Two sides of the social media coin
January 12, 2025
DAWN
The writer is a former editor of Dawn
WITH social media platforms running amok without much regulation or oversight, the hybrid Pakistani government and those considered established democracies in Europe, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, seem to be sailing in the same boat.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter for some $44 billion, nearly all market and media analysts thought he’d paid way more than the platform was worth. Many believed the world’s wealthiest man, a narcissist, had been led to a disaster by his ego.
They also believed that Twitter, that he renamed X, would prove to be his Waterloo. Financed largely through banks, it is too early to say whether it does indeed turn out to be a financial fiasco in the long run, because its revenue streams would never be able to justify the price he paid for it.
For now, however, the platform has bestowed him the sort of reach, even power, he could not have dreamt of despite his staggering wealth. After having donated a $100 million to the Trump campaign, being by the president-elect’s side during the run-up to the elections, and now named to a senior government role, Elon Musk’s wealth and political power have grown.
Where the Pakistan hybrid set-up’s near-total control of traditional media platforms, from TV/radio to newspapers, has meant compliance and the dissemination of a view favourable to it, it has had to turn off the tap completely in terms of social media because of its inability to influence/control the dominant narrative there.
Musk raised a red herring often used by the far right in the UK to support Islamophobic, racist Tommy Robinson.
The hybrid set-up not just has most traditional media groups on their knees, it also has a monopoly over coercive tools, with armed state institutions/organisations at its beck and call. In the opposite corner, the PTI (mainly its leader Imran Khan) continues to hold sway over public opinion and consolidates its considerable support base in the country via its unrivalled ascendancy over social media and the latter’s narrative-building tools.
The Pakistani state, or more accurately, its hybrid government, has appeared helpless in countering the PTI narrative, which continues to find resonance among large chunks of the country (to those who will ask how I reached the ‘large chunks’ conclusion, I would point to the last election, where the party emerged with most seats, despite unfavourable headwinds of all sorts).
It has lacked knowledge of social media, sophistication and expertise in evolving a policy where it is not always the case of using a sledgehammer — authoritarian means — to block out views not favourable to it or in line with its desires. It could do well to look elsewhere.
Two recent issues that Elon Musk raised on X with his over 200m followers are a prime example of how to stay ahead on social media despite your mistakes. Elon Musk took on the core of the hard right of the dominant pro-Trump Republican Party, which is vehemently anti-immigration, by supporting (fast-track) ‘H-1B’ visas for specialists/experts so ‘they could contribute to the US economy’.
While Musk made sense in this case, the backlash was severe. One can be sure Trump transition team members may have had a quiet word with him. Musk’s response, which could well have owed itself to his media team, raised a controversial issue away from the States and successfully drew attention away from what many hardcore Republicans saw as an outrageous stance.
Musk raised a red herring often used by the far right in the UK to support Islamophobic, racist Tommy Robinson, currently imprisoned on contempt of court charges. Musk implied that many British-Pakistani Asian gangs involved in grooming underage (child) girls for sex were not prosecuted because of considerations for their ethnicity and because Pakistani-origin Britons were a voting bloc for Labour.
He also implied that this happened under the current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer’s, watch when the latter was director of public prosecutions for five years from 2008 to 2013. Historically, some prosecutions did not happen when Starmer was DPP because the police and local prosecutors believed there was insufficient evidence and ‘unreliable witnesses’.
However, these decisions not to prosecute were overturned by Nazir Afzal, himself of Pakistani origin, chief prosecutor for Northwest of England, appointed by Starmer in 2011. Afzal has a sterling record of prosecuting these gangs and of earning record convictions and sentencing.
A national inquiry report (called the Jay Report) in 2014, after a 2012 The Times investigation into the child sex grooming scandal in Rotherham in northwest England, and later a (parliamentary) Commons Home Affairs Committee, did not point the finger at Starmer.
