I'm So Mad, I'm Going to GeoCities

 Preface

It has become cliché to point out that with respect to social media, you are not the customer, but rather the product. In a narrowly focused sense, this is true; social media companies, just like traditional media companies, rely on advertising revenue as their source of cash flow. When a media organization's sales department calls on an ad buyer, the value proposition they're offering is typically a description of the size and demographic makeup of the audience they intend to deliver. 

The description of social media users as product might be true but misleadingly so. For starters, it's a description of something we're already used to.  Broadcast radio has relied on advertising revenue since the 1920s; television's revenue model has been ad-based since its inception in the late 1940s. For print media, which traditionally draw revenue in roughly equal parts from readers and advertisers, it's been about half true for even longer. As shocking as it might sound to describe people's time and attention as a commodity, it's a reality that we've lived with for at least a century. At worst, the imminent collapse of civilization is severely behind schedule. Furthermore, an almost countless number of media organizations, new and old, would like access to your limited time and attention. They want something that's in short supply, you have it, and you have choices about where to spend it. In that sense, you are the customer, and media organizations compete to get you to engage with them the same way consumer brands compete to get you to spend your money on them.

This article is written from the perspective that we have choices about the media we consume, and that media organizations are—or should be—concerned about the choices we make.

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In Los Angeles in the mid 1980s, AM broadcast radio had an impressive lineup. A silky-voiced former BBC man named Michael Jackson interviewed the newsmakers of the day with a kind of depth, precision, and wit that is—as it was then—a rare treat to hear. Tom Snyder, long a mainstay of Los Angeles television, hosted an evening interview show that tended to go a little more toward the entertainment and cultural influencers of the time. Bud "Steamer" Furillo presented a sports roundup that didn't sound like an infomercial for testosterone supplements. If you enjoyed medium wave DXing in those days, you were treated to similar content, all with its own local flavor, from cities all across the country.

As David Foster Wallace chronicled in the Atlantic nearly two decades ago, those days didn't last. Holders of broadcast licenses in the United States have traditionally been expected, as the trustee of a limited common resource, to operate in the public interest. Part of this was the so-called fairness doctrine, which required broadcasters to cover controversial subjects more or less evenly. The FCC removed the fairness doctrine in 1987. 

The end of the fairness doctrine was not the immediate end of the AM radio we had known for years. Two developments would have to take place over the next few years to take full advantage of the FCC's new policy. The first was that syndication and the proliferation of technology for cheap nationwide distribution of programming forever changed the economics of radio, and sucked all the joy out of medium wave DXing. The second is that AM broadcasters started understanding who their audiences were. A good bit of broadcast radio listening takes place in the car. In the 1990s, a lot of talented and motivated people—sales people, business analysts, field engineers—were spending much of their workday in the car. Talk radio started telling these people a story that at least some of them wanted to hear. What you have achieved so far is entirely the result of your intelligence, gumption, and hard work. What you have not yet achieved, the reason you're in your car and not in the corner office, is entirely someone else's fault—immigrants, minorities, tax-and-spend liberals, academic elites, and the list goes on. 

The removal of the fairness doctrine allowed AM broadcasters to take a decidedly conservative slant; the need to tell the story of exceptionalism and victimhood in a way that would compel listeners to stick around through a few commercial breaks led to a presentation style that became increasingly strident and confrontational. The rest of the story is recent enough that we all know it by heart. Talk radio led to Fox News, Fox News led to social media trolls, and a social media troll became the President of the United States of America.

The unregulated nature of social media allowed users, both individually and on an organized basis, to use platforms to spread misinformation and to incite violence (for reference, the latter has never been considered protected speech in this country and the former is, well, complicated). Things came to a head in the early 2020s when a global pandemic exposed the potentially deadly consequences of misinformation and an insurrection at the United States Capitol threatened to disrupt the democratic process of completing a Presidential election.

The public ramped up pressure on social media companies to moderate content and enforce their own terms of service, and the major social media companies have responded. One could argue that the responses have been less effective than desirable, and that they amount to closing the barn door after the horse is out, but they've been more effective than doing nothing, and they've certainly been effective enough to provoke cries of censorship from those who don't see the need for content moderation. An entire cottage industry has sprung up of (mostly failed) alternative social media platforms that offer freedom from content moderation.

As of this writing, it is looking increasingly likely that Elon Musk will be purchasing a controlling interest in Twitter. Getting a good read on Musk's intentions is always difficult, but he has strongly hinted in the past that he is no fan of content moderation. In an oddly recursive development, Twitter users have taken to Twitter to express, in the stark and un-nuanced way that a 280-character limit tends to force, their either limitless joy or unfathomable dread over what the new Twitter will look like. The ones rejoicing seem to be taking particular pleasure of predicting a paroxysm of anger and threats to leave that will never be carried out. The not carrying out part is probably true, sort of; the paroxysm part not so much.

Those of us who came of age listening to Michael Jackson didn't throw a tantrum when that kind of programming left the airwaves. We drifted away, the same way a lot of us drifted away from Facebook starting in 2016. If the new Twitter transforms into something noticeably more combative and unwelcoming than the old Twitter, I suspect that a lot of us will drift away. Not all at once, and not in a huff of hurt feelings and liberal tears, but over time I could see people like myself just checking in every once in a while to see what our fellow radio amateurs are doing, or post a photo from a POTA activation, and not spend nearly as much time online as before.

When the major social media companies began taking a more active role in content moderation, it was a business decision. Users who don't feel safe from harassment or threats, or who have become fatigued by sorting through a flood of misinformation will likely spend less time online, and will see advertisers' products less frequently. If Twitter's new ownership pursues policies that the old ownership believed were bad for business, there will be consequences in terms of business results. Exactly what those consequences are is difficult to guess, no matter how confident those doing the guessing say they are, and whoever guesses right could make a lot of money.

It could be that a Twitter with a smaller but more loyal audience (Elon Musk does have a formidable collection of stans) could prove attractive to at least some kinds of advertisers. It could be that the smaller audience remains highly engaged for a time, and then becomes bored as the number of libs to own dwindles. Maybe audience size and engagement won't really change much, and we'll all just get a lot better at using the mute and block features to curate our own content. It's also possible that those of us who don't want to be trolled and bombarded with misinformation represent a lucrative opportunity, and another platform will snap up that audience and make a stack of money. Both Facebook and Twitter are closing in on the geriatric—by tech standards—age of twenty. The time could be ripe for the next big thing to come along.

I can't remember the last time, outside of live play-by-play baseball coverage, that I listened to AM broadcast radio. It's more on the scale of decades than years. It turned out that AM radio had a certain combination of characteristics that uniquely suited itself to a very specific kind of audience, one that I and most of my friends and family are not members of. Social media might ultimately prove to occupy a particular niche, one in which the loudest, most strident, and most violence-prone voices are the ones that are heard. Ten years from now we might look back on the early, pre-2016 days of social media with a sense of loss for what once was, and what might have been, holding the same regard for the zombie kid who likes turtles as we once held for Michael Jackson and Tom Snyder. Or Twitter might finally give us an edit button and everything will work out after all.