Platforms come and go, but this feels different: the final death of the idea that social media could ever be the internet’s town square, a global meeting place for ideas that would broaden all our horizons. Now, the future of social media looks increasingly segregated for users’ safety, like rival fans at football. X for the rightwing and the raging; centrists and policy nerds on Bluesky; people who hate politics on Threads or Instagram; Gen Z on TikTok; boomers on Facebook.
Hell is other people. Or, more specifically, other people on social media. Hell is millions of people who would avoid each other like the plague if they met in real life, but who are shoved into each other’s faces and essentially egged on to punch each other online; it’s people endlessly winding each other up out of boredom or frustration or desperation to be part of some gang, which ends in viral bullying, death threats, children ripping other children to shreds on platforms they are legally not old enough to join.
Hell is a social circle so vast and remote that human brains just aren’t wired to cope with it: it’s sociability without accountability, and it was making us miserably stressed long before Elon Musk bought X and drove it at a wall. But even then, people stayed for the reasons people do stay in toxic relationships – inertia, fear of being lonely, misplaced hope it may get better – and because it seemed intrinsic to many working lives. You had to be on X because everyone else was, a circular logic that this week finally snapped: a stampede away from X has seen rival Bluesky add 1 million users since the US election, with several prominent Labour MPs joining the charge.
What’s the point, the chair of the women and equalities committee, Sarah Owen, asked, in being on a site that’s “gone from cat memes, to sharing Wordle scores, to calling people whores just for having a different political opinion”…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/15/x-bluesky-social-media-platforms
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