In fact, the Home Affairs Committee lauded his efforts to address the issue in these words: Mr Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term as Director of Public Prosecution (DPP). In 2014, he was knighted for his “services to law and criminal justice.”
None of this was acknowledged by Musk who, bizarrely, asked the king to dissolve parliament and order fresh elections. Under which law and why, one may have asked Musk, given the opportunity. But his purpose was served. By creating this huge controversy, his vocal support for H-1B visas and the Republican backlash was quickly brushed under the carpet.
Not content with taking sides in UK politics, where the opportunistic Conservatives, who did nothing to implement the Jay Report’s 22 recommendations for all their years in office, jumped on the bandwagon and raised it in the Commons, Musk expanded his political role elsewhere in Europe.
Openly siding with the German anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and Eurosceptic far-right AFD party and its leader, Musk has forced some European leaders to call for examining social media regulations so an individual can’t manipulate public opinions and undermine the democratic order. But I seriously doubt such legislation will ever be passed.
In the end, it will have to be social media managers with their expertise in new, even evolving, platforms who can help keep the narrative onside. Or the democratic architecture as we know it is doomed.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2025
WITH social media platforms running amok without much regulation or oversight, the hybrid Pakistani government and those considered established democracies in Europe, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, seem to be sailing in the same boat.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter for some $44 billion, nearly all market and media analysts thought he’d paid way more than the platform was worth. Many believed the world’s wealthiest man, a narcissist, had been led to a disaster by his ego.
They also believed that Twitter, that he renamed X, would prove to be his Waterloo. Financed largely through banks, it is too early to say whether it does indeed turn out to be a financial fiasco in the long run, because its revenue streams would never be able to justify the price he paid for it.
For now, however, the platform has bestowed him the sort of reach, even power, he could not have dreamt of despite his staggering wealth. After having donated a $100 million to the Trump campaign, being by the president-elect’s side during the run-up to the elections, and now named to a senior government role, Elon Musk’s wealth and political power have grown.
Where the Pakistan hybrid set-up’s near-total control of traditional media platforms, from TV/radio to newspapers, has meant compliance and the dissemination of a view favourable to it, it has had to turn off the tap completely in terms of social media because of its inability to influence/control the dominant narrative there.
Musk raised a red herring often used by the far right in the UK to support Islamophobic, racist Tommy Robinson.
The hybrid set-up not just has most traditional media groups on their knees, it also has a monopoly over coercive tools, with armed state institutions/organisations at its beck and call. In the opposite corner, the PTI (mainly its leader Imran Khan) continues to hold sway over public opinion and consolidates its considerable support base in the country via its unrivalled ascendancy over social media and the latter’s narrative-building tools.
The Pakistani state, or more accurately, its hybrid government, has appeared helpless in countering the PTI narrative, which continues to find resonance among large chunks of the country (to those who will ask how I reached the ‘large chunks’ conclusion, I would point to the last election, where the party emerged with most seats, despite unfavourable headwinds of all sorts).
It has lacked knowledge of social media, sophistication and expertise in evolving a policy where it is not always the case of using a sledgehammer — authoritarian means — to block out views not favourable to it or in line with its desires. It could do well to look elsewhere.
Two recent issues that Elon Musk raised on X with his over 200m followers are a prime example of how to stay ahead on social media despite your mistakes. Elon Musk took on the core of the hard right of the dominant pro-Trump Republican Party, which is vehemently anti-immigration, by supporting (fast-track) ‘H-1B’ visas for specialists/experts so ‘they could contribute to the US economy’.
While Musk made sense in this case, the backlash was severe. One can be sure Trump transition team members may have had a quiet word with him. Musk’s response, which could well have owed itself to his media team, raised a controversial issue away from the States and successfully drew attention away from what many hardcore Republicans saw as an outrageous stance.
