables? I mean, Elon Musk made Twitter even more algorithmic, like as he transformed it into X. So all of a sudden...

16:21Kyle Chayka:What does that mean when you say algorithmic? So there's a linear feed is a chronological list of posts from people you follow. That's how social media used to work. It's the kind of literal, here's what people posted kind of structure. An algorithmic feed instead is this disordered list of posts, not chronological, ranked in order of how the algorithm thinks you will engage with them. So in an algorithmic feed, the most engaging content to you or what is predicted as the most engaging to you will be at the top. The other thing is like the algorithmic feed itself can also be a kind of facade because it doesn't have to take your data into account.

17:07Like you don't know that the algorithmic feed is actually taking into account what you're clicking on. You don't know how well personalized it is. So I think what Musk did was tweak the variables so that it's not actually the exact topics that you want to see. It's the exact topics that he chooses to prioritize.

17:27Kyle Chayka:I've been wondering about that. That's interesting. Could you explain to me, hypothetically, Carl, if I were to open a Twitter account tomorrow or an X account, would the things I would be receiving in the algorithmic feed be things that the algorithm thought that I wanted to see as in that I appreciated or things that it thought would get a reaction from me? So if you were to open a new X account, if you just had no data and opened an account, the algorithmic feed would start you off with a range of generic topics, which on X might be Tesla, Trump, cryptocurrency. So that is not an unbiased set of topics.

18:12And then the feed would mold itself around what you continue to engage with to some degree. But you can see the X feed, the X algorithm is much slower and stickier than the TikTok feed. Which, if you set up a new account on TikTok and start scrolling through videos, TikTok will lock into your subconscious in five minutes. It's absolutely insane. Different algorithmic feeds work differently, and some are more based on what you engage with, and some are more based on what does the platform want you to see. Okay, so what you're describing here is an extremely highly attuned piece of technology that is somehow tapping into your psychological profile.

19:01But only based on what you click on. Yes, yes. It's not reading your mind. It's just watching what you do and what signals you output. But it turns out that what video you watch for microseconds longer and what you scroll past immediately is a really good signal of what you're thinking about and what you want to see.

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20:36all right so what happens then when you throw generative ai into the equation that was the other pivotal moment in the 2020s so far when chat gpt was released to the public and all of a sudden you could not trust that content was purely created by humans and wasn't just a product of AI. And I mean, social media has been leaning into AI. My favorite example of this is Instagram posts with music on them. Like, no one, I could not tell you a single person who is like, I love to see still images with soundtracks on them. And yet Adam Masseri is like, you will put music on your photo. Because you know what happens, Kyle?

21:20Kyle Chayka:Every time you post something, it tells you, Yeah. Oh, posts with music get more clicks. So now just to spite Instagram sometimes, I refuse to put music on my posts. It's awful. Like no one wants this. Cal, I want to ask you about something that I think broadly relates to this conversation, which is dead internet theory. I do not entirely know what it means, but it's something I've heard out there. Can you explain to us what it is? Yeah, it's a very evocative phrase. Like the internet seems so alive. There's so many people on it, but actually it's dead, like a coral reef in the ocean. Dead internet theory is the idea that the majority of the internet is now just bots talking to each other and generated automated content.

22:05And that gives the illusion of activity. It gives the illusion of interacting with other people. But actually what you're seeing is bots and the hollow echoes of content that has already been posted. And this has some truth to it. There was a report that just in 2024 last year, the majority of traffic on the internet is now bots. And that's not just like bots posting on social media, it's bots crawling the internet, and AI models absorbing and training on data on the internet. It's this kind of machinery behind what goes on online. But it does mean that social media is less human than it used to be.

22:43Like you have a harder time trusting that what you're seeing on the screen is actually the thought and intention of a person. And so you have to kind of evaluate each bit of content to make sure that it's real or authentic. And that goes the same for videos now, since you can generate very realistic videos with Sora, OpenAI's tool. It goes the same for music on Spotify. AI slop music is an increasing problem. And sometimes I listen to a loungy jazz track and then I realize that it's actually just a totally hollow fake artist who has no profile whatsoever. So yeah, I think it makes the internet less meaningful and more exhausting to parse just because you have to decide at so many moments if what you're looking at is meaningful or not.

23:33Okay. In that case, what is the future of social media? Where Where does it go from here? I mean, we see the large social networks and the tech behemoths leaning into generated content. And I think users don't actually want that. I think it's a novelty for now, and people will drift away from it. So instead, I see people gravitating towards smaller online spaces, connecting more closely with individual voices like creator types, and just posting less in general. There's another report recently found that literally social media peaked in 2022 in terms of usage and user activity. And it's been down ever since, which is also the pandemic.

24:17So that's a contributing factor. But I do, I feel like in the 2010s, in that golden age, quote unquote, there was this idea that posting your life on the internet was good. to share the things that were happening, that it was cool to post something that you observed, and it was right to communicate that to hundreds of millions of people. I mean, I just always remember people posting their breakfasts on Twitter. Like, just sharing the banal details of your life with random people online. And we kind of learned that there are many negative consequences to doing so. I think people are having less fun being on the internet, in part due to this AI wave, in part due to the corporatization of social media.

25:04And so that just leads people away from the internet. Well, I have to ask then, I mean, if you're Mark Zuckerberg or, you know, Elon Musk, you spent$44 billion on Twitter or whoever in that sphere, you must be quite concerned if the internet is dead. So, you know, what's their plan for either saving their investment or keeping these platforms relevant? Well, I think this pivot to AI is in part a maneuver to save the finances of these companies from long-term doom. Like social media built up the world's best sets of human data on the internet because we all posted so much stuff. And so now the social media companies are huge troves of data that will make for better and better AI models.

25:52So that's become one direction they're going in. And I think the social networks have leaned into just being more passive broadcast experiences. Like, rather than people posting their lives and sharing things with each other, it's more just about people leaning back and consuming their favorite internet celebrities. And that's the end of the transaction.