Social networks are dead: people have been replaced by content. Today, the imperative is to engage users with entertainment content. The initial mission of connecting people around the world has yet to pay off. Yesterday that was true; today, it can no longer be. Social networks are dead if we consider them platforms intended to create connections between people. Instead, they are increasingly platforms for entertainment content. The goal is no longer to connect people with each other but to offer engaging content to people. In intentions, social networks like Instagram are closer to Netflix than to their original mission. So what? TikTok was right.
Content is king. TikTok changed everything! It didn’t all happen overnight, although the changes were there for all to see: the focus on likes, which created an ever-increasing competition towards virality; the creation of pages and profiles designed to get large volumes of traffic, trying to leverage how Facebook works, turning people into measurable metrics.
Facebook is the looser
And higher numbers won out over lower ones, gradually shaping the form and substance of social networks. A transformation that was then accelerated by the advent of TikTok, which was intended to be something other than a social network: ample space for videos, an entire ‘For You’ section dedicated to discovering new content to watch, but not new people to interact with. TikTok was never intended to be a social network, but always an entertainment platform.
In doing so, it drew so much attention to itself, especially from the younger generation, that it eventually dragged along even the two biggest social networks in the world: first Instagram and then Facebook. Since the advent of Reels on Instagram, short videos of a maximum of sixty seconds that took over the format made popular by TikTok (which now allows videos up to ten minutes long to be uploaded), the social network has changed its face. And for a simple reason: that type of content increased user engagement more than photos of friends.
The change of direction was made clear when Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s CEO, declared that Instagram was no longer ‘the photo-sharing app or the square photo app’ in July last year. Nothing that surprised the social network’s frequent users; but a public declaration of intent is nevertheless an important change of step: the future was a mosaic made up of videos, films and content recommended even by people who are not part of the ‘friends’ circle.
Then, Facebook came. The latest update of the application has divided the feed into two: on the one hand, in the main tab, the content recommended by the algorithm, complete with Stories and Reels highlighted at the top of the screen; on the other, in a separate tab, a chronological feed for updates shared by friends, pages or groups. Content creators have ‘killed’ social networks. This change means only one thing: Facebook is no longer without a recognizable identity, and photos and videos shared with friends are the past. Meta, which controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, needs to engage people rather than connect them; it requires them to spend more time on its online platforms. If this means changing course from a social network to an entertainment platform, welcome.
Influencers are the present
Social networks have created new figures: influencers and content creators. That is people who publish daily content designed to interact with people. The best manage to aggregate a large group of followers; others try. Either way, these two figures have metaphorically killed the platform that formed them, forcing it to change. Content creators – ‘friends’ or not, it no longer matters – have become even more central precisely because they create entertainment content that engages people by making them spend more time in the application. For this to be possible, Facebook and Instagram’s algorithm had to become something else. It doesn’t recommend the posts of friends but recommends the content of anyone.
Despite the convoluted events, Elon Musk’s vision for the future of Twitter also goes in the direction of a platform closer to WeChat, an all-encompassing Chinese application with which to do practically everything, and TikTok, than to a traditional social network. Another demonstration of how social networks are no longer attractive today. Twitter has meanwhile introduced its audio rooms – the Spaces – and now aims to integrate newsletter-like note formats, Notes precisely. Social networks are dead, killed by the creatures they themselves have created: algorithms and influencers. Now room for content. Come together, right now, over me.