Musk raised a red herring often used by the far right in the UK to support Islamophobic, racist Tommy Robinson, currently imprisoned on contempt of court charges. Musk implied that many British-Pakistani Asian gangs involved in grooming underage (child) girls for sex were not prosecuted because of considerations for their ethnicity and because Pakistani-origin Britons were a voting bloc for Labour.
He also implied that this happened under the current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer’s, watch when the latter was director of public prosecutions for five years from 2008 to 2013. Historically, some prosecutions did not happen when Starmer was DPP because the police and local prosecutors believed there was insufficient evidence and ‘unreliable witnesses’.
However, these decisions not to prosecute were overturned by Nazir Afzal, himself of Pakistani origin, chief prosecutor for Northwest of England, appointed by Starmer in 2011. Afzal has a sterling record of prosecuting these gangs and of earning record convictions and sentencing.
A national inquiry report (called the Jay Report) in 2014, after a 2012 The Times investigation into the child sex grooming scandal in Rotherham in northwest England, and later a (parliamentary) Commons Home Affairs Committee, did not point the finger at Starmer.
In fact, the Home Affairs Committee lauded his efforts to address the issue in these words: Mr Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term as Director of Public Prosecution (DPP). In 2014, he was knighted for his “services to law and criminal justice.”
None of this was acknowledged by Musk who, bizarrely, asked the king to dissolve parliament and order fresh elections. Under which law and why, one may have asked Musk, given the opportunity. But his purpose was served. By creating this huge controversy, his vocal support for H-1B visas and the Republican backlash was quickly brushed under the carpet.
Not content with taking sides in UK politics, where the opportunistic Conservatives, who did nothing to implement the Jay Report’s 22 recommendations for all their years in office, jumped on the bandwagon and raised it in the Commons, Musk expanded his political role elsewhere in Europe.
Openly siding with the German anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and Eurosceptic far-right AFD party and its leader, Musk has forced some European leaders to call for examining social media regulations so an individual can’t manipulate public opinions and undermine the democratic order. But I seriously doubt such legislation will ever be passed.
In the end, it will have to be social media managers with their expertise in new, even evolving, platforms who can help keep the narrative onside. Or the democratic architecture as we know it is doomed.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2025
The new colonisation
Rafia Zakaria
Op-Ed: Social media — Full of itself, failing to deliver in too many ways
By Paul Wallis
January 12, 2025
Rafia Zakaria
January 8, 2025
DAWN
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
THE world already knows about the outsize role that the richest man in the world — billionaire Elon Musk — played in the 2024 American presidential election. As has been written about at length, Musk put in $270 million into president-elect Donald Trump’s campaign. His involvement also rebranded Trump as pro-tech rather than just a populist fuelled by his working class and ill-educated following. Trump immediately gave Musk the position of budget cutter-in-chief, the actual implications of which will be obvious after Trump’s inauguration later this month. Since nothing is free in this world, it is likely that Trump will have to pay up very soon.
Musk wants more than what he has been promised. In recent months, there have been reports about Musk’s meddling in politics and elections in Europe, including Britain and Germany. His interference has drawn the ire of some European leaders. “Ten years ago, who would have imagined that the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks would be supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections, including in Germany,” said French President Emmanuel Macron. Meanwhile, the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, said: “I find it worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries.”
Where the UK is concerned, previously, Musk had been championing Nigel Farage, the far-right anti-immigrant leader of Reform UK. However, in the past few days, Musk has had a sudden change of heart, and said that Farage did not have what it takes to lead his party to victory. He did it expectedly on X, the social platform that he now owns, tweeting: “The Reform Party needs a new leader.” Instead, Musk is now supporting a man known as Tommy Robinson, an Islamophobe, with a criminal history who is currently serving an 18-month prison term for contempt of court.
Musk’s access to limitless amounts of capital means that he can fund whichever and whatever political interests he chooses.
