They promise to connect people around the world and thereby make the earth a better place. But today platforms like Facebook or Tiktok are no longer “social”. Their promises reveal themselves as a fig leaf for questionable data collection practices.
Not everyone can do that: an influencer stages herself for a video.
Kilito Chan / Moment RF
A Facebook profile? Yes, yes, we had one like that once. But can you guess the password? Somehow life has shifted to other channels in recent years. Today you might be on Instagram. Or on Tiktok. But you don’t actually use it like Facebook did back then to organize birthday parties or to find out who’s coming to your friend’s garden party on Saturday.
In recent years we have gradually slipped into a new digital reality. There used to be social networks where you posted what you were doing and saw what your friends were doing. But little by little, most users have stopped posting a lot of private information.
In fact, it seems as if we have collectively found a better way to deal with the networks. Some of the barkers of yesteryear who flaunted their private lives online have now become conscious consumers. They know all too well that any image they post on the internet could potentially end up in facial recognition databases or fake porn.
The change in user behavior was accelerated by the platforms themselves by gradually giving less weight to content from private contacts. Apparently they noticed that we would spend more time on their apps if they fed our feed less of the same old beach photos from old school friends and more videos from influencers who know how to present themselves in an entertaining way.
This shows that today social networks are more about commerce than communication. And the users are divided into two groups: senders and receivers, i.e. influencers who create content and viewers who talk to the app.
The “Tiktokization” of networks
This trend became clear with the meteoric rise of Tiktok. On the Chinese app you don’t have to follow anyone, add friends, or declare your interests. After just a few minutes of use, the algorithm automatically learns which content captivates you the most.
The platforms from Silicon Valley, especially Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, gradually adapted to the Tiktok principle with its short videos. They introduced the short video formats “Reels” (Instagram and Facebook) and “Shorts” (YouTube) and showed their users more and more of them. Nowadays you see the same sauce of clips everywhere that are designed to give you a quick dopamine hit in the brain.
The basic idea of social networks has failed. When Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, he said: “Facebook is here to connect the world.” He “just wants to ensure that people communicate with each other more efficiently.”
In the meantime, Facebook has become a place where only a few long-forgotten “friends” with a strong need to communicate share their lives. But you see all sorts of other content: funny videos of children and cats, scams, recordings from hidden cameras.
Private communication takes place again in small rooms
There is nothing “social” about it anymore. And that’s good. Because private communication is now where it belongs: in encrypted chats whose number of participants is kept as small as possible.
Platforms like Tiktok or Instagram still know too much about us: our interests, likes, political preferences and, via metadata, our places of residence and work and perhaps even our bedtimes.
But at least most users now protect their privacy from voyeuristic third parties by hardly publishing any personal things about themselves and no longer informing the world about the upcoming summer holidays, during which burglars can clear out their apartment.
Facebook’s original mission of getting people to share is now exposed for what it always was, a fig leaf. Now everyone can see what the company really is: a massive data octopus and a very successful advertising machine. Noble promises made by platforms are pure marketing blah blah, today more than ever.