After the Bell: AI killed the social media star

Of all the things I’ve given up in the past few years, there is one that stands out, one thing I never think about.

It is not KFC, the smell of which can still bring a certain hankering. And my attempt to give up deep house has been judged a total failure (Claptone really is addictive).

I’m talking about X – or Twitter, as I still call it in my head. I remember clearly the moment I decided I was just done there. Since then I have never thought about tweeting. 

I did think for a while that LinkedIn would be my new X, that it might give me the rush I got when I first started tweeting (back in 2012, shortly Paul Mashatile was re-elected leader of the Gauteng ANC. Who knew then it was the start of a massive comeback?).

But instead I fear LinkedIn is in danger of just becoming my latest ex. 

The hustling there (of which I too am guilty) is such a turn-off.

When I first started asking my friends and colleagues about social media, quite a few said they were spending less time on it. I thought it was just my tiny focus group. But actually, as the Financial Times has now reported, social media peaked about three years ago, back in 2022.

Since then we’ve started to spend a lot less time on it.

As a parent to two teenagers, I have had to rein in my public celebrations. Nothing scares me more than my kids revealing their inner lives to whoever on social media. And you may not know this, but I suspect that getting a new driver’s licence card is child’s play compared with getting a teenager off a screen.

I know most of us think we’re giving up social media simply because it’s so toxic. There is a lot in that, the impact of social media on democracies around the world is huge. It’s turned us against each other, it’s promoted politicians who force us into binary decisions to the most powerful positions in the world.

But I think something else has happened.

It seems to me no coincidence that the decline of social media (and pray it is so) started just as content generated by artificial intelligence really got going.

So much of what you see on X and LinkedIn is so obviously not real that you spend all your time just scrolling, looking for something that is genuine. In the end, you decide to use your small screen for something else.

I don’t have any numbers for this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you do what I do with the time that I used to spend on social media. I head for YouTube (I know most younger people will be on TikTok). Watching New Zealand rugby-discussion-TV on the Monday after the Boks win makes me happier than social media ever did.

I do know that there is an entire global industry of people who are going to be out of work if reports of the death of social media are not greatly exaggerated. I’m talking about that group known as “influencers”.

I’m afraid, as a journalist, I have only contempt for them.

I have no problem with advertising, or even product placement. But people who advertise products while pretending to be something else goes against my grain completely. If they are out of work, I will have some sympathy for their dependants, but not for them. 

I have to laugh at some aspects of this though.

It seems one of the main reasons we are spending less time on social media is because too many people are trying to make money from it. In the process they’ve made it so boring that we are going elsewhere. It’s the best case of the goose killing the golden egg that I can think of.

There are plenty of lessons from this that might guide us well during the AI era.

For a network to be social it actually requires a link between us and other humans. It must be genuinely “social”. I am happy to argue and debate with anyone for as long as I know there is a chance I can change their mind, or they can change mine. The moment I realise that neither of those things is possible, I switch off.

And I think that is something fundamental these networks have just missed.

This also means that, from now on, anyone who wants to change our minds (basically, to make us give them some of our money) will have to do so authentically. If we think they’re lying, we’re outta there.

I also think that, perhaps, as humans, we have realised something else. That the time spent on social media just does not make us happy. 

Several years ago, at my local strip mall, I was standing in a queue at the pharmacy when I noticed the woman in front of me. She had a small handbag and was knitting away merrily while she waited. Ten minutes later, in another queue, I was behind her again. 

Seeing that I was watching her knitting, she turned and explained (as she clearly had many times) that this was more productive and made her happier than just spending that time on her phone.

Wiser words in aisle three of my local Spar have never been spoken. DM 

P.S. Thank you to those kind souls who took the trouble to email (and never received a reply) to reassure me that I would receive my car licence disc. You were correct! My next task is to renew my driver’s licence card. Pray for me.