Musk has used X to spread questionable information about UK’s current Labour government. He accused British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of not cracking down on child rapists when he headed the Crown Prosecution Services. Many see his assertion as incorrect, as the number of prosecutions during his tenure had risen. Musk also demanded that King Charles III intervene and dissolve parliament. One reason for all this ire is that the Labour government has gone after online hate speech, potentially messing up Musk’s vision of X as a platform where anything can be said at any time.
Beyond the British and the Americans, Musk has, in his new position as political kingmaker, also picked favourites in the German election. His modus operandi has been along the same lines as in the UK. Musk is championing Germany’s far-right, anti-immigration AfD party. Musk has lobbed insults at Olaf Scholz, the current German chancellor, calling him a “fool” after his centre-left coalition collapsed last November; he did so again after a Saudi-born man rammed his car into a crowded Christmas market in a German city.
An assessment of the danger that Musk poses is reflected in the responses of the leaders whom he criticises. Nigel Farage, once a favourite, said: “The fact that Musk supports me and supports Reform doesn’t mean, as two grown-ups, we have to agree with everything the other says.” It is tricky ground for Farage, since Musk can not only weaponise X against Farage but also have an impact on the party’s fund-raising. Even more worrying would be if Musk decides to take his dollars elsewhere — dollars, as we all know, have a tremendous impact on the outcome of elections.
Chancellor Scholz was a little more strident in his response to Musk’s latest tweets about him, asking his followers to not “feed the troll”. “I don’t believe in courting Mr Musk’s favour. I’m happy to leave that to others,” he said.
Neither of the two men, whose leadership is likely to be significantly impacted by Musk’s habit of putting dollars behind whomever he supports, serves the American billionaire’s interests. The $270m that he poured into the US election along with his vocal support for Trump played a big, perhaps a decisive role in the Republicans’ victory in the presidential poll. It is likely that he is going to have a similar impact on the policies of the actual Trump administration. Interestingly, while he is making a habit of championing anti-immigrant parties in Europe, he wants the US to increase the number of H-1B visas so he can attract the best engineering talent from other countries.
Elon Musk’s rise is something to worry about. His access to essentially limitless amounts of capital means that he can fund whichever and whatever political interests he chooses and then control the agenda. Within the Pakistani context, Musk’s Starlink satellite is currently awaiting approval from the government. This technology’s ability to provide internet coverage to people regardless of where they may be, is itself a testament to the man’s genius. The same goes for the fact that he already holds inordinate power over ever bigger areas of the world. Musk’s active participation in space colonisation, Starlink and the promotion of AI means that he is ahead of most of the political leaders that he is seeking to control.
Few governments in the world have a real handle on advanced technologies and their fallout; in an uncertain global political landscape, Musk’s influence will impact the distribution of power in the world. Many world leaders already recognise the danger that Musk’s interference and technological genius can unleash. Project colonisation is about to take off — the dominance of a single man and his particular vision of the world can result in disastrous consequences.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 8th, 2025
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.THE world already knows about the outsize role that the richest man in the world — billionaire Elon Musk — played in the 2024 American presidential election. As has been written about at length, Musk put in $270 million into president-elect Donald Trump’s campaign. His involvement also rebranded Trump as pro-tech rather than just a populist fuelled by his working class and ill-educated following. Trump immediately gave Musk the position of budget cutter-in-chief, the actual implications of which will be obvious after Trump’s inauguration later this month. Since nothing is free in this world, it is likely that Trump will have to pay up very soon.
Musk wants more than what he has been promised. In recent months, there have been reports about Musk’s meddling in politics and elections in Europe, including Britain and Germany. His interference has drawn the ire of some European leaders. “Ten years ago, who would have imagined that the owner of one of the world’s largest social networks would be supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections, including in Germany,” said French President Emmanuel Macron. Meanwhile, the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, said: “I find it worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries.”
