Social media is getting smaller – and more and more treacherous

In 2024, social media shrink.

Of course, it has little effect. Since the United States is likely to be divisive and often separated from reality, social media will again be a battlefield for public opinion and perception. But the platforms where these conversations take place are smaller, more varied and less connected to each other.

Following the 2016 election, Donald Trump discovered that he could speak directly to the audience of tens of millions on Twitter. Trump moved to a much smaller social truth after the January 6 rise, a network that seemed to be the main point of his sales. When Trump disappeared, he lost something precious: the ability to talk to the “big room” – a platform that reached a wide range of people interested in public affairs.

Large room spaces, such as Twitter and Instagram, are constant battlefields for attention. They are very valuable to activists, who want to get messages like #Metoo and #blacklivesmatter to achieve new conversion to movement and for influential people they create by creating audiences. But they are also inherently contradictory spaces because people with different perspectives on the type of speech are appropriate for space.

Trump is now talking to a smaller room, but this is the one that almost anyone who hears him. He never wants to throw away social truth, because his statements do not matter how inflammatory it is, Raun d’ttre is for the network.

Consciously or not, other operating systems move in the same direction. Forced destruction from Twitter, turning it into a smaller room, is a safe space for extremists that makes it insecure for those who do not share their views. Reddit, one of the funniest spaces for conscious local conversations, is pouring users because it implements unusual and musk policies in the hope of generating a lot of income. Some subsidiaries migrate to Discord, where their conversations will not overlap with thousands of other Reddit issues, but where they have complete control over their selected rules on the road.

Small room networks can be very important spaces for societies to find support and solidarity. When you are looking to support life with diabetes or without alcohol (two struggles that I am personally involved in), you are not looking for confrontation, but for comradeship, convenience and constructive advice. Millions of us find these spaces in Subreddits, Facebook groups, or even on social networks for a specific purpose such as our own archive, which connects 5 million authors and fan fans each month.

But small rooms have a great downturn: they are as useful for the Nazis as they are for the nodes. These conversations, insulated from the external study, can normalize the perspectives and lead people to the dark deeper into the dark issues that expressed interest in them.

We need small room networks-they introduce strangers together, creating social capital and communication between people who may never interact with the physical world. But they cut the public sphere mostly, which means that 2024 elections may even be more than we’ve seen in our social media age, even more than we’ve ever seen.