Social Media At a Crossroads of Cultural Backlash & Generative AI
It’s the end of the world for creator economy as we know it
Social media has been in flux for a while. As I noted over a year ago, major social platforms from Twitter to TikTok were confronting existential-level threats while bracing for the impact that generative AI promised to unleash.
This year, however, social media companies have a new formidable challenge to overcome: convincing parents that they are not bad for kids.
Parents vs. Social Media
By now, most parents have heard of, if not read, The Anxious Generation, a best-selling book that attributes poor mental health among teens directly to social media. Its author, social scientist Jonathan Haidt, calls for parents to keep kids off the apps before high school and off smartphones altogether until age 16. To promote his book, Haidt penned a piece for The Atlantic provocatively titled End the Phone-based Childhood Now, citing various detrimental effects of social media on teens’ mental developments. Quickly, his message spread, especially among parents who feel validated that a researcher has affirmed what they have already suspected. Detractors, however, criticized the book for over-simplifying a complicated issue to offer parents an easy scapegoat.
The cultural backlash against social media reached new heights this week, with multiple regulatory actions grabbing headlines. At the national level, the US surgeon general Vivek Murthy, in an opinion piece for the New York Times, called on Congress to force social media platforms to add a tobacco-style warning label saying that “social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”
At the state level, the New York state governor signed into law two bills meant to protect minors from the downsides of social media use. These new state laws will require parental consent for social media companies to use “addictive feeds” powered by recommendation algorithms for kids under 18, limit collection and sale of data on minors, and bar social app notifications from 12am to 6am. Not to be outdone, California governor Gavin Newsom also expressed wishes to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day for children and teens, citing curbing social media use as one objective.
Of course, all these regulatory actions and political posturing designed more to placate worrying parents rather than effectively discouraging social media use among young people didn’t come out of nowhere. Rather, they are reacting to a widespread anxiety among American parents over the impact of social media on their kids’ mental health.
To be fair, parents have many legitimate reasons to be weary of social platforms. The ills of social media have gotten ample and consistent coverage ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the stories trumpeting a narrative of “social media is dangerous for kids” are always the perfect engagement baits for (understandably) concerned parents.
This week alone, we have stories about Instagram regularly recommending sexual content to accounts for teenagers that seem interested in racy content, a group of grieving parents suing Snapchat for allegedly fueling a opioid-overdose epidemic among teens, two South Carolina teens arrested for kicking down doors of random houses as part of a new TikTok challenge, and a harrowing account of the parents of a young creator struggling to come to terms with the fact that 92% of their teenage daughter’s Instagram followers are adult men. Who can blame the parents for being anti-social media when such damning news stories are flooding their own feeds and screens of choice.
Yet, counter arguments and evidence also suggest things are not so clean-cut. Despite some studies claiming to have found correlation between social media use and mental health issues, on an aggregate level, researchers have found there is no clear scientific evidence that social media is causing mental health issues among young people. Sometimes, social media appears to exacerbate anxiety and depression; Other times, it appears to boost well-being and connectedness, according to a 2022 analysis of 226 studies. In addition, a recent report suggests that a decline in mental wellbeing is only being observed among Western English-speaking teens, calling into question the argument of smartphones being the reason for teen anxiety.
Looking at the bigger picture, social media appears to be an easy scapegoat for a myriad of factors contributing to the deteriorating mental state of American youth, which includes rising political and economical uncertainties, mounting climate anxiety, shrinking time for unstructured play, and the loss of affordable third places for in-person socialization. Ironically all of these factors can drive, and have driven, teens deeper into the comforting embrace of algorithmic content feeds on social media that promise a sense of community and escapism.
Building upon the loss of unstructured play time and third places, some critics even suggested that teens losing the spaces where they can communicate without omnipresent parental monitoring as the real cause of their ongoing mental health crisis. By that logic, social media might be one of the few remaining places where kids have a chance to be free from parental surveillance, and taking that away from them would just make matters worse.
This debate is still far from settled, of course. Earlier this month, Meta and other social media companies won the dismissal of novel claims in hundreds of lawsuits brought by school districts (and no doubt supported by the parents) seeking to recover costs for addressing the negative impacts of students’ social media use. A California state judge rejected the districts’ allegations that social media has increased the cost of education because it makes students more distracted and disruptive, driving up the need for classroom discipline, employee training and communication with parents, siding with the social platforms that claim no responsibility for third-party content.
And social media is about to get even more unruly, thanks to the onset of AI-generated content.