Where the UK is concerned, previously, Musk had been championing Nigel Farage, the far-right anti-immigrant leader of Reform UK. However, in the past few days, Musk has had a sudden change of heart, and said that Farage did not have what it takes to lead his party to victory. He did it expectedly on X, the social platform that he now owns, tweeting: “The Reform Party needs a new leader.” Instead, Musk is now supporting a man known as Tommy Robinson, an Islamophobe, with a criminal history who is currently serving an 18-month prison term for contempt of court.
Musk’s access to limitless amounts of capital means that he can fund whichever and whatever political interests he chooses.
Musk has used X to spread questionable information about UK’s current Labour government. He accused British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of not cracking down on child rapists when he headed the Crown Prosecution Services. Many see his assertion as incorrect, as the number of prosecutions during his tenure had risen. Musk also demanded that King Charles III intervene and dissolve parliament. One reason for all this ire is that the Labour government has gone after online hate speech, potentially messing up Musk’s vision of X as a platform where anything can be said at any time.
Beyond the British and the Americans, Musk has, in his new position as political kingmaker, also picked favourites in the German election. His modus operandi has been along the same lines as in the UK. Musk is championing Germany’s far-right, anti-immigration AfD party. Musk has lobbed insults at Olaf Scholz, the current German chancellor, calling him a “fool” after his centre-left coalition collapsed last November; he did so again after a Saudi-born man rammed his car into a crowded Christmas market in a German city.
An assessment of the danger that Musk poses is reflected in the responses of the leaders whom he criticises. Nigel Farage, once a favourite, said: “The fact that Musk supports me and supports Reform doesn’t mean, as two grown-ups, we have to agree with everything the other says.” It is tricky ground for Farage, since Musk can not only weaponise X against Farage but also have an impact on the party’s fund-raising. Even more worrying would be if Musk decides to take his dollars elsewhere — dollars, as we all know, have a tremendous impact on the outcome of elections.
Chancellor Scholz was a little more strident in his response to Musk’s latest tweets about him, asking his followers to not “feed the troll”. “I don’t believe in courting Mr Musk’s favour. I’m happy to leave that to others,” he said.
Neither of the two men, whose leadership is likely to be significantly impacted by Musk’s habit of putting dollars behind whomever he supports, serves the American billionaire’s interests. The $270m that he poured into the US election along with his vocal support for Trump played a big, perhaps a decisive role in the Republicans’ victory in the presidential poll. It is likely that he is going to have a similar impact on the policies of the actual Trump administration. Interestingly, while he is making a habit of championing anti-immigrant parties in Europe, he wants the US to increase the number of H-1B visas so he can attract the best engineering talent from other countries.
Elon Musk’s rise is something to worry about. His access to essentially limitless amounts of capital means that he can fund whichever and whatever political interests he chooses and then control the agenda. Within the Pakistani context, Musk’s Starlink satellite is currently awaiting approval from the government. This technology’s ability to provide internet coverage to people regardless of where they may be, is itself a testament to the man’s genius. The same goes for the fact that he already holds inordinate power over ever bigger areas of the world. Musk’s active participation in space colonisation, Starlink and the promotion of AI means that he is ahead of most of the political leaders that he is seeking to control.
Few governments in the world have a real handle on advanced technologies and their fallout; in an uncertain global political landscape, Musk’s influence will impact the distribution of power in the world. Many world leaders already recognise the danger that Musk’s interference and technological genius can unleash. Project colonisation is about to take off — the dominance of a single man and his particular vision of the world can result in disastrous consequences.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, January 8th, 2025
Op-Ed: Social media — Full of itself, failing to deliver in too many ways
By Paul Wallis
January 12, 2025
DIGITAL JOURNAL
This photo illustration shows the social media platform X (former Twitter) app on a smartphone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 18, 2024
This photo illustration shows the social media platform X (former Twitter) app on a smartphone in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 18, 2024
- Copyright AFP/File Allison Joyce
Social media was going to connect the world. It was going to be a way for people from anywhere and everywhere to engage. “Everyone is connected”, etc.
That worked out well, didn’t it?
