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SAN FRANCISCO — We lost Twitter and got X. We tried Bluesky and Mastodon (well, some of us did). We’re worried about AI bots and teen mental health. We cocooned in private chats and scrolled endlessly as we had done in previous years. For social media users, 2023 was a year of beginnings and endings, with some soul-searching in between.
Here’s a look at some of the biggest social media stories in 2023 — and what to watch for next year:
A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk moved into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, fired its CEO and other top executives, and the social media platform now known as X.
Musk revealed the X logo in July. It quickly changed Twitter’s name and its whimsical blue bird icon online and at the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
“And soon we’ll be saying goodbye to the Twitter brand and slowly all the birds,” Musk posted on the site.
Because of its public nature and because it attracts public figures, journalists and other high-profile users, Twitter has always had an outsized influence on popular culture – but that influence seems to be waning. Is.
“It had a lot of problems before Musk took over, but it was a beloved brand with a clear role in the social media landscape,” said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. “There are still moments of Twitter magic on the platform, such as when journalists took to the platform to post real-time updates about the OpenAI drama, and the small communities on the platform are important to many users. But Twitter has largely died out in the last 17 years, and X’s raison d’être is dubious.”
Since Musk took over, X has been plagued by accusations of misinformation and racism, suffered significant advertising losses and suffered a decline in usage. It didn’t help when Musk sneered in an on-stage interview about companies holding back spending on X. Musk asserted that the advertisers who had pulled out were engaging in “blackmail” and, using profanity, essentially stated. to lose them.
Continuing a trend of welcoming back users who were previously banned by Twitter for hate speech or disinformation, in December Musk reinstated the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, an unscientific poll. referring to what he posted to his followers. In favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.
Other organizations supporting LGBTQ and marginalized groups, meanwhile, are sounding the alarm about X being less safe. In April, for example, it quietly removed a policy against “targeted misgendering or dead naming of transgender people.” In June, the advocacy group GLAAD called it “the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people.” stated.
GLSEN, an LGBTQ education group, announced in December that it was leaving X to join other groups such as the suicide prevention nonprofit Trevor Project, saying that Musk’s changes had “set a new plate.” has created forms that enable its users to harass and target the LGBTQ+ community. ban or discipline.”
The platform still has moments of Twitter magic, such as when journalists took to the platform to post real-time updates about the OpenAI drama, and small communities on the platform remain important to many users. . But the Twitter of the last 17 years is largely dead, and X’s reason for existence is dubious.
Jasmine Enberg, Insider Intelligence
Musk’s ambitions for X include turning the platform into an “everything app” — similar to China’s WeChat, for example. Issue? It’s not clear whether American and Western audiences would like the idea. And Musk himself has been pretty vague on the details.
While X faced an identity crisis, some users began looking for alternatives. Along with Bluesky, Mastodon was a contender, originally spun out of Twitter — a pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who still sits on its board of directors.
CEO Jay Graber recently said that while tens of thousands of people, many of them fed-up Twitter users, started signing up for Bulaski only (yet) in the spring, the app has since 10 Fewer people were working.
That meant “hustling to keep everything working, keeping people online, adding features that we had in the roadmap,” he said. For weeks, the job was simply “scaling” — making sure the system could handle the influx.
“We had one person on the app for a while, who was very funny, and there were memes about Paul compared to all the engineers on Twitter,” he recalled. “I don’t think we hired another app developer until after the crazy growth spurt.”
Seeing an opportunity to attract angry Twitter users, Facebook parent Meta launched its rival Threads in July. Its popularity grew as tens of millions of people began to sign up – although keeping people going was a challenge. Then, in December, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a surprise move that the company was testing interoperability — the idea that through Mastodon, Bluesky and other decentralized social networks people could share their accounts. should be usable on different platforms. Email address or phone number.
“Beginning a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol,” Zuckerberg posted on Threads in December. “Making threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and will help content reach more people. I’m pretty optimistic about that.”
The effects of social media on children’s mental health prompted a reckoning this year, with the US Surgeon General warning in May that there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teenagers – And called on tech companies, parents and caregivers to “take urgent action now to protect children.”
“We’re asking parents to manage a rapidly evolving technology that fundamentally changes how their children think about themselves, how they form friendships, how they see the world. experience — and technology, anyway, that previous generations didn’t have to manage.” Dr. Vivek Murthy told The Associated Press. “And we’re putting it all on the parents’ shoulders, which is not fair at all.”
In October, dozens of US states sued Meta for knowingly and knowingly creating features on Instagram and Facebook that harm young people and contribute to a youth mental health crisis. Addicted to the platforms.
In November, Meta’s former engineering director Arturo Badger testified before a Senate subcommittee about social media and the teen mental health crisis, hoping to shed light on how Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, are aware of Instagram’s dangers. I knew but did not choose. To make meaningful changes to address them.
The testimony comes amid a bipartisan push in Congress to adopt regulations to protect children online. In December, the Federal Trade Commission proposed major changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children, including targeting ads to children under 13. By default turn off and limit push notifications.
Your AI friends have arrived – but chatbots are just the beginning. Standing in a courtyard at his company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, Zuckerberg said this fall that Meta is “focused on building the future of human connection” — and painted a future where people connect with their friends or Interact with and with hologram versions of co-workers. AI bots built to help them. The company unveiled an army of AI bots — with celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton lending their faces to play them — that social media users can interact with.
Next year, AI will be “integrated into almost every corner of the platform,” Enberg said.
“Social apps will use AI to increase ad performance and revenue, subscription sign-ups, and commercial activity. AI will deepen both users’ and advertisers’ dependence on and relationship with social media, but its implementation remains to be seen.” But will not be smooth. Consumer and regulatory scrutiny will be intensified,” he added.
The analyst also sees subscriptions as an increasingly attractive revenue stream for some platforms. Inspired by Musk’s X, subscriptions “began as a way to diversify or grow revenue as the social ad business took a hit, but they persisted and expanded even as the social ad market stabilized itself. is doing.”
With major elections looming in the US and India, among other countries, the role of AI and social media in disinformation will be front and center for social media watchers.
“We’re not ready for that,” AJ Nash, vice president of intelligence at cybersecurity firm ZeroFox, told the AP in May. “To me, the big leap forward is the audio and video capabilities that have emerged. When you can do that at scale, and distribute it across social platforms, well, that’s going to have a big impact.”