Social media landscape in chaos with more than a ‘vibe shift’ underway
Outgoing US President Joe Biden took a clear swipe at Facebook and its owner Meta Networks this week.
In his farewell address as he prepares to vacate the office to make room for his successor Donald Trump, Biden warned of the death of the free press and an “avalanche of misinformation and disinformation” before taking obvious aim at Facebook’s recent announcement that it planned to cut back on moderation, saying: “Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit”.
Facebook lining-up behind Trump is, along with sizeable cash donations to Trump’s inauguration fund from the likes of Apple and Google, first and foremost a sign that claims of the weakness of government in the face of all-powerful corporations are bunk.
The next time a politician says there is nothing they can do about the actions of such-and-such a company or industry, we should all laugh straight in their faces. After all, if politics is rendered powerless in the face of business, why then are businesses lining-up to kiss the ring?
Having previously been in the president-elect’s bad books, this motley crew are certainly hoping to avoid retribution, but they clearly also smell deregulation, and with it the opportunity for hyper-profits, in the air.
That aside, however, also clearly visible are a chaotic few years ahead for social media as the public, still in search of self-expression and entertainment, has tired of the billionaire clowns these data-mining operations have thrown up.
Elon Musk’s gamble to buy Twitter and turn it into a pro-Trump information war machine – whether in the first instance intentional or not – is widely believed to have paid off. It has, however, left the perennially struggling Twitter a shadow of its former self.
Decentralised alternative and quasi-spin off Bluesky is showing some promise, but the idea of less-aggressive-Twitter isn’t massively interesting.
Facebook, meanwhile, has already been abandoned by the young (and plenty of other people who simply tired of its wall of banality and grief), while Meta’s star platform, Instagram, is suffering from a major identity crisis due to a flood of advertising, AI-generated ‘content’ and slop that no-one actually wants to see.
At the same time, plans to ban TikTok due to its Chinese ownership have seen short video aficionados flock to the unlikeliest of places: RedNote. It is unclear if the TikTok ban will go ahead, scheduled as is for 19 January, given that Trump will be inaugurated president the very next day and has, despite his constant drumbeat for trade war with China, made positive comments about TikTok in the past.
Shanghai-founded RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, is no less Chinese, though, and while the various influencers are just looking for somewhere else to flog brand deals their move to RedNote may seem quixotic or even defiant in the face of rising tensions between the US and China. Instagram, surely, would have been the obvious destination, but apparently not.
How all this will play out is very far from clear, but the old empires, so to speak, are, if not crumbling, then at least a lot more vulnerable, to regulatory shifts, to competition, and even to caprice, than we may have thought.
Social media is not going away, nor will its influence, but the platforms are unlikely to be as stable as they were in the last decade.
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