The Circular Social Media Economy
Or, how you're being influenced by social media even if you don't use social media.
Culturally, we have a habit of dismissing the interests of young people. Folks thought The Beatles were crude and annoying and look how that turned out.
The same goes for every social media platform as it rises to prominence. But when we downplay the impact a platform can have on a generation—or an entire society—that’s when elections are thrown, social movements get pressure cooked, and revolutions are born.
Living in a world where a sitting President chose X as his platform of choice to notify the American people that he would no longer be seeking re-election, we can’t afford to turn a blind eye in 2024 or beyond.
In this issue, we’re offering a lightning-round explainer of the most influential social platforms to help you make sense of not just the upcoming election, but the outlook for our democracy at large.
Subscribe and stay tuned for deeper dives on each platform in later issues.
TikTok
According to Pew, it turns out that 43% of TikTok’s users regularly get their news from the platform. That’s a rate as high as Facebook, and second only to X. With 1/3 of all Americans reporting to be TikTok users, this is more than Beatlemania.
It’s no secret that TikTok is the fastest-growing and most scrutinized platform of 2024. Armed with what many users believe to be the best content suggestion algorithm in the business, the Chinese-owned social media site has taken over the digital information ecosystem for young people.
TikTok’s powerful influence over young people has less to do with its popularity or content and more with what the algorithm feeds them.
Take this report from The Wall Street Journal in December 2023. WSJ created eight fake accounts pretending to be 13-year-olds to test what content the app shows them without any empirical user data or behavioral insights.
Every account they made was shown violent Gaza-related conflict videos. Half the accounts wound up in a “rabbit hole,” where the majority of their “For You” page became related to the war. One account found its way there after a mere 57 videos, after which nearly all the suggested content was about the war in Gaza.
What should also be noted is that even if you’re not “on TikTok”, many creators repurpose or recreate their top TikToks and post them across the web to satiate social media’s limitless appetite for vertical video content. So in effect, if you’re on social media, you’re consuming content that was originally created for TikTok.
The Bottom Line:
We’ll explore the many concerns the security community has around TikTok’s inner workings in a later issue, but for now, what you need to know is this: TikTok’s algorithm and user interface are specifically designed for an addictive, endless scroll. It has a reputation for being the most entertaining platform, and yet nearly half of its users expect to receive their news alongside viral dances and riffs on the latest lipsync—and it’s delivering.
Reddit
Thanks to its democratized content moderation system, Reddit has an ardently dedicated user base and, subjectively, more genuinely viral content. Close-knit communities within Reddit, known as subreddits, react to world events and share their experiences with people, places, and things by posting directly on the subreddit’s page. Other users vote on the post through “upvotes” and “downvotes” usually based on its relevance to the community or entertainment value. Upvotes increase its visibility while downvotes kill it.
What many don’t realize is that much of today’s click-bait news sites and aggregators pull entire stories from popular threads on the platform. In fact, other influencers use so much content from Reddit that the company began placing watermarks on pictures posted to the website to discourage bots from scraping them and to show the internet just how much content originates from their platform.
The Bottom Line: Despite being a source for journalists and beyond, a surprising amount of its content has much murkier origins. In 2017, researchers from the University of Alabama Birmingham attempted to show where Reddit sits in the online news discourse cycle between the mainstream media, Twitter, and the infamously problematic internet forum 4chan. They found that 4chan content’s entry point into more popular platforms came through Reddit. The content then made its way to Twitter, all while mainstream news stories impacted users’ interpretation of the content and dictated its saliency and virality.
Reddit’s connection with Twitter is particularly interesting and influential, and we explain why below.
X (Formerly Known as Twitter)
As one prominent New York Times reporter once said to me, “No one is on Twitter except for every journalist in America.”
They were correct, it turns out. Despite being the smallest of the major social media sites, X is the collective digital home for the people who produce our news. Pew estimates that 70% of journalists actively use X compared to only 22% of the US population. It is by far the most used social media platform for journalists and has the highest usage disparity between them and the US population writ large.
What’s important about this is that X is the clearest gateway between online culture and mainstream news. Journalists scrolling on X are influenced by the content they consume. They are impacted by the tone, volume, and overall vibe of the platform, which they admit is where they spend most of their time online. This results in both an information silo for those journalists and a feedback loop where the “vibes” of X influence their writing, their writing influences the “vibes” on X, and journalists end up commentating on discourse they created themselves.
The Bottom Line: If you read Friday’s edition of Noise Level, you’ll know that the pervasive tone on X is divisive, combative, irreverent, and often viciously partisan. If content from the darker corners of the internet gets laundered through Reddit and onto X while journalists spend most of their time scrolling, consuming that content, and steeped in that tone, it is all making its way downstream to readers who believe they are insulated from the insanity of online culture.
From 4chan To Your Nightly News
Are you starting to see a pattern?
The 4chan->Reddit->Twitter->Journalists link is evidence that what happens online has downstream effects on traditional media. More importantly, it shows that online content influences the mindsets of people who are not on these platforms by making its way onto your TV, newspapers, and even speeches given by the President of the United States. The content on X affects journalists who then write the news, which gets posted on Facebook, talked about on YouTube, opined on by Jon Stewart and John Oliver, and joked about on SNL.
This is just one of the many ways digital culture makes its way downstream to people of all ages and all demographics, whether you love technology or still use a flip phone. The internet isn’t a compartmentalized information ecosystem, it is the information ecosystem.
So what happens when a foreign entity controls what 70% of the teen population sees on TikTok? Or if 70% percent of Gen X spend their time reading Russian bot posts on Facebook? It’s difficult to argue that this is only affecting the people on those platforms.
And if you’re wondering how TikTok dances move downstream, you’re likely underestimating just how much young people impact our pop culture, which we all do from time to time. You may never film yourself dancing in your bedroom, but I bet you’ve heard a Beatles song recently.