Sorry, Social Media Is Never Getting Any Better

At the Austin, Texas-based South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in 2007, a new social media website quickly gained popularity among attendees. The site was called “Twitter,” and it immediately attracted critics.

The primary complaint was that nobody needed to know the mundane details of everyone’s personal life. A Wall Street Journal article at the time reported, “[S]ome users are starting to feel ‘too’ connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.”

Some SXSW attendees considered Twitter a mere flash in the pan. “Twitter will flame out before the end of 2007,” Mat Balez, a Montreal-based web developer, predicted on his blog. But Twitter creator Jack Dorsey defended his new invention. “Everyone says Twitter’s completely useless, I don’t want all this information,” he told the Austin American-Statesman. “We check in later, and they’re complete addicts.”

Dorsey was right. The people who mattered most in America couldn’t quit. Over the next 17 years, Twitter grew from a place where people held court on their daily inanities to a driver of world politics. Nobody can seriously argue that Donald Trump’s ascendance to the presidency in 2016 would have been possible without Twitter or that the site, now called X, doesn’t continue to drive American popular opinion.

But now the platform has grown so obnoxious, users are fleeing it in droves. In mid-November, the site Bluesky, a major X competitor, announced it had picked up one million new users since the November 5 election. Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-owned social media site and another X rival, now boasts 200 million monthly active users.

But those looking for a social media utopia in other places are bound to be disappointed. Every social media platform, new or old, will eventually go the way of Twitter.

The site has become so ubiquitous that some Americans conflate the ability to speak on X with the constitutional prohibition of government limits on speech. And plenty of people take advantage of that supposed First Amendment right to spread disinformation or misinformation, to troll people, to try to get people fired and so on. Social media’s biggest strength—that all users can post and have their voices heard—became its greatest weakness: that all users can post and have their voices heard.

The platform’s recent troubles have recently been the subject of a number of long legacy media pieces criticizing the way X has changed under the leadership of its new owner, Elon Musk. The world’s richest man bought the site in 2022 and immediately turned it into a vehicle for publicizing none other than Elon Musk.

Part of that self-serving attention seeking manifested itself in a political context, with Musk endorsing Donald Trump in the 2024 election and pushing the tenor of the site Trump’s way. Some of the political takeover was overt, such as when Musk frequently posted information about Trump for his 200 million followers.

But this political push also happened behind the scenes. New users signing up for the site who had no interest in politics were nonetheless fed political information. When the Wall Street Journal created accounts related to crafts, sports and cooking, more than half of the suggested posts pushed into their For You feeds were related to politics. For instance, “If that cringe, dingbat, zero-votes, airhead Kamala Harris is able to cheat enough to win the presidency—the USA is over,” wrote famous right-wing troll catturd2 in a post served up to the nonpolitical accounts. (And, of course, the first account that X suggested these new users follow was Elon Musk.)

Most of the political content served to X users tended to be from the right. According to a Washington Post analysis, Republican tweets totaled about 7.5 billion views since July 2023, while Democratic tweets only reached around 3.3 billion views. Along with that came a torrent of Republican-led misinformation, such as politicians claiming Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets. (In the Wall Street Journal’s analysis, one of the most prominent users fed to nonpolitical accounts was Jack Posobiec, who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy that led to a man showing up to a pizza place in Washington, D.C. and firing off a gun.)

This right-wing bias, of course, has Democrats and progressives fleeing the site en masse to form their own enclaves at other social media sites. According to Edison Research, X’s usage has dropped by 30% in the last year, and the value of the company has dropped an estimated 80% since Musk paid $44 billion for it two years ago.

But social media users looking for peace of mind at Bluesky and Threads will experience only a temporary respite. When a new social media site starts up, there is always a “Twitter in its early years” vibe, where people feel the place out and get to know one another. But eventually the trolls come in, hell-bent on destroying the experience for everyone else.

As with any society, the social stratification begins immediately. The users seeking the most attention have to assert their dominance right away, either by making outrageous statements or by belittling others who might challenge them. The right-wing echo chamber on Twitter quickly morphs into a lefty echo chamber in which any suggestion that maybe Donald Trump could actually win in 2024 is answered with screeching anger and insults. Recently on Threads, I made the anodyne observation that I don’t know whom some of my good friends voted for, and I was met by angry users telling me to acknowledge my “privilege,” whatever that means.

The calumnies are further intensified by the fact that a huge number of people on any site lurk around anonymously, so they can fire off misinformation or insults with no risk of blowback or shame. Of course, no social media site would ever require users to identify themselves—it would drastically reduce the site’s potential customer base—so the bad behavior will always persist. Oscar Wilde once said, “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth”; on social media, it might as well be, “Give a man a mask and he will start tweeting at your boss to get you fired.”

This mask of anonymity is why social media never has any chance of being a tolerable place to have actual conversations or form meaningful relationships. The problem isn’t algorithms or engagement or monetization or any of that stuff. Much like Soylent Green, the problem is people—both the megalomaniacs who own the platforms and the people who use them. Humans online are jealous and needy and attention-seeking and angry and all the things they’re (theoretically) not allowed to be in person.

The original idea behind Twitter was well meaning: Get a bunch of people together to share stories and ideas, and the public knowledge base will only grow. But those people quickly responded to out-of-whack incentives, realizing the easiest way to gain attention was to tear someone else down. And no matter what algorithm you create, as long as it’s real people using your site, that incentive will always prevail.

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