Generative AI as a Double-Edged Sword
Social media is on the cusp of an unprecedented transformation from “zero distribution cost” to “zero creation cost,” thanks to the advent of generative AI. It has the potential to upend the business model of social media and transform how we interact with UGC-driven platforms, making it a double-edged sword for social media.
Like other tech sectors, social media companies are eager to integrate generative AI into their toolkit to boost user creativity. TikTok, for instance, has introduced AI tools that allow creators to use customizable digital avatars and language dubbing features. Moreover, the Symphony Digital Avatars, available as stock or custom versions, will offer brands the ability to reach global audiences more effectively. These avatars can resemble specific creators or brand spokespersons, thereby retaining brand identity while communicating in multiple languages.
Still, the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated content remains a major concern. For instance, TikTok’s new dubbing tools must be precise to avoid embarrassing or offensive mistranslations. Any failure in this regard could damage brand reputation and alienate audiences.
TikTok is not the only one eager to add generative Ai features into its toolkit. Snapchat’s recent integration of generative AI into augmented reality (AR) experiences represents another interesting route of bringing AI into social apps. By allowing creators to leverage generative AI to create 3D effects in real-time, Snapchat is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in AR, making it faster and more dynamic.
Going beyond creator tools, new apps like Butterflies illustrate the potential of generative AI to create entirely new types of social networks. Created by a former engineering director at Snapchat, Butterflies allows users to create AI characters that generate content and interact with other accounts autonomously. via posts or DMs. This twist on social media offers a glimpse into a future where AI characters coexist with human users, but it also raises some ethical and psychological concerns.
Another major concern is the authenticity and trustworthiness of AI-generated content. The pervasive presence of AI-generated ads and content might exacerbate user frustration. Many users already find social media advertising intrusive, and the addition of digital avatars pitching products may only intensify this sentiment. The idea of AI entities interacting with humans on social media can seem cool for a hot minute, but it may ultimately contribute to a sense of detachment from reality. If not executed carefully, all these factors could lead to another round of backlash against social platforms for prioritizing commercial interests over the wellbeing of the users.
Routes to the Future of Social
Taken together, social media is truly at a crossroads of cultural backlash and AI-related disruptions. As a result, the creator economy will likely go through a period of upheaval and reinvention in tandem with the social media platforms that they largely depend on. And the route to the future of social media starts by figuring out how the creator economy will reconfigure itself in response.
Already, some social media creators say earning a decent, reliable income is getting more and more difficult, as platforms pay less for popular posts and brands get pickier about partnerships. Not to mention the looming TikTok boom that may decimate the audience base for some creators. If AI can one day competently replace human creators to entertain users with hyper-personalized AI-generated content, would there still be a market for human creators?
Brands, of course, would be happy to sponsor an AI-generated brand ambassador if they are cheaper and as effective. After all, an AI spokesperson would never get into any controversy or need to take a break. Still, there’s no guarantee that, without genuine human connections undergirding it all, creator content would still be as effective. If anything, the current cultural aversion towards letting AI replace creative jobs suggests that a partly synthetic social network app might take a few years to normalize.
Yet, social media is not going to wait for that to happen. Instead, some have started to lean on the power of fandoms to keep up the engagement rate. For example, TikTok launched an in-app experience this week to celebrate Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, prompting users to complete Swift-themed challenges over 11 weeks in order to get digital profile frames and create friendship bracelets. Instagram also created a similar feature for Swities in April.
In addition, many big social platforms are also intentionally going small in a bid to restore the type of intimate personal connections that many users now miss, which leads them to retreat into alternative social platforms that are smaller and more private. For example, Meta recently rolled out the ability for users to restrict their Instagram Live broadcasts to Close Friends, with the option for three other users to join.
Another interesting way for social media to rehabilitate their reputation is to be more educational. After all, no one blames Duolingo, a popular language-learning app, for its emotionally manipulative notifications or highly gamified in-app features that hook users and keep them coming back, because users believe they are learning something useful from it, rather than letting sludge content on TikTok rot their minds. If social media companies can somehow use their addictiveness for a good cause (or prove that they already do), then that’d certainly quiet the wave of parental rage.
Like many things in life, the current hostility towards social media might just be part of a pendulum swing that reflects a larger societal need to take a break and go “touch grass.” One recent Guardian report claims that the recent brouhaha over social media addiction is leading to a growing enthusiasm for Polaroids, postcards, vinyl records, and other analog media objects. I see it as the opposite — it is through reconnecting with the tactile joys of analog media that we rediscover a sense of presence and permanence, enhanced by an inherent friction of efforts and thus worthiness, that most digital spaces still woefully lack.
