The decline of social media is good

It’s been terrible at helping us think.

A lot of people abandoned X after the presidential election, apparently wanting nothing more to do with its owner and his political views. I didn’t think to check before the election, so it’s hard to say exactly, but I think my feed alone lost a net of some 20,000 followers in a few days, and counting. It’s lost many, many more followers than that since the change in ownership.

Bluesky is one of the beneficiaries, it seems, having gained a million followers soon after the election.

I’m on Bluesky, and Threads, but have stayed on X. I get some use out of it, even the parts that are awful. It’s my business to monitor many sources of information, and it’s also my preference as a citizen. But I get less value from X than in past years. Many people who remain are less active, and while I haven’t counted, it feels to me that more and more of the traffic is among bots or accounts that might as well be bots, for all the thought they put into their posts.

Beyond that, the experience is manipulated. Here’s the simplest example of what I mean: I regularly set the app to see people I am following; but the app constantly flips back to a “For You” tab of people I did not choose to follow, which is often topped by a tweet from the site’s owner. I was already following him! He didn’t need to try so hard.

Much of the information on X is a mixture of irrelevance and falsehood. This morning, thanks to X giving me content I didn’t ask for, I saw an exchange that was characteristic. Nate Silver, the polling analyst, asserted that Kamala Harris was a mediocre presidential candidate. His underlying post gave reasons. This triggered an enraged response from a progressive who considered Silver’s point to be racist, I guess. This, in turn, was shared by some right-wing account that falsely identified the angry progressive as the leader of the Democratic Party. This, in turn, was shared by a billionaire, and then X put this concoction in front of me: a credulous person sharing a falsehood about an angry reaction about an opinion that I didn’t particularly need to begin with.

Here’s another, and sadder, way the experience is manipulated: we’re given to understand that the algorithm chokes off links that recommend articles. This has been one of the most valuable functions of Twitter, recommending deeper reads that you might not otherwise have encountered. Now that’s less common.

So, whatever. The owner can do what he wants with his $44 billion property. I’m just using it less. It’s less valuable. And on the whole I appreciate the disruption. The way to understand our fractured world is to think more deeply about it, and thoughts take time. Social media demands and rewards the opposite—instant conclusions, biases, instant rage. Its corrosive influence is evident in some of the posts by its richest and most famous users.

As I said I am on the other platforms and get some use from them, too, but the range of opinion seems limited. And there is just a fundamental problem with the form.

The center of my writing, aside from books and NPR, is this space, where I try to give thoughts in context—to a smaller audience that is willing to spend a bit more time. I am grateful for the vote of confidence of subscribers here, and even more grateful that many subscribers pay. We’re all figuring this out together; and even if we fail, I hope we can spend a little more time with reality and a little less with fakery and fury.