The attempts to rein in the ultimately ungovernable has meant that the platforms may become more like launching pads, spinning off niche networks of the disaffected. But having grown unprecedentedly large, they became toxic and subject to manipulation. By centralizing distribution they assured there was always something worth your attention. The big social networks have always really been broadcasters whose most valuable asset is your time.
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The same sorts of groups that, in the past, would stomp their feet and threaten to leave the big social networks and then fail are in small ways starting to succeed. There are concrete and at times uncomfortable signs that the social oligopoly may be ending. “Maybe we’ve reached the point where it’s not even possible to have Facebook in common.” The election may have helped fragment us more than we were fragmented,” says Ethan Zuckerman, the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, who has grappled with the questions of a new, decentralized social sphere. “It’s a really different world post-2016. But now, it’s becoming clear that they can’t replace the whole internet either, as once seemed their destiny - and, indeed, that no executive in their right mind would want to swallow it whole.Īnd so for the first time in years, there are viable new social networks being born on the margins, and the great questions have to do with what comes next. Nobody thinks Facebook, YouTube, and the like are going away. No longer finding new frontiers and markets to rule, they’re instead figuring out where the boundaries of their empires ought to be and building tall walls on those borders.
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Now they’re a mid-20th-century European power, agonizing over the inevitable loss of the colonies and trying to stomp out insurgencies.
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The intense political battles over Facebook and the other giant social media companies mark the end of the empire-building phase of those companies’ history.