Social media is dead

You just haven't noticed yet, says journalist Matt Muir

They say you kill the things you love – Mr Musk was very keen on Twitter

The first time I ever heard about Facebook was in 2005, from someone I was attempting to chat up on a plane. They were a student at USC, and were telling me about how party etiquette had changed (‘nobody asks for your phone number any more, they just look you up on Facebook’), and I remember vaguely thinking ‘yes, but you’re Americans, you’re weird and this will never catch on.’

Two decades hence and, well, it turns out I’m a moron, with Meta’s family of apps racking up 3.27bn daily users. It’s fair to say that, as a species, we continue to spend significant chunks of our lives plugged into digitally-enabled networks of other humans.

It’s also true, though, that we don’t seem to really enjoy it very much anymore. Users of X — née Twitter — have for years referred to it as the ‘hellsite’, long before Elon Musk’s purchase rendered that epithet significantly more accurate. The carefree days of the late-00s and early-10s, in which we would post photographs of all our days and nights to our ‘Page’ are long gone, replaced by the grim understanding that it’s perhaps not always an unalloyed good to have lots of pictures of you floating around the web unguarded. We’re less inclined to chat openly, to share thoughts with strangers or acquaintances, now we’ve got 20 years’ experience (and an exciting new vocabulary too). We’ve got trolls, griefers, nazis, incels and reply guys under our belt.