Social media: How ‘content’ replaced friendship

"Social media has become less social," said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. In its heyday, "Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you." But today's version of social media is "where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news," and a "rising tide of AI-generated slop." Federal regulators are currently suing Meta over its monopoly on "personal social networking services." The government's case, though, relies on sifting through deals made more than a decade ago, when Facebook was "singular and inescapable." In the age of TikTok and YouTube, that feels antiquated.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently testified that his company is now really in the "discovery-entertainment space," and he's not wrong, said Issie Lapowsky in Vanity Fair. Zuckerberg has a lot of incentive to say that he's competing with the whole world of entertainment companies. That "undermines a central pillar" of the antitrust case he faces. But the numbers do bear him out. He testified that "just 20 percent of the content people consume on Facebook and 10 percent of content they see on Instagram is from their friends." It's highly debatable whether this evolution has been good for users, "but from a legal standpoint," in this case, it's good for Meta. Technology has changed so much that the trial has felt like "a trip down memory lane," said Mike Isaac and Cecilia Kang in The New York Times. Zuckerberg "winced as he watched his younger self on video discuss some of his early competitive concerns," including Dropbox. Other apps that used to worry Zuckerberg included Path, Orkut, Evernote, and Google Plus— all dead or obsolete. Even the version of Facebook that the government is trying to depict sounds extinct. To the government, it's "about connecting with friends and family." That's the Facebook of a decade ago, "a long time in internet years."

It's not clear that Zuckerberg wants the evolution of social media to unfold this way, said Shira Ovide in The Washington Post. He seems oddly envious of his own app, Instagram, which he has sometimes treated "more like a rival than a successful part of his own company." In 2018, he "considered casting off Instagram" because he was worried its growth "could hurt the Facebook app." He waffled over whether to announce when Instagram reached 1 billion users. According to psychologist Abraham Tesser, Zuckerberg built the original Facebook and still treats it "as an extension of himself." Like a jealous lover, he resents the popularity of something new. But he's probably got to stop living in the past.