Once upon a time…
A couple of years ago, my day job asked me to talk to a group of sixth formers about their social media habits. The results were pretty much what you would expect, with TikTok and YouTube at the top. There was a tiny bit of love for Instagram, but Facebook and Twitter were basically an irrelevance. In fact, my sense was that the old-fashioned Facebook concept of social media was very much out of fashion.
This was actually part of a social media audit I was asked to do, and when I looked at Meta’s backend analytics, it painted a sorry picture. It was a mess. More than that, it looked like it had been designed to be deliberately misleading. At the end of the process I came to the conclusion that Meta was juicing the numbers, and using bot farms overseas to make it look like there was more engagement than there was.
Clearly, these seemed to be failing platforms run by a company that had basically given up on them.
Fast forward two years and it now seems to me like Meta’s social media products collectively make the most powerful media empire on the planet.
What changed?
Well, Donald Trump came back, obviously. And Mark Zuckerberg aligned his company with the Trump administration’s goals. But then again, so did pretty much every American media company, so what did Zuckerberg get right?
I think the change has actually been pretty recent – perhaps in the last 3 to 6 months. It came about, I think, from Meta recognising a golden opportunity.
Since the pandemic, their competitors’ platforms have been getting more and more crowded. For their competitors to make money, only the most algorithmically-optimised-for-attention can survive. Which means that TikTok and YouTube have increasingly been incentivising low effort quantity-over-quality packed with brand advertising. Even before Trump came in, it was getting much less fun.
But since he came back, the best way to get attention is to lean into the doomscroll, and make content about how bad things are getting.
Let’s take Johnny Harris as an example. He basically invented the YouTube current affairs house style. And this is the kind of video he was making four years ago:
This is the kind of video he’s making now:
This is probably 90% of my social media at the moment. And it’s very much my own fault, because I keep clicking on this stuff.
But here is where Meta’s corporate social media strategy suddenly becomes an advantage.
Welcome to the Happy Place
For years their algorithms have been based on the assumption that you don’t want to follow your friends or family, or current events: you want celebrities, influencers and nostalgia. Now, clearly that’s not true, but those are the things that Meta can turn into adverts.
What has changed, I think, is that many people are so traumatised and exhausted by current events that they want an escape from it all. And Meta has realised that if they just add ‘family and friends’ back into the feed then suddenly that is what their users want.
I first noticed this a few months ago in the rivalry between Bluesky and (Meta’s) Threads – two new Twitter clones trying to hoover up Twitter’s audience. This time last year, Bluesky was the clear winner, because it was engaging with actual reality instead of a fantasy bubble. Now it seems like Threads is winning, precisely because it’s less screamy and more chill than Bluesky. In other words, because the current harsh reality has been something users wanted to escape from.
Then I noticed that Facebook was making a comeback. I had made a local folk music Discord server because I found Facebook basically unusable. For quite a while this server has been been pretty active. But I’ve noticed that it’s started emptying out, and when I promote my folk events on Facebook there’s just a lot more response. And it’s not just folk music – so many people I used to hang out with from the Oxford indie scene are still there, posting. And I have to say, it’s actually a much better user experience than it was when I made the Discord server. Meta know I’m there for the local music, so that (along with adverts and Gen X nostalgia) is what they give me. They have data on me going back to around 2007, after all.
Finally, on the Colin & Samir podcast (which is basically ‘How to make it on YouTube’) I heard them discuss how Instagram is now more culturally relevant than both YouTube and TikTok. New shows like Subway Takes and Trackstar are starting on Instagram, and then moving to YouTube when they get really big.
Instagram has always been Meta’s most popular and influential product. The guy in charge, Adam Mosseri, is sometimes referred to as the only one at Meta with any taste, and he really seems to understand the creator economy. Even so, for the last few years the consensus was that Instagram was desperately copying TikTok and had no ideas of its own. However, TikTok (in the US) is still reeling from not knowing if it will get banned tomorrow, and many creators jumped ship to avoid the uncertainty.
So now Meta has this golden opportunity to create a mellow vibes bubble, far from the doomscroll. Adam Mosseri is really good at that.
Which means I think Meta have swept aside their VR headsets and Metaverse programmes and have instead started to pay attention once again to their social media platforms.
What the Regime does (and doesn’t) need right now
Arguably Adam Moseri’s style of social media is much more valuable to the Trump administration than Elon Musk’s. They don’t need state media or billionaire-media pumping out hate propaganda anymore, because millions of individual creators can do that much more effectively.
What the Trump administration needs is for big established media companies to normalise their actions. Make them seem not that big a deal, and happening far away anyway.
I’ve been hearing people talk about how authoritarianism is different now to how it was mid 20th century. I’ve been hearing the phrase informational autocracy. And it feels to me like Meta is trying to fulfil a very specific role in this new power structure. It is trying to be the portal in your phone that will show you curated content from celebrities, influences and your family and friends. Some might be outrage bait, and some might be nostalgia and fluffy kittens, but it’s all about a world removed from politics.
As times get harder, people need relief. They need entertainment. And as so much entertainment has become user generated, it’s been hard to escape the trauma of Gaza or Sudan or any number of oppressed peoples.
But Meta is all about that curation. They can just dial out anyone who’s harshing your mellow. And I’m expecting to see a lot of surveys that show that “everyone is still using Meta products, so you might disapprove of the company but you should probably accept that you need to keep using them, because that’s where everyone else is”.
How long will this be successful? Who knows. Although if the last few years are anything to go by then never underestimate the ability of a tech billionaire to shoot themselves in the foot.
The thing is, I absolutely understand why people are looking from an escape from the doomscroll. And they should! We need to find joy if we’re going to find resilience, and ultimately resistance.
But… I’m pretty sure Zuckerberg is not the man to trust with it.