Updated August 18. 2022
Social media is polluting society. Moderation alone won’t fix the problem
Companies already have the systems in place that are needed to evaluate their deeper impacts on the social fabric.
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Updated information Aug 1, 2022
Jul 25, 2022 - Technology
Sunset of the social network
- That's how TikTok sorts the videos it shows users, and that's largely how Facebook will now organize its home screen.
- The dominant player in social media is transforming itself into a kind of digital mass media, in which the reactions of hordes of anonymous users, processed by machine learning, drive the selection of your content.
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- Meta owns a big chunk of that market, too, thanks to Facebook Messenger and its ownership of WhatsApp.
- At the other end of the media spectrum, the "discovery engines" run by TikTok and Meta will duke it out with streaming services to capture billions of eyeballs around the globe and sell that attention to advertisers.
All this leaves a vacuum in the middle — the space of forums, ad-hoc group formation and small communities that first drove excitement around internet adoption in the pre-Facebook era.
- Facebook's sunseting of its own social network could open a new space for innovation on this turf, where relative newcomers like Discord are already beginning to thrive.
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Twitter now lets you soft-block followers
Now you can remove someone from your followers list without blocking them entirely.
