NY.– We lost Twitter and got X. We tried Bluesky and Mastodon (well, some of us did). We care about AI bots and the mental health of teenagers. We take refuge in private chats and browse non-stop, as we did in previous years. For social media users, 2023 was a year of beginnings and endings, with some reflections in between.
Here's a look at some of the biggest stories on social media in 2023 and what to watch out for next year:
Goodbye to Twitter
A little over a year ago, Elon Musk walked into Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, fired its CEO and other top executives, and began transforming the social media platform into what is now known as X.
Musk revealed the X logo in July. He quickly replaced Twitter's name and its whimsical bluebird icon, both online and at the company's San Francisco headquarters.
“And soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter brand and, little by little, to all the birds,” Musk posted on the website.
Due to its public nature and the attraction of public figures, journalists and other high-profile users, Twitter has always had a great influence on popular culture, but that influence appears to be diminishing.
“It had a lot of problems even before Musk took it over, but it was a beloved brand with a clear role in the social media landscape,” says Jasmine Enberg, social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. “There are still moments of Twitter magic on the platform, like when journalists took to the platform to post real-time updates about the OpenAI drama, and the platform's smaller communities are still important to many users. But Twitter's the last 17 years has largely disappeared, and X's raison d'être is murky.
Since Musk's acquisition, X has been bombarded by accusations of misinformation and racism, suffered significant advertising losses, and suffered declines in usage. It didn't help matters that Musk swore in an onstage interview about companies that had stopped spending on they would lose
Continuing the trend of welcoming back users who had been banned by the old Twitter for inciting hate or spreading misinformation, in December Musk restored conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' X account, pointing to an unscientific survey he published among his followers and which was favorable to the Infowars host, who repeatedly called the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax.
For their part, LGBTQ organizations and others that support marginalized groups have raised alarm about In June, advocacy group GLAAD called it “the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people.”
GLSEN, an LGBTQ education group, announced in December that it was leaving users harass and attack the LGBTQ+ community without restraint or discipline.”
Hello X. Y Thread. And Bluesky
Musk's ambitions for X include transforming the platform into an “everything app,” like China's WeChat, for example. What is the problem? It is not clear whether American and Western audiences are enthusiastic about the idea. And Musk himself has been pretty vague about the details.
As X faces an identity crisis, some users began looking for a replacement. Mastodon was one of the contenders, along with Bluesky, which actually grew out of Twitter, a pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who still sits on his board.
When tens of thousands of people, many of them fed-up Twitter users, started signing up for (still) invitation-only Bluesky in the spring, the app had fewer than 10 people working on it, its chief executive, Jay Graber, said recently.
This meant “hustling to get everything working, keeping people online, hustling to add features that we had on the roadmap,” he explained. For weeks, the work was simply about “scaling,” that is, ensuring the systems could handle the influx.
“We had a person on the app for a while, which was really fun, and there were memes about Paul in front of all the Twitter engineers,” he recalls. “I don't think we hired a second app developer until after the crazy growth spurt.”
Meta, Facebook's parent company, saw an opportunity to appeal to disgruntled Twitter users and launched its own rival, Threads, in July. Its popularity skyrocketed when tens of millions of people began signing up, although maintaining users has been a challenge. In December, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, made a surprise announcement that the company was testing interoperability, the idea championed by Mastodon, Bluesky and other decentralized social networks that people can use their accounts on different platforms, as is the case with the email address or phone number.
“We're starting 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 options on how to interact and help content reach more people. I'm pretty optimistic about that.”
Concern about mental health
The impact of social media on children's mental health plunged into a reckoning this year, with the US surgeon general warning in May that there is not enough evidence to show social media is safe for children. and teens – and calling on tech companies, parents and caregivers to take “immediate action to protect children now.”
“We're asking parents to manage a rapidly evolving technology that fundamentally changes the way their children think about themselves, how they create friendships, how they experience the world… and a technology, by the way, that previous generations they never had to manage,” Dr. Vivek Murthy told The Associated Press. “And we're putting all of that on the shoulders of parents, which just isn't fair.”
In October, dozens of US states sued Meta for harming young people and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to their platforms.
In November, Arturo Béjar, Meta's former director of engineering, testified before a Senate subcommittee on social media and the teen mental health crisis, hoping to shed light on how Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, knew of the damage that Instagram was causing, but decided not to make significant changes to address it.
The testimony came amid a bipartisan push in Congress to adopt rules aimed at protecting children online. In December, the Federal Trade Commission proposed sweeping changes to a decades-old law that regulates how online companies can track and advertise to children, including disabling by default ads aimed at children under 13 and the limitation of push notifications.
What to see in '24
Your artificial intelligence friends have arrived, but chatbots are just the beginning. In a courtyard at his company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, Zuckerberg said this fall that Meta is “focused on building the future of human connection,” and drew a near future in which people interact with hologram versions of their friends or co-workers and with artificial intelligence robots created to help them. The company unveiled an army of artificial intelligence robots – 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 virtually every corner of the platforms,” Enberg said.
“Social applications will use AI to drive usage, performance and advertising revenue, subscriptions and commerce. AI will increase users' and advertisers' trust and relationship with social networks, but its implementation will not be entirely easy, as consumer and regulatory scrutiny will intensify,” he adds.
The analyst also sees subscriptions as an increasingly attractive source of income for some platforms. Inspired by Musk's “.
With major elections looming in the US and India, among other countries, the role of AI and social media in disinformation will continue to be in the focus of social media watchers.
“We are not prepared for this,” AJ Nash, vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity company ZeroFox, told the AP in May. “For me, the big leap forward is the audio and video capabilities that have emerged. When you can do that at scale, and distribute it on social platforms, well, it's going to have a big impact.”
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