Social media has become an antisocial monster. It's time to call it something else.

Boston Globe

10 hours ago

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First, let's define social media. There are several basic features that platforms share: an interactive user interface; the ability to categorize people into followers, lists, or groups; and — above all — the sharing of user-generated content. In an ideal world, this leads to an egalitarian marketplace where people choose their interests, follow or grow their social network, and disseminate ideas for the benefit of others.
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That's obviously not where we ended up.
Tech giants have hijacked these forums and filled them with sponsored content and bots, shifting our focus from our friends and colleagues toward ads and corporations. With the advent of AI, a final, definitive threshold has been crossed. There is no way to ensure the humanity of anything we see online.
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Hundreds of incremental commercial decisions have led us here, says Chris Shipley, a technology strategist who popularized the term 'social media' in the early aughts. She agrees the term no longer fits for platforms that now occupy the spaces in our lives that used to be filled with actual people.
''Social' means, to many people, that it's 'sociable,' it's lovely, it's all the positive common connotations,' Shipley says. But 'when we see what's really happened, it's
antisocial.
'
This is true regardless of platform. YouTube's most popular channels overwhelmingly
Allowing tech companies to refer to their product as social media strips them of their culpability in creating this dystopian mess. It allows them to hide behind the fiction that these changes have been mere coincidences of iteration and that Big Tech hasn't fundamentally altered the nature of the product.
We need to better define what is happening to us online, especially as each person's digital habitat becomes more optimized and siloed.
Plenty of terms exist to describe this era of worthless content — AI slop, brainrot. There is also a lexicon for the banal brainsuck of the user experience — doomscroll, bed rot. But we need to shift from a vocabulary that is tailored to shame users and content creators to one that names, broadly speaking, the addictive forces and perverse incentives acting upon them.
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No one looks at what Amazon has become and calls the behemoth a 'bookseller' — the company has outgrown its original purpose.
So has social media.
'If people said, 'TikTok, Facebook, X — they're screwing with me and they're exploiting me,' we might think differently about them,' Shipley says. But 'consumers generally don't value themselves. They don't value their personal information. They don't value their time. They don't value their attention.'
Ultimately, says Shipley, 'We give away a lot of ourselves for very little in return.'
It's time to reevaluate just how much of us we allow these companies to consume, and to call it by its name. That's why, instead of social media, I would call these platforms 'consumption media.' It's a more apt term for the hours of content we run past our eyeballs while letting companies track, analyze, and monetize us.
We are consuming. And we are being consumed.
Rebecca Spiess can be reached at