No, I was under no illusions that some eccentric billionaire tycoon might save the social media platform.
In fact, I wanted the opposite.
I had hoped that the SpaceX and Tesla founder's impulsiveness and eccentricity, and his decision to fire thousands of Twitter employees, would doom the social media platform. To me, Musk's rebranding of the site as “X” seemed to signal its imminent demise.
And indeed, user numbers have fallen since Musk bought Twitter, and the app conceived as a virtual town square now feels like a hollowed-out shopping mall teeming with cryptocurrency ads and bots.
“When Twitter started to deteriorate, I think there was a sense of gratitude among some people, a sense of relief that they no longer had to worry about being on this platform that can be so hateful and so toxic, and I'm here to reveal myself,” Natalie Kitroeff told The New York Times' “The Daily” podcast.
Waite: After a tough year, there's hope for schools
But that episode, last July, was about the launch of Threads, a new Meta platform that Mark Zuckerberg clearly envisioned as Twitter 2.0, or Dos Equis.
“I wonder what it would mean for us if an alternative to Twitter didn't just go out there. It might sound quaint, but it's a real question,” Kitroev said. “As soon as another viable option came along, we all said, yeah, we'll try it.”
Like Kitroev, I felt forced last summer to accept the sad reality that users would constantly upgrade to the latest and greatest apps and that social media would forever rule the world.
Now, the situation has changed.
Some recent developments have me optimistic that we may finally be moving away from social media.
First, Threads was never really that popular: An Insider Intelligence analysis last fall found that Meta's app was struggling to attract users, and the think tank predicted that Threads would remain one of the least popular social media apps for the next few years.
So if X is a wasteland and its heirs are on life support, there may be room to believe that social media is truly in survival mode, despite the continued massive popularity of services like Facebook and Instagram.
Then this spring, social media critics got an extra boost when Congress passed a bill that would require the Chinese company ByteDance to sell the TikTok app. If the company doesn't sell it, the app will be banned in the U.S., which essentially means no one can download new versions, which could lead to bugs and glitches that make it completely unusable.
A few weeks later, the New York State Assembly passed the Child Targeting (Safe) Addictive Feed Exploitation Prevention Act, which regulates social media companies' use of algorithms to target children. The algorithms that put certain ads and content in front of users are what make social media so addictive and potentially dangerous, said Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who warned in 2021 that the company was prioritizing profits over safety.
Waite: After a tough year, there's hope for schools
New York's novel law could influence other states to protect children similarly — and perhaps even lead to broader protections for all social media users. Shouldn't the fact that we call ourselves “users” tell us all we need to know about the dangerous addictive nature of social media?
This week, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy announced he wants to make sure Americans are aware of the risks by issuing warnings about social media use, a move that requires Congressional approval.
In his commentary, Mursi described the youth mental health crisis as an emergency.
The article details that teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media have double the risk of anxiety and depression, and that teens currently spend nearly five hours a day on social media.
“In an emergency, we cannot afford to wait for perfect information. We evaluate the facts available, use our best judgment, and act quickly,” the surgeon general wrote.
Social media undoubtedly has many benefits: It allows you to connect with like-minded people who don't live nearby, it lets you share real-time news and information, and it even has lip-sync videos.
But do we really want our kids to spend the equivalent of a car trip from Albany to Buffalo every day scrolling through their smartphone feeds? Do we really want anyone to do this to us?
As Murthy points out, not only do social media use have serious consequences, but spending time on it doesn't make you feel better, as one young woman told him with “a hint of embarrassment in her voice.”
Murthy later wrote that other classmates echoed similar feelings of “shattered” self-esteem and difficulty setting boundaries or relating directly to others.
“There was a sadness in their voices, as if they knew what was happening to them but felt powerless to change it,” Murthy wrote.
Thankfully, the Surgeon General's warnings can really bring about behavior change: The Surgeon General's tobacco health warnings helped spark a 50-year decline in smoking, with more than 40 percent of U.S. adults smoking in the 1960s falling to fewer than 12 percent today, according to the Times.
Waite: After a tough year, there's hope for schools
So, social media is unlikely to disappear completely. And it shouldn't. But maybe it's finally time to start moving away from it. As optimistic as it may sound, we may all be at a point where we can accept the fact that our online “friends” aren't as important as the intimate, personal connections we have in IRL (real life).
Maybe we’re finally going to replace our favorite social media apps not with upgraded redux, but with more time spent in the real world.
At least there is hope.
