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There was a time not so long ago when it seemed like the most consequential conversations in our society were happening on social media. But as the digital commons spawned mobs, performative posturing and rage baiting, a lot of those conversations went private. That's one takeaway from the recent Semaphore report on the running group chats of tech titans, business leaders and public intellectuals.
It's a move to what Amy Webb calls the splinternet. She's the founder and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group. I think over time, sensitivities changed, and there was the public-facing dialogue that people were willing to have. And then there was the very real private dialogue that oftentimes, you know, people need and want to have.
A lot of that just can't happen during a group call or a Zoom. It has to happen asynchronously. And the easiest way to do that is a closed network that is shielded from public view. Although we saw very recently that what feels like an encrypted closed network can sometimes reveal itself to the wider public.
I wouldn't exactly say, you know, social media is dead. These platforms are still very active. There is a lot of discourse that goes on on these platforms. God knows I spend too much time paying attention to it. But how would you sort of characterize it?
How things have changed in terms of the centrality of these very broad social media platforms to, you know, the way our society kind of digests ideas and conversations. It's important to keep in mind that X, nay Twitter, is
had a very small audience relative to other large platforms. It just so happens that the people primarily using that platform were those in the public sphere. So those were journalists, public intellectuals, politicians, and a lot of those people are still on Twitter.
But we don't have, you know, two or three means of distribution anymore. So that would have been Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. We have many different choices now. And so back to that original point about a splinternet, you know, the internet plays by different rules depending on where you are in the world and what you have access to. And I think we have now seen the same thing happen to social media. We don't just have a handful of networks anymore. We now have
many different networks, each of which offers something different. So the reason to go to TikTok is not the same reason to go to, you know, threads, for example. You've got different audiences, different algorithms, different ways of harnessing attention. We have a lot of choices. And I think what's happened over the past few years is a similar splintering. And it's made it even more challenging to both find an audience and find the truth online. We'll be right back.
In honor of Military Appreciation Month, Verizon thought of a lot of different ways we could show our appreciation. Like rolling out the red carpet, giving you your own personal marching band, or throwing a bumping shindig.
At Verizon, we're doing all that in the form of special military offers. That's why this month only, we're giving military and veteran families a $200 Verizon gift card and a phone on us with a select trade-in and a new line on select unlimited plans. Think of it as our way of flying a squadron of jets overhead while launching fireworks. Now that's what we call a celebration because we're proud to serve you. Visit your local Verizon store to learn more.
$200 Verizon gift card requires smartphone purchase $799.99 or more with new line on eligible plan. Gift card sent within eight weeks after receipt of claim. Phone offer requires $799.99 purchase with new smartphone line on unlimited ultimate or postpaid unlimited plus. Minimum plan $80 a month with auto pay plus taxes and fees for 36 months. Less $800 trade-in or promo credit applied over 36 months. 0% APR. Trade-in must be from Apple, Google, or Samsung. Trade-in and additional terms apply.
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You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Amy Webb, founder and CEO of the Future Today Strategy Group.
What do we gain and what do we lose with discourse kind of splintering into different corners of the Internet? Well, I can tell you in my case as a original Twitter user, it has felt a little bit like for me the death of a community. I really did go through some form of mourning when that started to happen because I was used to talking to folks in some form or another every day.
And that entire network dissipated. Let's keep in mind that another huge change for social media is coming from the algorithmic composition of the networks themselves. So it's just become, I think, more challenging to participate in that public discourse, which is really, really important in a well-functioning democracy.
Yeah, I mean, even in the reporting on kind of these group chats, you know, influential group chats, there were at times reorganizations of the group chats over tensions that would arise, you know, political differences and splinter groups would form. And that kind of feels like what's happened with social media platforms, too, you know, I mean...
X is, you know, coded right. Blue sky is coded left. Mastodon is just complicated. But what does it sort of say about that project that social media platforms had kind of promised a way to connect and be exposed to the marketplace of ideas? Well, the marketplace of ideas has always existed.
I don't know that our essential human behavior has changed all that much, but information moves quickly. I think people are more susceptible to having their minds maybe not changed, but hearing somebody else reflect ideas that you may have, which may not be founded in truth and data, you know, it's more complicated now. I think the most interesting part of all of this is not how much information
Each social network has become politicized. It's the absence of conversation. So again, I think you have people saying things publicly for a purpose and then behind closed doors or on these on networks that are just not visible to everybody else, you know, having very different kinds of conversations. As I'm saying this, I have an analogy that maybe will not make sense, but it makes perfect sense to me. Do you remember the first season of Jersey Shore? Sure.
Vaguely. All you need to know is it was the best first season of any reality show ever. And it's because the people on that show weren't yet painfully aware of like being recorded. I mean, there were cameras everywhere, but they weren't they didn't have that self-awareness. Yeah. And therefore they were truly authentic. And I think that's analogous to the earliest days of social media when everybody showed up and was truly authentic.
Yeah, totally.
From a business perspective, you know, do you think we'll see sort of continued investment in more private encrypted messaging networks or, you know, sort of apps similar to Signal and these other things versus, you know, these ad-supported social media platforms? Well, look, the Signalgate, right, the gaffe that occurred that we all now know many details about,
In my talking with CEOs and executive leadership teams at different companies and also, you
I think this did nothing but help Signal because there wasn't yet broad awareness of what this network was. And let's be honest, had not a very well-known journalist accidentally have been added to that group, none of us would be talking about what happened. And now, again, like a lot of the CEOs that I interact with on a pretty daily basis on regular sort of text messaging are all like, hey, why don't we switch over and use Signal instead? I think what happened with that group was
has introduced this idea to leaders that maybe if we're going to continue to have these text exchanges, which a lot of them do, that they're now moving over to encrypted networks. So I think the problem here wasn't the technology, it was human error. And I anticipate those networks growing in popularity and very likely investment too.
You were a Twitter early adopter. I don't know if you left it or it left you, but what are you early adopting now that we might all be migrating to in the future? It's a great question. I'm trying to figure out where everybody went. I think the mastodons of the world, the blue skies of the world, you know, threads, there are so many different networks now. It's going to take a while for a critical mass to truly form.
And I wonder if before that has an opportunity to happen, we switch over to generative AI platforms instead, where the conversation is more human to machine, you know, or groups of humans to machines. Part of what I'm missing, honestly, is discoverability and serendipity, less self-promotion and much more passive absorption of new ideas.
People are using generative AI right now to some degree for that, right? It's to replace some of that serendipity. I wonder if there's a future network where I show up with my digital twin AI thing, you know, and there's a small group, some version of that backed by a multi-agent system becomes a much more engrossing, satisfying social media experience than what we currently have today. That's Amy Webb at the Future Today Strategy Group.
We'll have a link to that semaphore piece by Ben Smith about the group chats that changed America at our website, MarketplaceTech.org.
And I was thinking about what Amy Webb said about groups of humans talking to machines as maybe one future iteration of social media. And I realized we kind of already have a version of that now, though I don't think anyone believes it's fostering meaningful conversations. Social media has become increasingly overtaken by AI slop.
The outlet 404 Media has done some great reporting on how people are making money by farming engagement with AI, whether that's by generating fake disaster videos in the midst of a real disaster or creating sexy AI avatars to sell synthetic adult content.
As John Brandon writes for Fortune, when we are all surrounded by AI bots acting like humans, looking at content that was not generated by humans and looking at ads powered by algorithms, it will feel about the same as the Matrix. None of it will seem real, and then none of it will have value. Erica Soderstrom produced this episode. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech.
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