SerpApi.Org
You'd think the clue would be in the name. But for a long time, it has felt that social media companies have largely neglected the social part of their name entirely.
If anything, they seem intent on making us fall out. And that makes good business sense: getting people upset and arguing also means that they keep coming back.
There’s no need to retread the history of how all of that went. From the large scale (ever-widening political divides and misinformation) to the personal (growing dissatisfaction with the experience of being online), there is something fundamentally lonely about coming together with the aim of falling out.
So it was a pleasant surprise when X announced this week that it was making what it said was a “small tweak” to its algorithm to boost the posts of “mutuals”, or people who follow you and follow you back.
“We noticed this data was missing from the algo and it made your friends appear less in your replies,” X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, wrote in a post on the site formerly known as Twitter. “This resulted in the reply section feeling more like a battleground with people you don’t recognise.”
It is, of course, not sensible to take X to be a bellwether on anything particularly. Its management is so erratic that the algorithm might change again quickly, and so given to odd behaviour that the change might not reflect any meaningful change in policy at all.
But it is, if nothing else, a reminder that it is newsworthy for a social media site to want us to see posts from our friends. And a reflection of the fact that they have largely strayed so far from that near-tautologous goal.
Really, all the social media companies were originally launched as ways of letting people stay in touch with old friends and make new ones. But the lure of engagement was seemingly too strong – if users are wound up, they keep coming back; if they keep coming back, then you can show them more ads and earn more money – and that obvious dream has fallen away.
It is not even the first time that social media companies have tried to put us back in touch with our friends. In 2018, for instance, Facebook rolled out a change to its News Feed that Mark Zuckerberg said would prioritise "meaningful social interactions", as part of his pledge to spend that year "making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent".
Facebook users themselves can judge whether that – or any of the similar attempts that followed – have worked. But the fact that the companies keep announcing such changes suggest there are two obvious but ignored facts about today's social media landscape: we want to talk to our friends, and there is something structural about these sites and the companies that run them that mean they keep drifting away from actually letting us do so.
The Independent is the world’s most free-thinking news brand, providing global news, commentary and analysis for the independently-minded. We have grown a huge, global readership of independently minded individuals, who value our trusted voice and commitment to positive change. Our mission, making change happen, has never been as important as it is today.
