In 2024 social media will get small.
Not a little influential, of course. As the US endures an election that is likely to be divisive and often disconnected from reality, social media will once again be a battleground for public opinion and perception. But the platforms on which these conversations will take place will be smaller in scale, more diverse and less interconnected.
On the eve of the 2016 elections. Donald Trump discovered he could speak directly to an audience of tens of millions on Twitter. Kicked off the platform after the Jan. 6 uprising, Trump moved to the much smaller Truth Social, a network whose main selling point appeared to be his presence. Trump lost something valuable when he was de-platformed: the ability to speak to the “big room”—a platform that reached a wide range of people interested in public affairs.
Big-room spaces like Twitter and Instagram are constant battlegrounds for attention. They are invaluable to activists who want messages like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter to reach new movement supporters, as well as influencers who build power and revenue through audience building. But they are also inherently conflictual spaces, as people with different perspectives argue about what types of speech are appropriate for the space.
Trump is speaking to a smaller audience now, but it’s one where almost everyone who hears him agrees with him. He will never be kicked off Truth Social because his statements, however inflammatory, are the network’s raison d’être.
Consciously or not, other platforms are moving in the same direction. Elon Musk’s obsessive destruction of Twitter turns it into a smaller room, a safe place for extremists, making it dangerous for those who don’t share their views. Reddit, long one of the most exciting spaces for informed, topical conversation, is losing users as it implements unpopular Muskie policies in hopes of generating much-needed revenue. Some subreddits are migrating to Discord, where their conversations won’t overlap with thousands of other Reddit threads, but where they have full control over the traffic rules they choose.
Networks of small rooms can be very important spaces for communities to find support and solidarity. When you seek support for living with diabetes or alcohol-free living (two struggles in which I am personally involved), you are not seeking confrontation, but friendship, comfort, and constructive advice. Millions of us find these spaces in subreddits, Facebook groups, or even dedicated social networks like Archive of One’s Own, which connects 5 million fiction authors and fans every month.
But small rooms have a major drawback: They are as useful for Nazis as they are for knitters. These conversations, insulated from outside scrutiny, can normalize extreme viewpoints and lead people deeper into dark topics in which they have expressed a passing interest.
We need networks in small rooms – they introduce strangers to each other, building social capital and connection between people who may never interact in the physical world. But they further fragment the public sphere, meaning the 2024 election. they may be even more volatile than we’ve seen so far in our age of social media.
