In the past year or so, I’ve noticed that social media platforms are getting worse.
By worse, I mean being constantly bombarded with irrelevant and low-quality ads, seeing hate speech amplified, and AI creeping into most features.
And it’s no surprise given the changes to these platforms which have recently rolled out.
The spread of misinformation
In the past month alone, Meta announced that it would be doing away with fact-checkers, deeming them to be biased. As with X, moderation will now come in the form of Community Notes provided by its users.
The process for Community Notes to be added to posts is as follows.
- X user taps the ‘Request Community Note’ option from the three dots menu on a post
- The Community Notes contributor group is alerted to the post for review
- An approved Notes contributor then reviews the post, checking for accuracy and relevant info, and submits a proposed Note where valid
- The proposed Note is then reviewed (by another Notes contributor of varying political perspective), before finally being shown on the post, or not, depending on the process
To become a Community Notes contributor, all users need to do is sign up and meet the eligibility criteria, which aren’t exactly difficult to meet.
The problem is that Community Notes fail to address misinformation, with them either not being applied, or being manipulated to reference biased sources that back up or dismiss the claim made in the post.
Additionally, research revealed that Community Notes were only being shown publicly on around 8.5% of posts. That leaves a lot of room for misinformation to spread – and quickly.
A post which claimed that 20,000 Haitian migrants had been imported by the Democrats to a small Ohio town (and were now eating their pets) was viewed more than 5 million times on the platform, as well as being widely shared. Despite Community Notes contributors citing sources proving it to be false, no Note was added as they didn’t receive enough votes to be publicly attached to the post.
The same report found that a post with a publicly available Community Note is 80% more likely to be deleted by the user, but by then, the damage is already done.
With all this in mind, it’s clear that Meta does not care if their platforms are being used to spread misinformation. In fact, when posts are spreading misinformation, they typically get more engagement – which is exactly what they want. More time on the platforms means more eyeballs on ads, and advertising revenue is a huge chunk of how these platforms make their money.
The proliferation of AI isn’t helping either.
Many users are struggling to identify AI-generated images and videos. Over the festive period, I saw posts of people arguing with their parents about things they’d seen on social media that were clearly not real images, but they were insistent that they were.
@funtanylI feel so badly for so many people who are out of their depth with this AI content. We’re all vulnerable to it at different levels i think but this is a particularly insane example of it. I hear facebook is also full of baby boomers completely guilble to AI content and it’s really sad how unequiped for this media landscape and how vulnerable so many people are to it as wel.? original sound – funtanyl
If people can be fooled by images like this, imagine how easy it is to manipulate them – especially into believing things which could sway them politically.
And when it comes to the political motives behind some of these changes, it’s clear that the owners of social media platforms have no issue with throwing users under the bus.
The free speech debate
Along with announcing that Meta will be removing fact-checkers, it updated some of its ‘Hateful Conduct’ policy. These changes allow users to abuse minorities without any repercussions due to a rollback of its hate speech rules.
The changes include:
…removing rules that forbid insults about a person’s appearance based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease. Meta also scrapped policies that prohibited expressions of hate against a person or a group on the basis of their protected class and that banned users from referring to transgender or nonbinary people as “it.”
The President and CEO of GLAAD highlighted the many issues with the changes.
“Without these necessary hate speech and other policies, Meta is giving the green light for people to target LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups with violence, vitriol, and dehumanizing narratives. With these changes, Meta is continuing to normalize anti-LGBTQ hatred for profit — at the expense of its users and true freedom of expression. Fact-checking and hate speech policies protect free speech.”
This article by The Intercept shows what users are now permitted to post after the new rules were leaked.
Furthermore, Meta announced that Dana White, a longtime supporter of Trump would be joining its board, after Zuckerberg donated $1 million to his inaugural fund.
Following that, Meta removed Pride and Trans-related themes from its Messenger app. Which all may be a huge coincidence, though I suspect probably not.
