Can We Save Social Media From AI?
The latest episode of the Bloomberg ‘Odd Lots’ podcast was titled ‘How Social Media Became Overrun With AI Slop.’ That’s pretty descriptive and summarizes a fairly recent reality — most social media is no longer very social or very useful.
The Odd Lots team talked about AI-generated images being posted on Facebook. Popular images can be liked thousands of times and the people posting them can monetize this engagement. It’s fairly easy to earn $500+ a month just asking an AI engine to create art and then posting it. Popular themes are images of Jesus or popular sports teams.
If you live in New York, that’s not a lot of cash, but that’s two months on minimum wage in Brazil and there are places in Sub-Saharan Africa where $500 will go a lot further than it will in São Paulo. That’s a fairly reasonable income in Kenya.
When social media started out, it was all about connecting people. You could connect to your friends and family and follow their updates or photos. You could ‘like’ your favorite bands and those artists could easily reach all the fans who had liked their page just by posting an update. Announcing a new tour? Boom… there it is, with one click that announcement is in the newsfeed of all your fans.
Now it is flooded with AI created content — like the Facebook images of a tearful Jesus — and the various social networks are much more focused on telling you what you should be looking at rather than leaving you to just follow what your friends are doing.
TikTok took this to a logical conclusion. Nobody really knows how TikTok decides which video to show you, other than it learns what you like. If you like a video featuring an air crash with a single fatality then within a few minutes you will be watching passenger jet crashes.
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. The company made $4.4bn in revenue in 2022. Now it’s making $2.9bn, but with a huge debt the company now needs to service. Some analysts believe it’s now running at a loss.
Musk doesn’t appear to care. Buying Twitter inserted him into the national conversation as a media owner and this means he will almost certainly have bought himself a place in the White House from January 2025.
However, the problem he has created for users of X is that it is now flooded with AI-generated content, many bots are pre-programmed to respond to key words. Say anything negative about Musk himself and you can guarantee that hundreds of bots will respond to your comment a second after clicking ENTER.
X is also flooded with adverts for companies nobody has ever heard of. This is because as Twitter morphed into X, the process of content moderation was seen as surplus to requirements. Content moderation is what prevents your news feed being filled with images of murder, rape, and porn. In the name of ‘free speech’ anyone can now post anything on X — it has become a content free-for-all.
Can you imagine Tiffany or Louis Vuitton advertising next to a beheading video?
Although Musk called X a ‘digital town square’, he has taken active steps to ensure that people who agree with his world view are promoted by the platform and those who disagree sink into oblivion — nobody ever reads their comments. It’s not a town square or a forum, it’s just an echo chamber.
Meta has upset video creators on their Instagram platform because they only serve videos in high quality resolution if they are popular. Niche videos, or that video of your dog in the pub you wanted to share with some friends — that just gets the grainy look.
Marketing professionals have been writing for years about the decline of organic reach on social media. Let’s use the example of a band again because it’s easy to understand. I have some mates in a band in London. They have around 15,000 followers on Facebook. This sounds great. Imagine giving those fans some regular updates and information and aiming to earn £10 a year from each fan — that might be a good business plan for the band.
Back in the day this was possible. Those updates would go to all the fans, but now only a tiny percentage sees them — unless you pay the social network to boost it. Any artist with a page like this has to pay to push those updates to fans.
I have my own Facebook page — for Mark the author. I used to use it to send updates on articles and books I was working on. I have 9,200 followers there — all people who clicked on LIKE when they saw my name. When I posted news about my new book last month I didn’t get a single LIKE or comment on the post — nothing at all. Facebook told me I could reach thousands of people if I paid them £14 to boost the post though.
My new book announcement probably didn’t go to a single follower.
So what is my point here?
The social networks we are all using are no longer performing the function that many of us want from them. They are not helping us to stay in touch with friends or to keep our family updated on our latest trip around the world.
They are merely serving up content that algorithms determine we will probably be interested in — or content that has been sponsored.
Bloomberg said that our newsfeeds have become filled with AI slop and it’s true. The ‘For You Page’ is now filled with garbage and yet they use every psychological trick in the book to keep people addicted. Doomscrolling is now a real word, defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
However, many people still seem to think that these services exist for the good of the public. If there is any downtime, it becomes world news. If there is a threat that may prevent access then people recoil in horror.
They cry out — IT IS MY RIGHT — to have access to these platforms because communication is a basic human right. TikTok has been ordered to close all business operations in Canada. It may still be closed — and banned — in the US.
Responding to the possible US ban, a TikTok spokesperson said:
“The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their constitutional right to free expression. This will damage millions of businesses, deny artists an audience, and destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country.”
It’s a private company. It’s a private app. They are deciding what you see. Everyone still has their right to free expression even if TikTok does not exist. They had this right before social media and they retain it now — other apps and platforms do exist. We often see people on national TV talk shows complaining about their right to expression being denied — Alanis Morissette alert.
The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has been experimenting for the past five years with a social network that requires subscription, but in return there is no advertising, no sponsored content, and you can choose what is important to you — rather than an anonymous algorithm.
Wales only has about half a million people signed up. It’s more than nothing, but it doesn’t compare to the billions on the bigger platforms.
He is shining a light on what we all need though. If we want a service that helps us to stay in touch with friends, but doesn’t bombard us with ads and irrelevant junk then we will need to pay for it. The reality is, a lot of people are happy giving up all their spare time to TikTok because it is free, rather than more selectively using a communication tool they need to pay for.
They are the product and they still don’t realise it.
