Social media is dead, long live messaging
A lovelorn and juvenile Mark Zuckerberg just wanted to get social cachet and lampoon his classmates when he made the first version of Facebook in 2003. Instead, he became an arbiter of free speech for more than 1 billion people.
His company has ended up ruling on whether users should be allowed to promote Thai juice-only diets, in Italian; if boosting the quasi-therapeutic use of the drug ketamine is OK; and when videos of communal violence in India should be removed.
Mark Zuckerberg is forced to rule on the free speech of everyone from presidents down. Bloomberg
(The answers, according to Facebook’s independent Oversight Board, are respectively yes, no and temporarily.)
Doubtless Zuckerberg would like to go back to a simpler time when problems of misinformation, hate speech, discrimination and freedom were not his. Last week, the company took a big step in that direction, capitalising on a trend away from regular social media and towards messaging.
The news: Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced that its Messenger service would be encrypted by default. The company will be unable to see users’ messages, even if it wanted to. Users will also be able to edit posts, send disappearing messages and post richer images in those chats.
What’s driving it: Social media, as it was understood in the 2010s, is no more. Where once users posted witticisms and errant thoughts on each other’s Facebook walls, we now live in the age of infinitely scrolling video, pioneered by TikTok and cloned by all other social platforms, including Meta’s. That has driven real interactions with family, colleagues, friends and potential friends to group chats and direct messages.
Perhaps 10 million Australians are on WhatsApp, which is another Meta product and has long been encrypted. Now Meta is improving its other texting app to catch up while Facebook, the product that birthed Messenger, falls closer to irrelevance. And the more users that text rather than posting, the less it has to make rulings on their controversial opinions. That is no slight boon.
Our take: Messaging is great, and these new features will make it better, even if Meta’s motives are less than pure.
Using messaging rather than traditional social media posts to communicate with family, friends and like-minded online acquaintances will help users avoid some of the perils that have emerged on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X.
You are less likely to get “cancelled” for past (and badly aged) posts, you will be less exposed to algorithms designed purely to capture and hold your attention, and the strange alienation from friends, whom you only observe on social media but never speak to, should be reduced.
The misinformation that has thrived on social media will still circulate in private group chats, but its impact could be lessened by its slower distribution and probably smaller audience. Law enforcement may fret that it is harder for them to spot crimes when messages are encrypted, but plenty of apps already are, users can still flag troubling posts and cops managed in the analogue era when crooks mostly met face to face or used payphones.
In this new paradigm, the biggest risk to messaging comes from the companies now improving it. Should they see it as a source of advertising revenue, as Meta has already done with WhatsApp, it could fall victim to the same incentive to stuff it full of ads as the social media it has replaced.
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