According to people born in the semi-legendary prehistory they call “the 90s,” Facebook used to be the most popular social media platform. According to these millennial dinosaurs, Facebook was once the best place to chat and post pictures of themselves drinking cheap booze and wearing low rise jeans. Now, Facebook’s traffic is falling and its reputation has shifted; it’s now the app where your parents post embarrassing photos and conspiracy theories. In its place, Instagram now reigns as the prime sexting-and-selfies site.

Facebook’s decline is driven by changes to its algorithm, which is known to have promoted hate speech and caused a genocide. Media coverage of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg selling data to advertisers didn’t help Facebook’s reputation either.

While not (yet) as horrible as the terrible decisions Zuckerberg made, X (formerly known as Twitter) is heading for a similar decline. X’s value has fallen from 44 billion dollars to 19 billion (as of November of 2023) since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the popular social media platform in October 2022 (for reference, during that same period, Instagram’s value increased from 33.5 billion to 44.5 billion). This decline is unsurprising given Twitter’s mass layoffs, goofy new subscription service, Musk unplugging servers for fun, and promotion of white supremacy and transphobia on the platform.

The process of “enshittification”

Cory Doctorow, a journalist and blogger, sees a trend where successful platforms eventually decline due to poor corporate decision-making. He terms this phenomenon “enshittification.”

He explains that platforms enshittify due to their CEOs and investors attempting to wring as much profit out of them as possible by holding users and advertisers hostage against one another.

First, these platforms have to appeal to users to attract them in the first place. This initial period is when a platform is best for users since it will do everything it can to make itself useful, even operating at cost to give users the best deals or ad-free content.

Once a platform builds a loyal user base, they start using their massive traffic to attract advertisers by offering paid access to their users.

However, once social media companies have the users and the advertisers locked in, they don’t have to worry about the quality of the service they provide. After all, what are users going to do? Go to the other massive online shopping-messaging-movie streaming site with all the content and millions of users? Users are reluctant to jump to another platform without their entire social circle joining them, making it hard for users to just stop using a platform. By this same logic, advertisers stay on a platform because users stay there. Then the platform has a veritable monopoly.

At this point, these platforms can start using their status as the only intermediary between provider and consumer to abuse both for profit.

How they get you

Social media sites like Facebook and X control their users through a process Doctorow labels “mutual hostage taking.” The point of social media sites is to interact with other people. As mentioned, once a “critical mass” of your friends are with you on Twitter, it becomes almost impossible to leave, since you have to convince all your friends (and followers if you were an influencer) to go with you. And since it’s so hard to leave, social media platforms have free rein to do whatever they want, including cramming ads into your feed, changing the algorithm to promote themselves, and locking features behind paywalls.

Loyal users may attempt to excuse this behaviour by saying that these sites are responsible for millions of users and are constantly doing maintenance. Occasional misses and bad features that make the experience worse are to be expected, but it is not an indicator that they are actively trying to hurt their users. No one is perfect after all.

Unfortunately, this optimism doesn’t hold up. Take TikTok as an example. Employees at this massively popular online social media site say that TikTok can and does manipulate what content is shown on users’ feeds to attract influencers and businesses.

While attempting to attract customers isn’t malicious by itself, the way social media does it is incredibly dangerous. Social media platforms are privately owned and there is little in the way of regulation. This means much of the content on social media can be offensive, toxic, and downright dangerous. Additionally, since what users see on their feed is usually controlled by algorithms trying to increase engagement, the most popular posts or videos are usually those that fuel the most controversy; users are more likely to comment on a “9/11 Exposed” video than “cute puppies for 10 hours,” even if it’s just to insult the writer.

In other words, the problem isn’t just occasional bad features – the problem is built into the business model.

Social media is evil

Some sites can also do deeply unethical things to get people and content onto their platform. In 2011, Myanmar ended its decades-long isolation from the outside world, causing a lot of Burmese citizens to suddenly gain access to new technology and the internet. Meta (formerly Facebook) made a deal with local phone companies to have all phones come preloaded with Facebook, which made them the social media site that most Burmese citizens with phones used.

Anti-Rohingya sentiment in Myanmar was already a problem, and lots of Rohingya rights were stripped during Myanmar’s isolation. Unfortunately, things only got worse when everyone got access to Facebook. Hate speech against Rohingya people on Facebook exploded, and was boosted by the algorithm to get even more views. Despite warnings from experts and locals, Facebook did nothing to stop the spread of false and hateful propaganda, and this eventually led to the genocide of thousands of Rohingya people and almost a million refugees.

Social media can also be harmful in ways that don’t involve genocide. Suicide, depression, and anxiety rates among teens have never been higher, a trend that researchers have linked to excessive use of social media. This is because the business models of most social media platforms rely on getting users addicted and forcing them to constantly come back for more, which takes a devastating toll on the developing psyches of teenagers.

Social media platforms have no incentive to make their sites healthier for their users because clickable, inflammatory information is the cheapest and easiest way for them to get engagement and traffic. Since these platforms are privately owned and are barely regulated, no one can stop them, and they will likely continue to screw over their users if it means they can wring profit out of it.

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A lack of regulation and harm to users presents a major problem for everyone – users, governments, entire countries. Many aspects of our lives rely on social media. Just last week, I submitted my college applications using my Gmail account, provided by Google (another tech platform that many say is deteriorating), and at least two of my accounts on news sites are linked to my X account, which is currently in the hands of a billionaire who seems to be trying to lose his “richest man in the world” status as fast as possible.

Does this mean we, as users who lack the political clout required to make companies accountable, are screwed? I believe that we should let these platforms die. While leaving a platform may be difficult, there are alternatives. In July of 2023, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta launched Threads as an alternative for X.

Of course, Threads, as another social media platform owned by the same corporation that brought us Facebook, is also vulnerable to the same enshittification process. Thankfully, other sites such as Mastodon (created specifically to be a non-profit social platform to prevent enshittification) have also gained in popularity after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

By making it easier to leave a platform, such as through eliminating login methods that require a X account), we can ensure a painless transition off platforms like Facebook and X that have become so enshittified that they do more harm than good.

Social media users can also affect change in another way. By educating ourselves on the process of enshittifcation and its dangers, and being more conscious of the types of social media we use, users can avoid platforms that only care about profit and even make massive companies take responsibility for the misinformation they spread through regulation and enforcement.

Privately owned social media platforms are not required to give everyone a megaphone to shout through, and they shouldn’t be getting off scot-free for causing suicide, social polarization, and a literal genocide. It’s time people and governments forced social media companies to be accountable for the consequences of the technologies they benefit from.