Social media sites have the reach needed to shape opinion. The founders of both Meta and X have been cosying up to the incoming administration in the US, with Musk being rewarded with leading the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
Speaking of politics, at the time of writing this post, TikTok was temporarily banned in the US, as legislators wanted it to be sold off from its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance. The ban was reversed by Donald Trump, according to a notification on the platform.
According to the US Government, there are security concerns about the app, accusing ByteDance of being linked to the Chinese government. Which is rich, given that both Meta and X collect a LOT of data on their users (and then sell it), as well as both platforms having their own issues with propaganda being distributed.
It’s rumoured that US-based big tech companies want to see TikTok banned as the platform has continued to grow in popularity, and with it, taken a sizable chunk of advertising revenue. By forcing them to sell, the company can come under the control of a party with US interests who will be more than willing to pander to the government and other lobbyists at the expense of TikTok’s user base.
It’s also suspected that the US wants to ban the app as it has become a platform where users are mobilising, as well as sharing news and information which is usually suppressed by not only traditional media, but also other platforms. Since it was reinstated ‘by Trump’, users have noted that some searches, mostly on topics deemed to be controversial by the US, are no longer serving any results, suggesting that some form of restrictions have been applied to the algorithm.
So much for free speech, eh?
I hate AI so much
I can’t stop ranting about AI.
There’s no denying that it can come in handy when applied to some applications. But I don’t think social media is one of them.
In addition to the potential increase in misinformation through AI-generated images and video, social media platforms have gone all-in on AI, pushing us ever closer to dead internet theory becoming a reality.
Meta recently launched an AI chatbot in Messenger. Alongside this, it also created AI chatbots that appeared to be real profiles that users could interact with. One such AI profile was a black, queer single mother named ‘Liv’. The profile also included AI-generated images of her and her children.
After it surfaced that the bot was created primarily by a team of white men, users pointed out that this was basically a form of digital blackface, Meta took the profile offline, as well as scrapping a number of other AI profiles.
Besides the ethical issues with these types of AI-generated profiles, I have to ask myself, what is the point of them?
Are there really swathes of users on social networks that want to engage with the people they know, like, or admire even less thanks to feeds being dictated by algorithms stuffed with ads, in favour of talking to bots? I find it hard to believe.
LinkedIn introduced suggested AI responses to posts a few months back, resulting in comments being garbage that sometimes have nothing to do with the original post topic.
What is the point in ‘social’ media if the content being published, shared, and consumed is made up of bots all talking to each other? Did anyone ask for this?
And just this week, I noticed that X has begun to introduce Grok AI, which lets users ask follow up questions to posts, citing a summary of sources from other users on X – which may or may not be biased (in this case, downplaying Elon’s ‘hand gestures’ during his speech at Trump’s inauguration).
On top of that, social media platforms are using posts to train their AI models. And in some cases, there is no way of opting out.
What does all this mean for marketers?
After brands stopped advertising on X (Twitter) en masse, it seems a similar exodus could happen on Meta. The FT reports that big advertising agencies are stating that brands are already assessing the risks of their ads appearing alongside harmful or toxic content. While plenty of users won’t care about seeing a brand ad appear alongside something gross some idiot has posted, they still need to consider the reputational damage that could be caused for those who do.
If AI-generated content is pushed to users more and more, where does that leave brands that have already been suffering from reduced visibility on their follower’s feeds? And if AI bots are inflating engagement metrics on their posts, how are they meant to accurately measure it when they don’t know who is actually a real person?
If TikTok is banned, how will this impact brands operating in, or with a significant customer base in the US?
Brands with ESG policies may no longer wish to align themselves with the views held by the ‘tech bro’ owners of these platforms, who have no issues with using slurs, or doing everything possible to pander to the audience of boot lickers that adore them, despite a lot of those people holding abhorrent views, particularly on gender and race.
I’m not looking forward to seeing how social media platforms continue to change (for the worse) in 2025. And I bet my clients don’t, either.