Mark Zuckerberg Says Social Media Is Over

Summary

What, exactly, does a social network do? Is it a website that connects people with one another online, a digital gathering place where we can consume content posted by our friends? That’s certainly what it was in its heyday, in the two-thousands. Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of A.I.-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible. The people we follow and the messages they post increasingly feel like needles in a digital haystack. Social media has become less social.Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted as much during more than ten hours of testimony, over three days last week, in the opening phase of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Facebook’s parent company, Meta. The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.The F.T.C. is arguing that Meta maintained an illegal monopoly in the “personal social networking services” industry, in part by buying up Facebook’s competitors, such as Instagram, which the company acquired in 2012, and the messaging platform WhatsApp, which it acquired in 2014. But the F.T.C.’s definition of the ...