What if Social Media Does Not Matter in 2024?

The decline and fall of an intervening variable.

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

Ever since Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover there has been a drumbeat of worry about how that could affect the 2024 election. According to this worry, the 2016 election outcome was in part a function of disinformation spread through a social media space caught unawares. By the 2020 election many of these sites had improved their content moderation, thus blunting disinformation and misinformation strategies. In 2024, the field appears to be wide open again for manipulation. If CNN is dumb enough to enable Trump to exploit their platform, can Twitter or Facebook be far behind?

Last week, University of North Carolina researchers Bridget Barrett and Daniel Kreiss argued that social media platforms were regressing from their 2020 content moderation policies:

Social media platforms are also following a 2016 playbook and failing to protect U.S. democracy. Based on observations from a series of research projects on the 2020 elections, we hoped that platform companies would uphold pro-democratic principles during the 2024 elections. After the 2020 elections, our research team hailed the unmistakable steps the major U.S.-based platforms took to embrace their roles as “democratic gatekeepers.” What we meant by this is that platforms took serious steps to protect elections and the peaceful transfer of power, including creating policies against electoral disinformation and enforcing violations – including by Trump and other candidates and elected officials. And, deplatforming the former president after an illegitimate attempt to seize power was a necessary step to quell the violence….

In the last few weeks, however, social media platforms have walked away from their commitments to protect democracy. So much so that the current state of platform content moderation is more like 2016 than 2020….

These platforms appear to be taking a laissez faire approach to elections in 2024, as they did in 2016. For example, Meta claims that the risk of “real world harm” from the former president has subsided. In Meta’s announcement that it was reinstating Trump, the company specifically said that posts from Trump that violate community standards could still stand if they are “newsworthy,” an ambiguous term that means the platform itself determines “keeping it visible is in the public interest.” While keeping its policies for 2024 in place, YouTube explicitly states that election misinformation about 2022 and 2020 is now fine to spread in order to enable “public and democratic debate” and “to openly debate political ideas.” Twitter stopped caring about 2020 long ago, with a predictable flood of election lies.  

This all sounds pretty bad, and the federal government’s limited ability to advise sounds even worse. The implicit assumption in Barrett and Kreis’ argument, however, is that these platforms will be just as powerful in 2024 as they were in 2020 and 2016. And I am not sure that assumption holds up.

Consider Twitter. The past week for the birdsite has been — how to put this gently — in "epic fail” mode. The company rolled out a series of measures that seemed designed to alienate power users. They first announced “extreme measures” to impose caps on the number of tweets any individual user could view in a day. This led to many users complaining about being “rate-limited” in using the site. Then they put Tweetdeck — a useful way for power users to navigate the site — behind a paywall. The birdsite then required having a Twitter account to view tweets — although they subsequently backtracked on that measure.

In other words, in the span of a week Twitter made life pretty difficult for its users. This proved to be impressively bad timing, as other sites took advantage of the situation. BlueSky experienced a massive surge of new users. As a user of both sites, this past weekend was the first time I saw more engagement on BlueSky than Twitter. As Quinta Jurecic skeeted¹ on Wednesday, “twitter was sort of gradually getting worse for me but the last four days have seen a sharp drop in quality. now it's just completely unusable for what I need it for. I keep opening the browser tab, seeing horrible new tweetdeck, and closing out.”

BlueSky is invite only, and they are attempting what I assume is an elite-driven strategy to attract power-users from Twitter. Just as dangerous to Musk’s Twitter, however, is that Mark Zuckerberg is also setting up a competitor site, as the Wall Street Journal’s Tim Higgins explains:

The biggest competitive threat emerged from Meta Platforms, which tipped plans to launch a Twitter rival on Thursday dubbed Threads. The “text-based conversation” app’s arrival comes on the heels of upstart social-media companies Bluesky and Spill being inundated with new interest over the weekend as Twitter began the unusual step of limiting the number of posts its users could read….

Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg clearly sees an opening in the tumult at Twitter. Threads, which Meta has been planning for months, will be launched under the umbrella of photo-based social-media site Instagram, which is increasingly looking like the Swiss Army knife in Zuckerberg’s toolbox….

While Musk’s recent moves have been heavily criticized, he appears to be gambling that the strength of Twitter’s network can continue weathering such interruptions. Bluesky, for example, may have gained new followers in recent days but many were using the platform to post about…Twitter. 

Based on the initial chatter I’m seeing about Threads, I’m unconvinced it will be the game-changer that the WSJ suggests. Still, over the past week Twitter went from a dysfunctional focal point to a massively dysfunctional, quasi-focal point.

For those of us who relied on Twitter as a news source, this is a bad trend. But for those worrying about whether Twitter will be a vector for disinformation in 2024, it might be good news. After all, it is more difficult for disinformation to spread if the social media universe is balkanized across multiple platforms — which is where we are now.

Ryan Broderick (somewhat conspiratorially) argues that maybe this has been Musk’s plan for Twitter all along:

I think hardcore Twitter users have rose-colored glasses about the site’s coolness. The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture. The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were. And I don’t think it’s an accident that a deranged billionaire broke that, nor do I think it’s accident that we’re suddenly being offered smaller, insular platforms or an offshoot of a Meta app as replacements. The folks in charge clearly don’t want that to happen again.

I think the “folks in charge” are insufficiently monolithic to think like this (though see Anil Dash for one possible area of Silicon Valley groupthink). They are also far too ambitious to try to subvert their site becoming the next focal point.

That said, it is unlikely for any new focal point to emerge in the time necessary for it to matter in 2024. Furthermore, of the available sites I would bet that BlueSky winds up being more important for setting media narratives than the available alternatives.

But this leads to the most important point: the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has serious doubts that social media will have any effect on the 2024 outcome. Maybe social media campaigns had a marginal effect in 2016, and maybe content moderation had a marginal effect in 2020. Given the razor-thin margins in some states, I’ll allow that possibility. But 2024 is shaping up to be a repeat of 2020. Voters are quite familiar with Biden and Trump, and I doubt that many minds are gonna be changed because of a tweet or a skeet or whatever the fuck Mark Zuckerberg decides to call it on Threads. Or as Vanity Fair’s Brian Stetler put it, “It’s the opposite of complicated. It’s familiar, it’s comforting. It’s a rerun.”

I doubt social media will matter all that much in 2024. Which is a pretty embarrassing statement to make about Elon Musk. He has not only eviscerated Twitter’s economic value; he has done so in a way that badly erodes its political value as well.

1. Yes, tweets on BlueSky are called “skeets.” No, I don’t want to talk about it.