Last week, Facebook made history, losing $119 billion dollars in market value in the single largest one-day drop for a U.S. stock. Erosion of daily active user numbers in Europe and lackluster user growth in North America, along with expected declines in revenue growth due to changes in how privacy is handled on the platform, combined to create a rough week for the social media giant.
But Facebook’s nearly 20 percent drop was soon matched by Twitter, whose stock dropped 21 percent upon news that Twitter’s user growth had fallen, in part due to the purge of bot accounts. Some analysts suggested the sell-off of Twitter shares was unwarranted and that the “bad news” was merely a sign of Twitter taking necessary steps to improve the long-term health of the platform.
Between the much-needed removal of fake accounts and efforts to give users more control over their own data, these struggles may just be “no pain, no gain” bumps in the road that will lead to better platforms long-term. But there’s also the data showing that social media overall is less and less satisfying to users, a decline that has been in the works for the last three years according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The fact that social media ranks below health insurers and airlines is not a great sign, and it is Twitter and Facebook who have seen declines over the last year that put them at the bottom of the rankings.
For both Twitter and Facebook, concerns about privacy come alongside dissatisfaction with the content these platforms are serving, according to the ACSI. What may have once been a place for sharing has now become a place for arguing. I conduct focus groups across the country where people regularly bemoan how they don’t like going on social media anymore because it seems like a perpetual shouting match.
Twitter, at least, has seen a number of high-profile users step away in recent weeks. A fight that unfolded on Twitter over old tweets and political condemnations led to the real-world firing of director James Gunn from the upcoming “Guardians of the Galaxy” film. (In the wake of Gunn’s departure, some other celebrities have quit Twitter altogether.) New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman announced she was taking a break from the platform, noting “Twitter has stopped being a place where I could learn things I didn’t know…or engage in a discussion and be reasonably confident that people’s criticisms were in good faith.”
Purging bots and protecting user privacy are good steps, but if the content on these platforms is not of value, if logging on means being little more than inundated with venom and weaponized outrage fueled by misinformation, real users will also start to dry up. In the U.S., where the American Psychological Association finds stress is on the rise in large part due to worry about current events, being an added source of stress is unlikely to support user growth. Majorities of those over the age of 25 report, perhaps overly optimistically, that they think it would not be hard to give up social media, suggesting if the user experience on these platforms degrades further, there’s no reason to believe most users are so hooked that they couldn’t walk away.
There is one platform that continues to see rapid growth even as Twitter and Facebook plateau: Instagram. According to Pew Research Center data, Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) has a significantly younger user base, and it is those very youngest users (aged 18-24) who are most likely to say it would be hard to give up social media. (Snapchat, while also having a very young user base, has seen some struggles in its own user growth this year and saw its value fall more than a billion dollars after…a Kylie Jenner post criticizing the platform.)
For some time, Instagram has been a place more for photos of your breakfast food or vacation than a place for hot takes and angry mobs. “Instagram is one of the last online escapes in the Trump Era,” wrote Nick Statt at The Verge in 2017, noting that the platform is structured to reward positivity and aesthetically pleasing content more than clickbait. But political content is coming for Instagram too, and not just in the form of campaign fashion updates. Flop accounts (Instagram accounts that feature gaffes or outrageous comments) are picking up steam among teenagers as a way to import politics into their favorite platform and to debate their friends, largely out of the view of the adults who keep their arguments on other platforms.
Ten years ago, Twitter launched with most users using the platform to post mundane updates about their day-to-day lives, not unlike Facebook’s original status update feature. Both platforms began by promoting connection and serving content that was mostly apart from politics and news. Today, however, these platforms’ fates (and stock prices) are inextricably linked to the political realm. Instagram may well be on the same path.
It may be the case that there’s simply no way to facilitate nonabusive debate or quality information sharing on such a platform, that we are doomed to a new race to the bottom every time politics invades a new platform. But if there are lessons to be learned from the struggles of Twitter and Facebook as politics has become a bigger and bigger piece of what they do, Instagram would be wise to learn those lessons and learn them fast.
