Social media are now like old media, only much, much worse

Fede Durán, a journalist at Spanish daily El Mundo, called me to talk about the evolution of social networks following the launch of Threads, and how this will potentially make an already untenable system worse. Here’s his article in Spanish, “Las redes sociales se declaran la guerra… y la víctima es tu privacidad” (pdf), translated as “Social networks go to war, and the victim is your privacy”.

My immediate response is that social networks disappeared a long time ago, when they were simply a way to keep in touch with friends and family.

What we know today as “social networks” are, in reality, media, a format their creators and advertisers feel much more comfortable with: they have evolved to host vast amounts of televisual content, typically personalized with the sole purpose of creating as much data as possible about us, and then used to bombard us with ultra-segmented advertising. No detail about our lives is too small, and obviously it isn’t just the information you decide to share with the network through your profile, nor the stuff the so-called network is able to work out about you from your online activity.

The result is that Facebook and TikTok know much more about you than you do, because analytics and comparison with other users of similar characteristics allow it to deduce and infer…