Critique of current social media

“Facebook is full of people I love, but is ever more full of horrendous distraction and advertising.”

A survey participant aged 31–40 who’s a part of the IndieWeb

Current mainstream media is designed to profit off your attention and time.

Shoshana Zuboff (2020), a professor emerita at the Harvard Business School likens the grasp and influence of social media on our psyche as a means of remote control. She argues that current surveillance capitalist models of social media “undermines human agency, [usurps] privacy, [diminishes] autonomy and [deprives] individuals of the right to combat.

Design choices created to manipulate users are known as deceptive patterns (Deceptive Patterns, 2023).

Some deceptive patterns that social media employs to keep you on the hamster wheel include infinite scrolling, display of advertisements in the same style as other content, and unclear privacy policies that are too hard to read.

The primary objective of social media is to make a profit.

Social media was never free to begin with. In fact, the internet was primarily funded on debt in the past 20 years (Cameron Tonkinwise and Mark Titmarsh, SMC Seminar, “What is the Internet?”, Wed 28 Feb, 2024).

Products and services that operate on debt often begin with features that are beneficial for the users in an effort to take advantage of Metcalfe’s Law of exponential growth, where a network’s value is determined by the number of connected users.

The value in large networks is that it makes it difficult for people to leave, even when features are being removed, or their privacy and data are being exploited by companies for advertisement.

“There's too much content available nowadays due to the low entry barrier to content creation and most are not a value-add.”

A survey participant aged 25–30 who isn't a part of the IndieWeb

Content on social media is often repetitive and mundane and its algorithms make it difficult to find meaningful content.

In a video discussing social media with ex-social media employees, Anthony Padilla (2020) reflects on the noticeable changes in social media algorithms.

He highlights that the algorithm now focuses on showing us content that we spend the most time on, rather than quality content we actually like.

Social media does not foster authentic and genuine content. With how easy it is to produce AI-generated content, finding authenticity becomes harder than ever before.

AI Instagram influencers are already becoming a thing (Business Insider, 2023)...

“I’d wish people would see the more diverse internet and not just stay on big commercial platforms.”

A survey participant aged 31–40 who’s a part of the IndieWeb

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