No, this isn’t another doomsayer article telling you AI is going to make you redundant or people are going to stop using the internet… remember when they said TVs would be obsolete?!
It’s more an observation about the changing nature of social media and how we’re using it.
I said a while back that brands posting on any platform spells the end of that platform.
No one could’ve predicted a celebrity CEO throwing Sieg Heils at a US President’s inauguration.
According to Mashable, “in the broader leadup to the elections, X actually continuously shed daily active users. In fact, for the entire month of October, X saw a drop in anywhere from 300,000 to 2.6 million daily active users in the U.S. each day. Since early October, daily active U.S. users have fallen from 32.3 million to 29.6 million, a drop of 8.4 percent.”
In my peek behind the hate curtain, it seemed that people I followed had deactivated their accounts or ceased posting.
So I got no value from being on Twitter other than disparing at humanity.
In a recent report from Brand Finance, "X's brand is now worth $673 million. The brand was valued at $5.7 billion before Musk's takeover in 2022. When it comes to revenue, X's revenue fell by 40 percent when compared to the prior year based on internal company data from June 2024".
It's not just the platform formally known as Twitter that's haemorrhaging users, all platforms, apart from social stalwart YouTube, are losing their engaged base.
It used to be that platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were ways of connecting with friends of family through micro-blogging using different media.
There were the emo status updates, constant tagging of photos and parish notices for your own curated community. And it was a way of connecting with other communities you may not have had access to.
That has gone. Replaced with ads. Powered by behaviour-altering algorithms.
It's also given rise to influencers, who are now the subject of ridicule due to their entitlement and inauthenticity.
If everyone is monetising their lives by carefully scripting what should be visceral moments we can connect with or like Bonnie Blue, leaning into rage-bait to boost her visibility, we lose what we liked about social media to begin with.
It made us feel normal.
It provided language and analysis to life's challenges.
It inspired and educated.
Now, it's just marketing.
Its existence is now poisoning AI.
A recent study showed that "models given low-quality data skip steps in their reasoning process — or don’t use reasoning at all — resulting in the model providing incorrect information about a topic... In data sets with a mix of junk and high-quality data, the negative effect on reasoning increased as the proportion of junk data increased."
So, as us creatives have been saying for decades, when it comes to briefs:
Shit in. Shit out.
What this also shows is that the content on social media platforms is "junk".
The erosion of critical thinking, language and meaning creates dead air.
And people are responding in their droves with an "ad fatigue" trend. Ironically happening on social media.
It's the notion that "real influence is in discovery, not manipulation".
Trust is at an all-time low, and there's an upward tick in ad blockers.
So social media platforms will soon lose revenue as fewer people put links to buy on their posts and stop investing £44 billion in ad spend to reach a disengaged audience.