The mythology of social media makes even US media look almost focused and respectable. It’s self-hype to infinity.
The hype is pretty messy, too. Glitz, glamour, maybe, if you’re 10 years old. You have the infant influencers and rabid rabbits making millions. So what? A few industry pets aren’t all that relatable. The actual successes aren’t many people. It’s another 1%, as usual.
That’s the problem. What social media thinks of itself vs what it actually delivers. The ridiculous vs an ever-diminishing content value.
I bumped into a Forbes article “Why social media is the most misunderstood job in corporate America”. I had to see how social media could be misunderstood, even by a sector that famously drags its eyebrows along the ground for a living.
Social media is ironically called “the attention economy”, even in a country where ADHD is a sort of cultural icon.
It WAS different. Twitter was a primary source of news, and Tweet volumes meant something. That’s not the case now. Nobody gives a damn what a bot thinks about anything. Social media bots are fiction by definition. AI bots aren’t going to make things any better. You’d be lucky to get real numbers for marketing.
That’s not a problem in the sector.
“We reached 200 million people!”
Well, did you? Any social media demographic has a percentile of social media watchers. In the States, at least half of your audience is hostile to some degree thanks to the tides of political slop. Another hefty percentage of viewers are the people who posted it and their handlers. It’s not even a real audience in that many ways.
You could create a nice cynical algorithmic metric to measure hits as a form of market antagonism. The market, as usual, sees what it wants to see, not what it needs to see.
Well, you could get decent metrics if anyone could be bothered responding to the tonnage of tripe produced every second. Total silence is a negative response.
Imagery has a lot to do with this silent response. Nobody watches social media to find the babbling bozos of their dreams. Bear in mind also that these corporate guys also can’t read their own marketing figures.
Check out this Top Social Media Marketing Skills article, complete with an embarrassingly edited headline. Then see if you can say you’ve noticed any of those skills on social media. This is the image social media has of itself. “Pathetic” is hardly the word.
It becomes this in business terms:
“We spent $10 million on a social media marketing campaign” translates into a few extra sales worth maybe $1 million. They don’t see it and don’t look for it. There are obviously no business skills involved at any level.
TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are the mainstream market. They’re shopfronts as much or more than social media. They deliver consumables, not information There’s a huge difference. These are the lands of FOMO and the rest of the superficial rubbish on social media.
YouTube is a bit different. It provides content people like, and those people tend to be niche markets. The quality of content varies from undeniably excellent to utter trash. The audience soon learns to discriminate. That’s pretty much the whole story.
I was watching a live CNN coverage of the LA fires. The chat was entirely political, and nobody bothered to respond. There were posts celebrating the fires from around the world.
News?
Useful information?
Hardly. It was a soapbox based on a catastrophe. Do you think that sells or influences anyone? It doesn’t. It wasn’t even a new platform for the nuts; it had nothing to say and went on saying it for the entire CNN coverage.
That’s the dry rot destroying social media. You can’t “engage” with this drivel. It has no value. It’s just noise.
That’s where social media becomes its own worst and most unforgiving enemy. Nobody’s interested in non-information.
The lack of hard or even slightly useful information just isn’t good enough anymore. You can find drivel anywhere; why go looking for it?
There’s a major productivity issue here. Yes, you are allowed to laugh like an enthusiastic hyena.
How productive can this slop be for anyone?
Now add another dimension – Real users who want to communicate with each other. Remember them? Your actual core users who keep your numbers up?
These users can take or leave anything, however insane, and they do. They can ignore anything and be unimpressed by anything. You guys should be thankful you can even point to a meaningful market demographic like that.
The refugees from X and the resulting meltdown are a warning. The advertisers didn’t like it. They left The real users didn’t like it. They left. That’s what non-delivery means for social media.
Nobody HAS to watch anything online.
You’re a click away from oblivion.
__________________________________________________
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
Social media was going to connect the world. It was going to be a way for people from anywhere and everywhere to engage. “Everyone is connected”, etc.
