The yr of social media soul-searching: Twitter dies, X and Threads are born and AI will get private

We misplaced Twitter and obtained X. We tried out Bluesky and Mastodon (effectively, a few of us did). We fretted about AI bots and teenage psychological well being. We cocooned in personal chats and scrolled endlessly as we did in years previous. For social media customers, 2023 was a yr of beginnings and endings, with some soul-searching in between.

Here’s a glance again among the largest tales in social media in 2023 – and what to look at for subsequent yr:

Slightly greater than a yr in the past, Elon Musk walked into Twitter ’s San Francisco headquarters, fired its CEO and different prime executives and commenced remodeling the social media platform into what’s now often called X.

Musk revealed the X brand in July. It rapidly changed Twitter‘s name and its whimsical blue bird icon, online and on the company’s San Francisco headquarters.

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk posted on the location.

Because of its public nature and since it attracted public figures, journalists and different high-profile customers, Twitter all the time had an outsized affect on well-liked tradition – however that affect appears to be waning.

“It had a lot of problems even before Musk took it over, but it was beloved brand with a clear role in the social media landscape,” mentioned Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. “There are still moments of Twitter magic on the platform, like when journalists took the platform to post real-time updates about the OpenAI drama, and the smaller communities on the platform remain important to many users. But the Twitter of the past 17 years is largely gone, and X’s reason for existence is murky.”

Since Musk’s takeover, X has been bombarded by allegations of misinformation and racism, endured vital promoting losses and suffered declines in utilization. It didn’t assist when Musk went on an expletive-ridden rant in an on-stage interview about firms that had halted spending on X. Musk asserted that advertisers that pulled out have been partaking in “blackmail” and, utilizing a profanity, primarily instructed them to get misplaced.

Continuing the development of welcoming again customers who had been banned by the previous Twitter for hate speech or spreading misinformation, in December, Musk restored the X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, pointing to an unscientific ballot he posted to his followers that got here out in favor of the Infowars host who repeatedly known as the 2012 Sandy Hook faculty taking pictures a hoax.

LGBTQ and different organizations supporting marginalized teams, in the meantime, have been elevating alarms about X changing into much less secure. In April, as an illustration, it quietly eliminated a coverage in opposition to the “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals. In June, the advocacy group GLAAD called it “the most dangerous platform for LGBTQ people.”

GLSEN, an LGBTQ schooling group, introduced in December that it was leaving X, becoming a member of different teams such because the suicide prevention nonprofit Trevor Project, saying that Musk‘s changes “have birthed a new platform that enables its users to harass and target the LGBTQ+ community without restriction or discipline.”

Musk‘s ambitions for X include transforming the platform into an “everything app” – like China’s WeChat, as an illustration. The downside? It’s not clear if U.S. and Western audiences are eager on the concept. And Musk himself has been fairly imprecise on the specifics.

While X contends with an identification disaster, some customers started searching for a substitute. Mastodon was one contender, together with Bluesky, which truly grew out of Twitter – a pet undertaking of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who nonetheless sits on its board of administrators.

When tens of hundreds of individuals, lots of them fed-up Twitter customers, started signing up for the (nonetheless) invite-only Bluesky within the spring, the app had lower than 10 individuals engaged on it, mentioned CEO Jay Graber lately.

This meant “scrambling to keep everything working, keeping people online, scrambling to add features that we had on the roadmap,” she mentioned. For weeks, the work was merely “scaling” – making certain that the techniques may deal with the inflow.

“We had one person on the app for a while, which was very funny, and there were memes about Paul versus all of Twitter‘s engineers,” she recalled. “I don’t think we hired a second app developer until after the crazy growth spurt.”

Seeing a possibility to lure in disgruntled Twitter customers, Facebook father or mother Meta launched its personal rival, Threads, in July. It soared to recognition as tens of tens of millions started signing up – although preserving individuals on has been a little bit of a problem. Then, in December, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced in a shock transfer that the corporate was testing interoperability – the concept championed by Mastodon, Bluesky and different decentralized social networks that folks ought to be capable of use their accounts on completely different platforms – type of like your electronic mail tackle or cellphone quantity.

“Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol,” Zuckerberg posted on Threads in December. “Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I’m pretty optimistic about this.”

Social media’s influence on kids’s psychological well being hurtled towards a reckoning this yr, with the U.S. Surgeon General warning in May that there’s not sufficient proof to point out that social media is secure for kids and teenagers – and calling on tech firms, mother and father and caregivers to take “immediate action to protect kids now.”

“We’re asking parents to manage a technology that’s rapidly evolving that fundamentally changes how their kids think about themselves, how they build friendships, how they experience the world – and technology, by the way, that prior generations never had to manage,” Dr. Vivek Murthy instructed The Associated Press. “And we’re putting all of that on the shoulders of parents, which is just simply not fair.”

In October, dozens of U.S. states sued Meta for harming younger individuals and contributing to the youth psychological well being disaster by knowingly and intentionally designing options on Instagram and Facebook that addict kids to its platforms.

In November, Arturo Béjar, a former engineering director at Meta, testified earlier than a Senate subcommittee about social media and the teenager psychological well being disaster, hoping to make clear how Meta executives, together with Zuckerberg, knew in regards to the harms Instagram was inflicting however selected to not make significant modifications to handle them.

The testimony got here amid a bipartisan push in Congress to undertake laws geared toward defending kids on-line. In December, the Federal Trade Commission proposed sweeping modifications to a decades-old regulation that regulates how on-line firms can observe and promote to kids, together with turning off focused advertisements to youngsters underneath 13 by default and limiting push notifications.

Your AI associates have arrived – however chatbots are just the start. Standing in a courtyard at his firm’s Menlo Park, California headquarters, Zuckerberg mentioned this fall that Meta is “focused on building the future of human connection” – and painted a near-future the place individuals work together with hologram variations of their associates or coworkers and with AI bots constructed to help them. The firm unveiled a military of AI bots – with celebrities comparable to Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton lending their faces to play them – that social media customers can work together with.

Next yr, AI might be “integrated into virtually every corner of the platforms,” Enberg mentioned.

“Social apps will use AI to drive usage, ad performance and revenues, subscription sign ups, and commerce activity. AI will deepen both users’ and advertisers’ reliance and relationship with social media, but its implementation won’t be entirely smooth sailing as consumer and regulatory scrutiny will intensify,” she added.

The analyst additionally sees subscriptions as an more and more engaging income stream for some platforms. Inspired by Musk‘s X, subscriptions “started as a way to diversify or boost revenues as social ad businesses took a hit, but they have persisted and expanded even as the social ad market has steadied itself.”

With major elections coming up in the U.S. and India among other countries, AI’s and social media’s position in misinformation will proceed to be entrance and middle for social media watchers.

“We’re not prepared for this,” A.J. Nash, vp of intelligence on the cybersecurity agency ZeroFox, instructed the AP in May. ”To me, the large leap ahead is the audio and video capabilities which have emerged. When you are able to do that on a big scale, and distribute it on social platforms, effectively, it’s going to have a significant influence.”