Unless you’ve been living off the land in the wilderness for the past couple of decades, you’ve heard of Facebook, Twitter (now X), and Instagram. Most people have some type of social media presence on one or all of these platforms (or at least on LinkedIn, TikTok, or YouTube). Many businesses once used or currently use these platforms as a part of their marketing efforts, and despite being billion-dollar companies, there are some serious concerns about the viability of these platforms going forward. In this week’s blog, we will discuss some of the problems people are having with these established social media platforms and how alternatives might just be the future of social media.

Establishment Problems

Social media is popular, make no mistake about it. Unfortunately, it also has been attributed to many of the biggest issues people have in society nowadays. One publication—the Journal of Global Information Management—did a deep dive on the negative effects social media has on people and broke them into six categories. They are:

• Cost of social exchange - This includes mental health challenges and behavioral issues resulting from social media interaction.
• Annoying content - Any content that a user deems annoying or upsetting.
• Privacy concerns - Active threats to the safety of personal information and the business of selling it for profit to third parties.
• Security threats - Active threats that could put the well-being of the user at risk including fraud, scams, and social engineering.
• Cyberbullying - Abusive behavior toward other users by groups and individuals. Can include all types of misinformation and shady behavior.
• Low performance - The negative impact people see in their job and academic performance from social media. 

It’s undeniable that all of these line items offer some challenges for users. What’s more remarkable is that many of today’s most used and respected social media platforms do such a poor job giving users the resources they need to combat them. It could be argued that they actually are set up to profit from actively neglecting user needs. This is a problem. Let’s take a look at two ways innovation might be able to redeem the actions of the established social media brands going forward. 

Distributed Social Media

If you aren’t a big fan about how much influence big technology has gained in society, you aren’t alone. The technology companies behind all of the major social networks are some of the richest and most influential in the world. One way that people can move on from profit-driven social media is to use distributed social media. Many of the fastest-growing social networks have a distributed model, which means they are hosted on shared servers, rather than being controlled by a central business. This means that users have more control over their data, the content they are able to post, and the content they see. This shift would put control in the hands of user groups rather than corporate boards that only view profit as a motivator. 

Some of the most popular decentralized social media platforms as of this writing include:

• Mastodon - The largest decentralized social network functions a lot like X.
• Steemit - Functions a lot like Reddit.
• BlueSky - Another X decentralized competitor.
• PeerTube - A growing video social media akin to YouTube.
• Pixelfed - A decentralized social network that functions a lot like Instagram.

Whatever social media platform you’ve favored in the past, there is a distributed alternative that is slowly growing their user base. The shift to decentralized social media will likely take decades, but if you are sick of your current social algorithm, getting more control over the content you see can change your perspective on a lot of things.

Regulation

Now, I wouldn’t hold your breath, but there has been a push to better regulate a lot of aspects of the social media business model by legislative bodies. Not much has been done, but many lawmakers don’t necessarily like the influence that huge tech companies have on the legislative process and are pushing for more stringent regulation over these platforms. 

There are two conflicting trains of thought that are considered when pushing for regulation of social media. The first is the thought that all the misinformation that people get on their social media feeds is negatively impacting society. The other is that censorship of certain content on social media is negatively impacting society. You can see the trouble: if both are important, what regulations can be made that simultaneously protect freedom of speech while reducing the impact of flat-out lies and “alternative facts” from becoming prevailing opinions of the social media-using populace? 

It makes the regulation of these platforms—that are just vessels of profit for some of the most lucrative companies in the world—a stark challenge. If legislators are afraid to go up against technology companies, in the same way they have retreated from altercations with big tobacco, oil, pharmaceuticals, and other huge money-making industries, the chances that users will get value out of these platforms significantly decreases. 

There have been some incremental movements for regulations of social media sites. Not so much that the people running these corporations have to rein in their money-over-user behavior, but there has been some movement in trying to protect young people from harmful content, some data privacy protections have been enacted, and a little movement trying to limit the seemingly unlimited power of platforms in the way of antitrust suits. While there hasn’t been large amounts of support for any of these changes from lawmakers, the population that uses these platforms are slowly being educated on just how little value they actually get from these services, and demanding they change. Unfortunately, it may be too little, too late as the influence the major social networks have is considerable and not going anywhere anytime soon.

All-in-all, there are options out there if you feel like your social media feed is just a series of malignant information that serves to negatively impact your mental health, but wholesale change is years and years away. If you would like to learn more about the technology you use each day and how it affects your life and business, return to our blog soon.