That worked out well, didn’t it?
The mythology of social media makes even US media look almost focused and respectable. It’s self-hype to infinity.
The hype is pretty messy, too. Glitz, glamour, maybe, if you’re 10 years old. You have the infant influencers and rabid rabbits making millions. So what? A few industry pets aren’t all that relatable. The actual successes aren’t many people. It’s another 1%, as usual.
That’s the problem. What social media thinks of itself vs what it actually delivers. The ridiculous vs an ever-diminishing content value.
I bumped into a Forbes article “Why social media is the most misunderstood job in corporate America”. I had to see how social media could be misunderstood, even by a sector that famously drags its eyebrows along the ground for a living.
Social media is ironically called “the attention economy”, even in a country where ADHD is a sort of cultural icon.
It WAS different. Twitter was a primary source of news, and Tweet volumes meant something. That’s not the case now. Nobody gives a damn what a bot thinks about anything. Social media bots are fiction by definition. AI bots aren’t going to make things any better. You’d be lucky to get real numbers for marketing.
That’s not a problem in the sector.
“We reached 200 million people!”
Well, did you? Any social media demographic has a percentile of social media watchers. In the States, at least half of your audience is hostile to some degree thanks to the tides of political slop. Another hefty percentage of viewers are the people who posted it and their handlers. It’s not even a real audience in that many ways.
You could create a nice cynical algorithmic metric to measure hits as a form of market antagonism. The market, as usual, sees what it wants to see, not what it needs to see.
Well, you could get decent metrics if anyone could be bothered responding to the tonnage of tripe produced every second. Total silence is a negative response.
Imagery has a lot to do with this silent response. Nobody watches social media to find the babbling bozos of their dreams. Bear in mind also that these corporate guys also can’t read their own marketing figures.
Check out this Top Social Media Marketing Skills article, complete with an embarrassingly edited headline. Then see if you can say you’ve noticed any of those skills on social media. This is the image social media has of itself. “Pathetic” is hardly the word.
It becomes this in business terms:
“We spent $10 million on a social media marketing campaign” translates into a few extra sales worth maybe $1 million. They don’t see it and don’t look for it. There are obviously no business skills involved at any level.
TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are the mainstream market. They’re shopfronts as much or more than social media. They deliver consumables, not information There’s a huge difference. These are the lands of FOMO and the rest of the superficial rubbish on social media.
YouTube is a bit different. It provides content people like, and those people tend to be niche markets. The quality of content varies from undeniably excellent to utter trash. The audience soon learns to discriminate. That’s pretty much the whole story.
I was watching a live CNN coverage of the LA fires. The chat was entirely political, and nobody bothered to respond. There were posts celebrating the fires from around the world.
News?
Useful information?
Hardly. It was a soapbox based on a catastrophe. Do you think that sells or influences anyone? It doesn’t. It wasn’t even a new platform for the nuts; it had nothing to say and went on saying it for the entire CNN coverage.
That’s the dry rot destroying social media. You can’t “engage” with this drivel. It has no value. It’s just noise.
That’s where social media becomes its own worst and most unforgiving enemy. Nobody’s interested in non-information.
The lack of hard or even slightly useful information just isn’t good enough anymore. You can find drivel anywhere; why go looking for it?
There’s a major productivity issue here. Yes, you are allowed to laugh like an enthusiastic hyena.
How productive can this slop be for anyone?
Now add another dimension – Real users who want to communicate with each other. Remember them? Your actual core users who keep your numbers up?
These users can take or leave anything, however insane, and they do. They can ignore anything and be unimpressed by anything. You guys should be thankful you can even point to a meaningful market demographic like that.
The refugees from X and the resulting meltdown are a warning. The advertisers didn’t like it. They left The real users didn’t like it. They left. That’s what non-delivery means for social media.
Nobody HAS to watch anything online.
You’re a click away from oblivion.
__________________________________________________
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
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