Has social media peaked as platforms degrade while users crave authenticity?

"When I go on to social media now I see corporate communication, I see AI slop, or I just see people arguing who're never going to change their minds."

Are these factors, which Stephen Grootes summarises, turning people off social media?

He delves into an article published by the Financial Times, which posits that what has been a years-long degradation of these platforms does appear to be pushing users away.

It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022, says the writer, citing an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for FT by a digital audience insights company.

This would make sense, considering that we were on lockdown during the COVID pandemic at the time, comments Dion Chang (co-founder and CEO of Flux Trends).

Along with having less cabin fever post-pandemic, it's the influx of bots and bombardment of disinformation that are really driving us away.

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What people are starting to miss, is authenticity, says Chang.

"You look at posts, also on visual social media like Instagram, and wonder if something is real or not. So you're starting to doubt a lot of things and then if you're on a platform like X with all the toxic vitriol... you don't really know if you're arguing with a bot as well."

Chang highlights that agentic AI bots can run 50 social media accounts simultaneously, and that's just from a single bot farm in China, for instance.

In manyways, says the FT article, Meta and OpenAI’s new platforms are a fitting endpoint for social media’s warped evolution 'from a place where people swapped updates with friends and family, to one with less and less human-to-human interaction'.

To listen to Flux Trends' Dion Chang in conversation with Stephen Grootes on 702's The Money Show, click on the audio link below: